Revisiting Heinrich’s Impact on Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Carsten Busch - the "Indiana Jones of Safety", who has over 25 years of experience in HSEQ Management. and is a tutor in the Lund University human factors and system safety program.

Carsten is also a Safety historian and has extensively researched and written about the work of Herbert William Heinrich - and shares his finding with us in this fascinating interview.

Heinrich is considered by many to be the founder of modern Safety practice, but has become a polarizing figure in today’s safety discourse.

Carsten believes Heinrich’s work and legacy should be reappraised, and he helps Safety professionals understand what he actually wrote - rather than basing their knowledge on hearsay.

One of Carsten’s main concerns is that New View Safety authors aren’t applying their own principles when they criticize Heinrich and could be positioning his work to reinforce their own approaches.

Context is key and you’ll discover what Heinrich actually said, who his primary audience was (not Safety professionals!), and the surprising role insurance companies played in enhancing Workplace Safety in the 1930s.

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Here's a riddle, can you guess who is considered by many to be the founder of modern safety practice? His work is associated with triangles and dominoes, and he's the first safety engineer to be inducted into the Safety and Health Hall of Fame International. He's a polarizing figure in safety discourse and theory.

And if you guessed Herbert William Heinrich, you're right. But the next question is, have you ever read Heinrich's original work? Today's guest believes that most people haven't, and that that's a shame. Carsten Busch believes that it's worthwhile to reappraise Heinrich's work and legacy. He first discussed this in his thesis entitled, "Heinrich's Local Rationality: Shouldn't New View Thinkers Ask Why Things Made Sense to Him?"

He followed this up with his book, "Preventing Industrial Accidents: Reappraising H. W. Heinrich." Today, we'll discuss all things Heinrich and hear a nuanced view of his work that is both appreciative and skeptical of his ideas. Carsten Busch has studied mechanical engineering and safety in human factors. He has over 25 years of experience in HSEQ management in industries such as railway, oil and gas, and law enforcement.

Carsten's work has taken him to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway. He's a regular conference speaker who's active in professional forums, including the Dutch Society for Safety Science. Carsten's also a tutor in the Lund University Human Factors and System Safety Program. His main research interests include the history of knowledge development and discourse in safety. Previous books include the well-received "Safety Myth 101" and "If You Can't Measure It, Maybe You Shouldn't."

His other fields of expertise include progressive rock, single-malt whiskey, and fantasy literature. Carsten joins us from Oslo. Welcome.

- [Carsten] Thank you. Thanks for having me.

- So, you call yourself, or I've seen that you've called yourself a safety mythologist. What do you mean by that?

- That links to my first book, which by the way, wasn't my idea. It was the idea a late friend of mine, Alan Quilley, a Canadian safety professional. And we were discussing LinkedIn and also live because we met and we had regular calls over Skype. We discussed misunderstandings in safety and how people got some concepts wrong.

And then he said, we just should write a book about these myths. And well, at some point, I did that. Well, I thought it would be fun to call myself a mythologist instead of the well, the regular boring titles of safety professional or safety thinker or whatever.

I try to bust some myths, yes.

- So, there's a quote in your thesis, "Heinrich's ideas have been around for over eight decades, and one may wonder about the reasons for their longevity." Why is it important to read...important to you for people to read what he actually wrote?

- I would say for one thing, if you have appreciation for your field of work, you should know something about the history, which doesn't mean that you have to read all the ancient texts, of course.

But in the case of Heinrich, there are so many people discussing his work and dismissing his work, criticizing his work, where I think you cannot really appraise his work or criticize his work without knowing his actual work. And most people only know his work by hearsay. What really brought me on this path of safety methodology was actually a really long-running discussion on LinkedIn, which was about one of Heinrich's concepts, the infamous 88% of all accidents are caused by human failure or unsafe acts, or what you want to call it.

And it's the longest-running...it was the longest-running discussion that I know of it. It had over 7,000 posts at the time, which is something. And it's disappeared now, which is a shame because it was really fun to read.

And I noticed that a lot of people discussing there hadn't read his actual work. And I wasn't going to fall into the same trap. So, before I took part in the discussion, I took the books that had been waiting in my cupboard for five or seven years, I think.

