Understanding the neuroscience of habits to improve safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Cristian Sylvestre, founder and managing director of training consultancy HabitSafe and author of Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece.

Cristian is passionate about applying the latest neuroscience and behavioral research to help individuals and organizations be safer - and refers to this cutting-edge approach as Third-Generation Safety.

He argues that we’re overlooking the latest brain science, which tells us the subconscious mind drives 95% of our behavior. For Cristian, this is the critical piece missing from safety management because HSE professionals currently only use a conscious-mind approach.

Third-generation safety seeks to work with biology to ingrain safer habits in the workforce’s subconscious through repetition. Cristian explains this is the best way to overcome rushing, frustration, fatigue and autopilot - the four subconscious brain modes that cause 90% of workplace incidents.

Cristian delivers a whole-hearted appeal for a whole-brain approach to workplace safety management.

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." We rely on our brains every day to brush our teeth, choose our clothes, and choose our words.

Some of these decisions are conscious. We usually evaluate things like weather and formality before we decide what to wear. But we've all experienced automatic behavior, too, like driving to work and forgetting the journey. Why is that? Neuroscience seeks to improve our understanding of how the brain works.

Our guest today uses that understanding to move the safety profession forward. Cristian Sylvestre's 25-year safety career started in chemical manufacturing and then moved to the oil and gas industry. As a professional chemical engineer with a master's degree, he's trained to analyze complex problems and to use evidence-based science to deliver the simplest solutions that will achieve positive safety outcomes.

Mr. Sylvestre got interested in brain science about 15 years ago. His main field of interest is inattention, something that is at play at 95% of incidents, and something he believes traditional safety has largely ignored. He's the author of "Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece: Using Neuroscience to Enable Personal Safety," which he wrote to help people understand how inattention comes about and what we can do to minimize it.

Cristian joins us from Sydney, Australia. Welcome.

- [Cristian] Hello, Mary, thank you for having me.

- Thank you for being here. I'd like to start with a bit of context of where your ideas fall in the development of the safety profession. So the title of your book is "Third Generation Safety," how would you define first and second generation?

- Okay, so, let's just go back to basics initially. So safety, for me, is about trying to prevent an interaction between a hazard and a person. That tends to happen when either the hazard is moving, the person is moving, or both are moving. So if we think about, you know, so, say, pretend you were a factory manager in the 1970s, right before safety was a thing.

And your boss rang you up and said, "Look, you're having way too many incidents, you're injuring way too many people. I want you to injure less." What would you do? Well, the first thing you would do is you would find out what injured people. So what are the hazards? And then you would try and eliminate as many of those as you possibly could. But it wouldn't take you long to figure out that you can't get rid of all the hazards. So then you have to put a process in place where there is risk management consultation or training in order for people to be able to avoid coming into contact with the hazards for themselves.

That's first-generation safety. Why first-generation safety? Well, because it came first. And essentially, it's two things, it's essentially fixing the work environment, so eliminating the hazard, or improving the system. That's first-generation safety.

And first-generation safety, I mean, we know from the reduction in incidents, improves safety considerably. But, still having incidents? Even serious ones, right? Then, for me, what happened about 10 years later, we started looking at the person side of the equation, and what we noticed was that people had some unfortunate habits. One of those unfortunate habits is they didn't think very much about safety. So we started talking to people about how important safety was.

We started to ask people to think safety, safety first, keep safety front of mind, all those kind of things. And that really is second-generation safety, again, because it came second, but we were still having incidents. So really, when you think about second-generation safety is about getting people to think more about safety.

So if we step back and we think about the last 50 years or so, now, where have we landed? First and second-generation safety tend to land on three things and three things only, fix the work environment, improve the system, or get people to think more about safety. And that's really where first and second generation came from.

- When we spoke before, you mentioned that the trend is now going in the wrong direction, so can you explain what you mean by that, and as well, why is there a need for third-generation safety?

- So we've been doing first and second-generation safety for 50 years now. And if you look at the work fatalities in the U.S., in the 1970s, and 1980s, and 1990s, the 2000s, up until about 2010, there were significant reduction in each of those decades.

When you look from 2010 onwards, what you find is the low point was 2013, and since 2013, work fatalities in the U.S. have increased by 15%. That's why I think it's going in the wrong direction. In Australia, from 2013, it has not moved, hasn't gone up, it hasn't gone down, even though we do more first and second-generation safety than we've ever done before and we do it better than what we've ever done before.

I think we're stuck in a zone of diminishing returns, where the return on investment just by keep doing the same is relatively low. So fatality data, for me, doesn't lie, something doesn't add up. I'm not against and I'm actually in favor of continuing to do first generation and second generation, but that can't be all we do. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

So I have to acknowledge, and I'm willing to do that, that first and second generation got us to where we are, and it's a good thing, but it looks like it's very difficult just to continue in the same vein in order to get any improvement at all. So we have to ask a difficult question, and the difficult question is, what more could there possibly be?

And as it turns out, quite a lot. And that question, the answer to that question opened up a whole new opportunity to improve safety for me personally. And the answer is, I found, in brain science. So just to give you an idea of what we can do now, stuff that we couldn't do 15 years ago, you're probably familiar with an MRI. You go to the doctor, sends you for an MRI of your hand or something, he gets a picture, he or she gets a picture back, looks at the picture, finds out what's wrong, and then sort of gives you a treatment in order to get better.

There's a thing now, a piece of technology, called a functional MRI, or an FMRI. And an FMRI is not a picture, it actually maps blood flow as it's happening. So a brain scientist can work out exactly how the brain works. So, for the first time in human history, we're able to see what's going on inside people's heads as it's happening, a real game changer.

So if we put your head in an FMRI and we show you a picture of a snake, your amygdala is going to light up like a Christmas tree, because that's where fear registers in the human brain. And what we now know is that, through brain science, that 95% of what we do is subconscious. So there's no debate about this in scientific circles whatsoever, but safety keeps ignoring it.

It's as though we're in love with the concept of safety is all conscious and can't be anything else. So what we now understand is that most of what people do, they don't do out of choice, they do out of habit. So what is third-generation safety? Third-generation safety is just an understanding of how the subconscious mind influence behavior in order for us to be able to help people be habitually safer.

- As you got interested in brain science, you were specifically interested in inattention. What brought your attention to inattention?

- Well, as you mentioned in the intro, I'm a chemical engineer, so I'm a science person, and I was working on process engineering kind of stuff, right? And that's the kind of stuff that if you get it wrong, you blow up the suburb. So you can't afford to get it wrong. And I had three or four years of that, and I was getting a little bit sort of jaded by it all, I didn't want to do it anymore.

And at the time, the refinery that I was working for, they had a pretty bad personal safety. Like, you know, you've got two spectrums of safety, you got process safety on one side, and you got personal safety on the other. Totally different beasts. And because it was kind of analytical, they said to me, "Could you please take a look at the incidents?" And when I looked at the incidents, I noticed a couple of things. The first thing that I noticed was that the system was being used properly, the paperwork was being filled in correctly, but incidents were still happening.

And the second thing that I noticed was there was a trend where people were coming into contact with things that were meant to be there. They were running into poles, they were running into door frames, they were tripping over chairs, there was an incident about, you know, somebody that stepped back and didn't see the gutter, so they twisted their ankle. I started looking at that, and although I didn't like the idea of inattention at first, I had to reluctantly accept it, at least on a temporary basis, because there was no other explanation.

Now, when I presented the findings to the management team, everybody acknowledged the existence of inattention. But when I started talking about, "So now we need to find a way by which we can help people be more attentive," now, all hell broke loose, they threw their hands up in the air, and they said, "Cristian, it all happens in people's heads, there is nothing we can do."

Now, these days, we know that's not true. So, in order to try to get a better handle on what was going on, I then went off and analyzed the corrective actions, and I put them into three buckets, and I didn't call them this back then, but they were essentially the first-generation bucket, the second-generation bucket, and the third-generation bucket.

And what I found was that 85 of the corrective actions were all about first generation. So eliminate the hazard, give people more training, you know, plug the hole in the management system, that kind of thing. Second generation was about getting people to make better decisions, getting them to think more about safety, that kind of stuff. And what I found was that 85% were in first generation and only 15% were in second generation. There was nothing in third generation.

Nothing that worked. There was a lot of, "Pay more attention." "Be more careful." There was one particular one that was quite amusing, somebody suggested that maybe we needed to write a procedure so that people would look before they stepped, which is interesting.

- I was thinking that if you present this to people, people are being inattentive, it seems to me that kind of a natural reaction would be, "Oh, well, then, let's paint everything yellow, let's put up signs."

- Yeah.

- Did you have that reaction, and why would that not work maybe?