A few years before the discussion, I just had bought on Amazon because I thought, well, I have a lot of safety literature, and I want that classic too, put it in a cupboard and it looks cool. But I took it out and I read it, and I thought, "Well, these people really haven't read this work." And then I started partaking and, well, that set me off on the course of critical thinking and safety, but critical on a basis of knowing what's really been said and appraising it from there.

And afterwards then learning also to appraise things within their context because this stuff had been written in the mid-'20, '30s, '40s, and the world was different then. The language was different then.

All the early safety thinkers, safety authors, they speak of men. All the time they write about men because the [inaudible 00:06:17] safety man, and that was the reality then. And then after World War II, you see some women entering the literature, which, yeah, it's interesting to see that kind of development too.

- Yeah. Context definitely changes over time. You referred to ethical implications of misunderstanding or misrepresenting his work. Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yes. I think there are various reasons for having critique of someone's work. The first one can be substantial, that you actually take, say, the science and critique it based on the state of scientific knowledge or on basis of logical fallacies in a material, or whatever.

And there is quite some space for having substantial critique of Heinrich. Like, for example, this 88% ratio, where he says 88% of all accidents are caused by human failure, 10% by technical failure, and 2% we tend to say acts of God, although he didn't really use that term a lot.

But you can critique that ratio, for example, by saying your data was biased, which it was because it was data from insurance company. And if you file a claim at the insurance company, you will probably color the claim. You won't send in a claim saying, it definitely was me who was wrong here, please pay because, well, insurance doesn't really work that way, I'm afraid.

So, that would be a substantial claim. Then you can critique someone's work because you want to make a point, like when people like Dekker, for example, Sidney Dekker, discusses the older traditional takes on safety, he might paint a very black and white picture to bring his message across how differently his view on safety is.

So, he paints a bit blacker maybe than it should be to bring across a point, which is a valid way of speaking. But you are already treading into quite tricky areas there, because people might take your version as, okay, so that was what Heinrich was all about, the very black, gloomy...

Yeah. So, you need to be a bit nuanced when you bring that and say, I'm now painting a very stark picture to make the point clear, but there's more to it. And then you have some people who might cherrypick someone's work, present that, and then say, well, that's all there is to make themselves look or better, cherrypick or even make straw man arguments about someone.

One example from Heinrich's work is that there are a lot of people saying, well, these ratios of his famous triangle, they don't work because...that they're not real because in minor organization, they're totally different. Heinrich never made the claim that it was an universal law.

If you look at Wikipedia, you might find even Heinrich's law there, the page is sometimes on and sometimes off. And it looks like Heinrich said, well, this is a law of nature. You have always one serious accident, and then 29 minor, and then 300 near misses.

He does mention the numbers a lot, but it doesn't mean that it's a law of nature or something. For him, it was a tool to communicate. And people, once I've heard the ratio, they never forget the message, or maybe they forget the message, but they don't forget the ratio because it's easy to remember anger.

And this is where I say there are ethical implications. You can make yourself look better by cherrypicking or misrepresenting someone's work, but what you do in the long run is probably creating new safety myths.

- Let's take a few minutes now, I'm going to ask about Heinrich, his influences, his timeline, the kind of context he was working with. Can you give us a fairly short rundown of what he wrote and what he was all about?

- What he wrote and what he was all about. I can do that, of course. He worked for insurance company most of his life. He was actually a blue-collar guy who came into...after a couple of jobs in engineering, and he was a sailor for a while working with machinery.

And then by accident, he came into insurance, Travelers Insurance Company, and he would stay there from 1913 to his pension in 56. And sometimes he was loaned out to the government, but he worked all his time in insurance. And that's one source of misunderstanding, I feel, for a lot of people.

Because they hear, "Oh, he was an insurance guy," and then people will say, "But insurance isn't really about safety. Insurance is about making money. And that's what he was supposed to do." And, of course, he was to supposed to make money for his company, but I think it's important that we understand the function of insurance at that time.

And what I would like to do is short history lesson, which will take 5 to 10 minutes, maybe which I tend to do with my students to explain to them the context in which Heinrich grew up. And first, we go all the way back to the industrial revolution, which happened certainly in 1550 to 1850-ish.

And the industrial revolution brought a lot of new risks or risks on a larger scale, because industry people were packed into factories now. They got new machines. They got new power to power those machines, especially steam, which introduced new risks. Explosion risk that wasn't there before.

Pressure vessels was main area of risk at the time, and actually one of the first that Heinrich worked with when he joined Travelers Insurance in the early 1900s. And with these new risks and the factories, that came a lot of bad working conditions. We all know the Charles Dickens novels, which paint very, well, stark picture of what there was at the time, a lot of accidents and a lot of fatalities from these new risks.

And I would say that was when safety as a profession was born, because before that, there was concern for safety. If you look in the Bible, the Old Testament, even there is a rule, a safety rule in Deuteronomy saying you should have a railing on your roof to prevent people falling off. And there are other really ancient laws about safety.

But safety as a profession didn't come before, say, the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century after the industrial revolution and all these new risks. And safety emerged, so to speak, thanks of social and political movements that started around that time because people reacted on all these accidents on an unprecedented scale at the time.

And people thought this is not okay. And you had also the socialist movement coming up and stepping in for workers' rights and Marx and Engels and all these people.

One of the things that came out of the social and political regulations, not so much in the United States, I think at the time, but United Kingdom, England, they would've first safety law, I think, in 1830-ish. And it was a long, slow way, because a law is one thing, enforcing the law is quite another thing.

And people implementing the regulations is yet another episode, especially because safety at the time was cost driver. If you wanted to take an existing factory and make it safer by guarding machines, by changing the layouts, that cost money.

And most employers weren't really interested in that. Another thing that came out of these social and political movements, people who reacted on the amount of accidents and fatalities was educational. There were safety exhibitions showing how machines could be made safer. There were safety museums.

I think the first was in Amsterdam in the Netherlands late 1890-ish. I think New York came quickly after, and several around the world, where people tried to educate others you can do things safer. And there were some companies who actually thought, well, it's humanitarian duty, that's a difficult word, to take care of our workers is our duty.

And besides excellence, harm, efficiency. To take an example, DuPont. We all have heard about DuPont at the time, they made mainly explosives. And I quickly found out it's not good for business if your explosives go off on the factory floor.

- Sorry, that's DuPont for anyone didn't recognize the name. No, it is DuPont.

- Yeah, that's my school French taking over. They were among the companies I'd say that were quite ahead of, well, all the others. And then came a game-changer, and that's called workers' compensation. And changed the game of safety quite significantly.

It's probably a turning point for safety because before workers' compensations laws came, and the first were in Germany, all the cost of accidents were for the employee. If you got hurt in an accident, you couldn't work, you stayed at home, you wouldn't get paid because you didn't work.

Your employer would find someone else. And if you didn't get well, well, tough luck. So, it didn't even pay to invest in safety because, well, if someone got hurt, you just got another guy and on you went. Workers' compensations turned that on its head because if someone got hurt, the employer was expected to pay the victim.

So, suddenly, the cost of accidents was turned to the employer, which was a huge incentive to work on safety because if you could avoid accidents prevent accidents, you could reduce your costs. Germany was first, I said, Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor at the time, 1884.

He didn't do this out of the goodness of his heart. He was just a very cunning politician. It was one of the ways to keep socialists down. So, it was a really smart political move on his behalf, which was perfect for safety. And a lot of European countries followed.

America, not so much, United States. The first for them was 1911 following the Pittsburgh Survey. And take note of that, if you want to read some exciting stuff from early safety, look up Pittsburgh Survey on the internet, the document safety and the law by Crystal Eastman.

It's open on the internet, and it's a fantastic document to read. Crystal Eastman, one of probably the first women in safety, a very smart lady. She went on and did fantastic other stuff. But it's a really interesting document where she really smartly dismantles already in 1910 the notion of most accidents happen by way of carelessness.

And she does it in a brilliant statistic way. Yeah. So it's fun, but that's just aside. But her work contributed to the adoption of this workers' compensation also in America. And this is where insurance companies come in, because employers had to insure themselves against accidents.

And the insurance companies, they were really, really active driving safety at the time. In Europe, it would be partly the government inspectorates that were created that were active in enforcing safety laws. In the United States, there were hardly any safety laws at all.

OSHA wouldn't come until 1970, I think. So, there were 60 years in the future. So, it was insurance companies who drove early safety in the United States. And they would appraise organizations, companies, visit the plants, give them advice how to improve safety, and then, well, give them a premium.

And if they improved safety and prevented accidents, companies could reduce their insurance cost. If you look into the early safety organizations, there were a few big firms, U.S. Steel, they had a safety department.

DuPont had a safety department. Apart from that, most organizations would lean on insurance companies who had huge safety departments. Travelers Insurance, Heinrich's employer at the time, they had about 400, 450 safety engineers, which they lent out to, well, their clients to make inspections, to give advice on situations, to investigate accidents, and well, try to improve safety.

They also gave out...published a lot of safety literature dedicated to, I know cinemas and agriculture and other sectors, but they would write dedicated safety literature for them and publish it for free so that people could improve safety.

So, that's quite different how we see insurance. When I think of insurance, I think, well, these are these firms that take a lot of money from me. And when I bump my car into something, then they say, "Nah, we are not going to pay you anyway because you should have paid attention, or, yeah, your car isn't worth that much anyway."

So, that's how we see insurance. It's not entirely how insurance was at the time. Insurance had a really important role in enforcing and stimulating safety at least before World War II. So, that's one very important part of context we need to take in us.

And that's also what shaped Henrich because most of the literature used would come from insurance. Almost all American safety orders before, say, World War II, they were employed by insurance companies themselves.

One main exception, Lewis DeBlois, who worked for DuPont and was their first vice president of safety, wrote a really nice safety book, which influenced Henrich a lot.

- That's the context.

- It's some of the context that he grew. And, of course, one part of context that I haven't mentioned, but it's really important to mention, is that safety became a profession in, say, the first 2, 3 decades of the 20th century, but also management became a profession around that time.

We've probably all heard of Frederick Taylor in scientific management. Taylor wrote his famous book in 1911, same year as the Pittsburgh Survey. He really had profound impact on...well, even on our lives today. And out of his work that, there was management before, but I would say much thanks to his work, or much due to his work, management became a profession in itself.

And you can see safety as one aspect of management. And well, maybe an extension of management into one specific direction. And Heinrich was very much aware of that.

He picks up a lot of the DuPont philosophy that safety is a management responsibility. DuPont really drove that into extreme, so to speak, that they said managers have to live on the compound because then they take safety really seriously because they don't want their family blown up, paraphrasing a bit, but it was policy for them at least for a while.

And Heinrich takes that management responsibility, and you see it throughout all his work. And you also see if you read thoroughly that he doesn't speak to safety people. His main audience is management, especially top management. So, you need to read his work also through those glasses.

And when I studied his work quite thoroughly, that was really wow experience that now I understand why he does some things where I as a safety professional would say, "Well, why would you have so much focus on direct causes?"

It's because he wants to help managers to simplify safety, which was a new thing, a new area, an added burden, so to speak, for them. But Heinrich gives them quite easy-to-understand tools [inaudible 00:28:35] bullet lists and easy-to-remember ratios.

And he speaks to them. He doesn't speak to us safety professionals 70 years down the road. We can learn from him, but we are not his audience, even though we think "Industrial Accident Prevention" is a safety book, it is, but it's mostly a management book.

- Yeah, that's a very interesting distinction there. So, when you're talking about new view, like this is who you mentioned specifically in your thesis and the book, you count yourself among the sort of new view people, but who do you mean by new view?

Like, are there specific authors, or yeah?

- Yeah, it's not easy. And it's quite easy to misrepresent the field. But as a rough indication, when I wrote my thesis, I was thinking about people that would fit within the same movements of safety II, safety differently, HOP, human organizational performance.

So, names like Hollnagel, Dekker, Conklin, and some others. But those three names, Hollnagel, Dekker, Conklin, I looked most at in my thesis work at the time because they had written most of the material.

And then there are many others that do qualify. Well, it's a fuzzy field. As I said, looking back, I think, well, it's a bit problematic speaking about new view, and I could have been clear there.

- Well, one caveat that you do make, though, is that new view, which we'll as an umbrella term in this interview anyway, folks, for sort of all this movement that's happening under multiple labels. You point out that it's about understanding organizational failure, and not about understanding safety literature.

And that's important because in the thesis, you're asking, "How do new view authors discuss Heinrich, and do they use their own method of inquiry?" So, it's important to notice to note that their method of inquiry is to understand organizational failure, it's not really to evaluate safety literature.

However, how did you find, when you did the research for this, that new view or modern authors, how do they discuss Heinrich?

- Well, it struck me that many of them have a quite negative tone when they discuss Heinrich's work. And as I said, by coincidence, more or less, I was quite familiar with much of his work because I had read at least two versions of his book before I embarked on this journey.

And I commented quite often during class, but this isn't what Heinrich said, this isn't what Heinrich meant, because if you read this work, then you see that there is more to it, there's more nuance.

And I started wondering, but why is it that these people discuss things the way that they do? And then I started going deep into Heinrich's work. I got into contact with his employer, Travelers, which turned out that they had much of his original work, papers, he had written at the time, and even some original notes, which they provided.

It's a dream scenario for any researcher that, "Oh, yeah, just send us a mail if you need more and we go into the archives and see what we find." So, I had a chance to get to know Henrich better than you would if you just read his book because I could see...and I'm in a process of republishing those papers so everybody can see if they're interested, how ideas develop from say '26 to '31 when his first book comes out, and then develop further into other versions of his ideas.

So, that's one thing. I really dug in there. And then I started to go systematically through say, for example, the work of Sidney Dekker. Where does he mention Heinrich, in what terms does he mention, and what might be the idea behind this representing stuff in certain ways? And well, yeah, that's then when I found out, okay, some of the critique is actually substantial, goes into the, well, the science of things.

Some of the critique is maybe a bit more, well, making ourselves look better and is used rhetorically. and some of the critique, I think, and that's not necessarily Dekker, I would say, and the other two big authors, but some of the people just dismiss stuff because it's old and start saying, "Yeah, but it's not science."

No, it's not science because there wasn't safety science at the time. The medical field wasn't science before World War II. So what do you expect a new field of profession like safety put things in context. And that did a lot of good anyway, even when it wasn't science.

- Now, one of the foundational questions...or yeah, foundational questions of new view, HOP, safety differently, all these things is asking yourself, why did it make sense for the worker to take this action or do this thing at that time in that context?

And your discussion is that in modern discourse, those kinds of authors don't look at Heinrich with the same question. They don't look and say, "Why did it make sense for Heinrich to come up with these ideas, or to make these assertions at the time and in the context he was in?"

So, have I got that right? Is there anything I'm missing about that?

- Yes. I more or less take accident investigation question and I use it to study literature, which isn't what it is designed for. But I think adopting that view and trying to step in an author's shoes, however difficult that is, 80 years down the road, not being in the same context and not knowing what this figure was thinking and we can't ask him, but at least trying to understand, well, why would it make sense for him, for example, to subtitle his book "A Scientific Approach," which is one of the things that is critiqued?

And just as new view authors, including me, would reject easy answers to safety questions, like why did this train crash into something, and just saying human error, that's too simple. We are not going.

We have to dig deeper. And criticizing Heinrich for, yeah, you subtitle your book Scientific Approach, but you don't do science, that's too easy. Ask yourself, why would it make sense for him to use such a subtitle? And there are several...we don't know for sure, of course, but there are several possibilities that at least sound plausible.

And it would not be to be expected, let me say, that Heinrich would write a scientific book at all because how would he? And that's where it comes in handy if you study his background and his biography. He was a blue-collar guy.

He had grease on his hands. And he just worked himself up and he studied in evenings and he got his math exam, and he got his engineer's exam while he was sailing. He didn't have any training in academic matters.

- What did you find when you asked that question, why did it make sense, and some of the things we've been talking about all along? But for that, for example, why did it make sense for him to discuss things the way he did?

- Well, one reason just to continue on the scientific bit is how do you define science? And from today's perspective, we would probably say, well, you do science when you follow the scientific method, which wasn't common at the time for a lot of fields. Definitely not safety, but medicine not that much either at the time.

So, that's not the definition that Heinrich would've used. He doesn't really define it a lot, but he speaks a lot of working fact-based. So, that's one interpretation that he has of science. Science is something that is based on facts.

And he says we should address accident prevention also in a fact-based way, not just doing something because it's perhaps the right thing to do. He said, first, when something has happened, go and try to find out why it happened. And then he was really systematizing and structuring the accident analysis process quite in its baby shoes, so to say, or well, in its infancy.

but it was a step ahead from everything that was there at the time. So, I think that that's one way of seeing science. And well, he explains that part quite good, I think. Another suggestion why he would use subtitle, Scientific Approach, is to sell his book.

And to sell this to people, it's how people sell toothpaste. They get an actor, good-looking actor who, well, he might look like a doctor. You put him on a white coat.

And then you say, hey, this toothpaste is tested in a laboratory, whatever. But science sells, so I think that that's one idea. And then of course, you have the hugely successful scientific management, which was really hot at the time and make a connection there.

Although you won't see Heinrich really as a Taylorist. I'm quite sure that he was thinking, "Well, we can benefit from that moniker."

- But you wouldn't conflate the two. You wouldn't conflate Heinrich with Taylor then?

- No. He's not a real Taylorist. In some aspects, when it comes to worker initiative and using good ideas of workers, he's much more like, say, the new view than Taylor, who was really about, well, you have planners, you have doers. There are some planning in Heinrich's work, but he speaks much higher of a worker initiative and using their good ideas, they know how the work is done, and they know about problems.

I wouldn't say Heinrich was a Taylorist. He was surely influenced by Taylor. Definitely. But then, so are we. So, I wouldn't call myself a Taylorist.

- So, you are not dismissing new view approaches. I wanted to, again, read a quote from the thesis, "Many authors and safety professionals revert to an extreme position by either unquestioningly accepting and echoing Heinrich's ideas or a contemporary derivative of those ideas, or dismissing them entirely with rather little middle ground."

So, I wanted to ask you, what is the middle ground? Is there an ideal blend? I'm not sure if that's the right way to ask.

- Oh, there probably is. I don't know where it is, the ideal blend. But I think Erik Hollnagel says this quite nicely. Erik Hollnagel brought the idea of safety II. But he says you both need the traditional safety, safety I, as he has labeled it, and safety II to be really successful.

So, I think we shouldn't do away all the old stuff from Heinrich and others because there's a lot good in it. There are also some things that we probably should stop doing in the traditional safety, but we can't do without it.

To use a really stupid example, I don't think that we wouldn't like to fly with a plane that wasn't built on safety I principles, where stuff was thoroughly engineered and risk assessed and all that.

But then using a plane, we probably would like pilots and so on to be as resilient as they can get and being able to handle all kinds of eventualities.

- So, there you go.

- It's not the best of examples, but yeah.

- Well, no, it's a microcosm in the plane of how there is a blend of both. You were also a little bit conflicted in your study of Heinrich, and this is the last quote I'll hit you with, but you wrote, "He fascinates me and has done great stuff for the profession, but he has also written some stuff that leaves me sad."

Can you explain those a little bit?

- Yeah. Sometimes, and I don't have quotes, but partly it boils down to language used at the time, I think. Sometimes he writes quite...how should I say? In a way that I wouldn't phrase things, quite blaming and morally condemning certain behavior, which isn't the main theme of his work.

But there are some passages where you think, "Hmm, okay. I didn't like reading this." And it's most clear, and again, in the context I think in his World War II writing. He's written, like, it's not appearing in his books, but if you have the chance to read some of his World War II papers and columns, there he more or less equates having an accident with an act of sabotage, which is as blaming as it gets.

But we have to understand it within the context of, well, the time and the priorities. And he wasn't alone because he more or less quotes President Roosevelt there.

- I was gonna say, in the context of a war, I can almost see how someone would think that, like the onus is on you not to have an accident because everything you do is a reflection of the war effort, right? Everything is about the war effort at that time.

- So, it's most clear there. But he has a similar language also outside of war. And that's where I think that's a shame because, well, if that's what sticks in your mind afterwards, well, it damages a lot of the good he has written.

But then he has also written some really fantastic stuff, where in one paper...actually where he discusses this 88-10-2 ratio, where he then speaks of people not as a root cause of problem, but as a root remedy, which when I read that, I was like, wow, that really fits into a new view because people are the solution.

Here is a guy who we all know has said most accidents are caused by people, and what does he say? People are your main solution. Okay, interesting. Yeah.

- I wanted to ask about the state of discourse today. And I am talking about sort of on LinkedIn, where people are on occasion dismissive, go back and forth. And sometimes I wonder when I see people with seemingly different points of view arguing, if you kind of look just a little bit under the surface, I often find that they're actually arguing for the same thing.

Like, they actually have overlapping beliefs that they're not seeing for whatever reason. Do you think that that happens today in the kind of discourse that you see?

- Yeah, quite a lot. I sometimes think we're like these religious sects that quabble over, well, really a minimal differences of how a piece of Scripture should be interpreted.

And that's also what you see in safety quite a lot. Well, you're in a new camp or you're in old camp, and if you're in the middle, you're heretic for both camps. But in the end, our goal is to protect people or to help people doing their jobs better. So, I think if we concentrate on that, we really want the same by different means.

And perhaps we don't even want different means, but just a bit of tweakage.

- We have more in common than we have different often.

- We have probably more in common. Well, protestants and Catholics say that they have a lot in common, but they conflict about some stuff and then start wars about it. Not anymore luckily, but they used to.

- Well, that is a good place for us to move into some of the questions I ask all my guests at the end. If you were to be developing training for future safety professionals, what's one sort of human interrelationship skill or soft skill, they're sometimes called, that you think would be extremely important for them to develop before they...or to prepare them for the work world?

- Well, one thing that I've learned in my 30 years now when I started as a safety professional, I thought I needed to have answers. People still expect me to have answers. But I think it's much more important to have good questions because often people know the answer.

So, I think helping professionals to find good questions and first ask a lot of questions before they move towards the answer, that's probably one of the key skills.

- If you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career, what's one piece of advice that you might give yourself?

- Oh, dear. I probably would say start reading much earlier, but then, yeah, I don't know. I have had the privilege to have had quite some safety practice before I moved into more academic directions. And I think that's also beneficial to actually have been around, not as a worker, but a lot on the shop floor and talking to people and helping develop solutions and using solutions that was quite useful, I think, to appreciate the theory afterwards.

But if I had to give my younger self an advice, I would say start reading earlier because I didn't start really studying before, I think, well, halfway in my career, perhaps 10 years into my career.

- There's never any limit to what can be read. And on that note, you've mentioned specific...obviously, there's your thesis, there's your book. You mentioned the...is it called Pennsylvania Survey?

- Pittsburgh Review.

- Pittsburgh?

- Yeah. Survey.

- Are there any other resources that we haven't talked about that you might recommend to listeners to look up if they're curious about some of this?

- Oh, there are some fantastic books from the early ages of safety online if you go on archive.org. And then there's the Hathi Library, I don't know the url from memory, but you find a lot there.

And also JSTOR. But you prepared me for the question and I've brought one book. Let's do it this way. "Men and Machines" by Stuart Chase, which is I think the only book that made it through all the references in Heinrich's book. And it's a fantastic piece of work.

It's written in '29, I think, and this guy, he was a journalist and economist and whatnot, traveled the world. And this is a fantastic read, even today where he discusses machines in society. And I think he was four decades ahead of his time. And he's quite left-wing, which is also quite interesting coming from the USA.

And this is to be found online. So, I can really recommend "Men and Machines" by Stuart Chase. If you want to read some old stuff and not Heinrich, go for this one. It's a lot of fun.

- Good. All right. Well, we'll see if we can find a link to that as well for the description. Where can our listeners find you on the web if they'd like to reach out?

- Mindtherisk.com is my website. You can find even a summary of Men and Machine there. And I think there's even a link to an online version. And then there's a lot of other literature. I try also to post my blocks there, but I'm seriously behind there, so forgive me for that. The day has only 24 hours.

- It's true. It's true. So, that is all the time that we have today. Thanks so much for the fascinating discussion.

- Thank you for inviting me and indulging me.

- I'm always interested in history and historic information. So, listeners, can you do us a small favor? Go to your podcast or video viewing app and give us a star rating. It takes less than a minute, and we really appreciate the feedback. Thank you to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team, making sense of safety since 2022.

Bye for now.