- We did a little bit of that, but, you know, the site was doing that reasonably well already. And the problem that we've got with human beings is that we get used to things. So after a while, things become wallpaper. So I didn't really see the benefit of doing that. Now, the interesting thing about that particular sort of, you know, write a procedure about people looking before they move, that's one of the habits that we teach, right?

That's one of the main habits. And this all happened in the 1990s, so for me, I went looking for research about inattention, and I couldn't find anything. And then I left the refinery, and sort of seven or eight years later, I found myself in the same position in another organization. When I was working as the group manager for Health, Safety, and the Environment, really good first and second generation stuff, we were still having incidents, even serious ones, and the only thing that came up was inattention.

And that's when I started looking at brain science, and by then, there was a bit of brain science coming through about, you know, what's going on in people's heads, not just the sort of people that had some sort of dysfunction associated with the brain, but they were now starting to study how healthy brains actually worked. So I started coming across information about the things that caused inattention and what we might be able to do in order to help people be more attentive.

- Okay, so, coming back to this idea of habit and conscious and unconscious, so I think the layperson's understanding is, you know, Freud and Jung, the subconscious is an area that maybe directs our actions, but we're not aware of it, whereas the conscious has to do with decisions. Is that understanding accurate?

Or are there some nuances that I'm missing there?

- No, [inaudible] the first pass, that's not a bad sort of understanding, but knowing that in itself doesn't help us improve safety.

- No, no, okay.

- So for me, it was really a question about sort of how do we get to understand what happens in the subconscious mind from an incident causation perspective in order to help people avoid incidents? That's really what it's about. So if we can just step back to where we were before, so what we've done for the last 50 years is fix the work environment, improve the system, and get people to think more about safety. Those are the destinations, those are the endpoints, that whatever we do for safety, that's what we're trying to do.

Third-generation safety brings a fourth destination into the process, and that is, don't just get people to think more about safety, get people to have safer habits. What am I talking about? Look before you move, you know, look for a line of fire when you're crossing the road. So if you see something slippery, anticipate that there'll be a slip, maybe you might be able to do something about preventing it.

It's those kind of things that we're interested in. So there are things that are going around in safety at the moment, people are talking about, you know, more care, better trust, healthy relationships. Those, for me, are not destinations, that is the suite of tools in order to get to the destination more efficiently and more effectively. So I'm not against those, and I think those are important.

When we go to a site or we get a new client, and if you gave me a choice about, "Do you want a site where people care, you know, trust, and they got healthy relationships or one that don't, I know which one I'm going to choose, it's that one. The issue I have is that we only ever use it for first and second generation. And what we know from brain science is that the majority of our behavior originates in the subconscious, and that's what drives it.

And in safety, we tend to ignore that and do very little with it. So, you know, if the only thing that we're doing is we're saying, "Look, more care, better trust, healthy relationship is going to fix safety," that's just a panacea of wishful thinking, for me. But when you apply that in order to improve the destination point, then that's where it really has a huge impact.

- It seems to me, then, that you're saying habits are really kind of the key here.

- Yeah.

- So I think about, for example, when you learn to drive, right? Everything is new, you have to consciously think of every move that you make. And, you know, 10 years in, you either are or are not shoulder-checking automatically or, you know, turning on your signal before you change lanes and that sort of thing. So how then...so I'm gathering, the idea is to create or ingrain safer habits.

- Yup.

- How? How do we do that?

- Okay, right. There's a couple of things that we need to overcome, right? And this is one of the aha moments that people have when we do some training with them. We ask the question, "When you're inattentive, what's the most common safety consequence?" Would you like to hazard a guess?

- I would say bumping into something or...

- Okay, that's what most people say, an incident of some kind. That's not the right answer. The right answer is nothing. Nothing happens most of the time that we're inattentive.

- Most of the... Yeah, okay.

- So, think about it this way, so if every time you were inattentive, you had an incident, I wouldn't be doing this, you'd figure it out all for yourself, right? But if most of the time when you're inattentive, nothing happens, what we do is we repeat the inattention, it gets embedded or ingrained into our habits, which makes inattention a huge blind spot for most people. That's the first obstacle we need to overcome.

If I can't convince you that inattention is part of being human, why would you do anything about it? And the problem is that people think everything is conscious. That doesn't help. But even if they look at their own data points, right? So they go, "No incident, no incident, no incident, no incident, no incident. Today I had an incident, I was inattentive when I had the incident. The incident must have been caused by a lapse of inattention."

Sorry, a lapse of attention. And what we know is that attention goes up and down during the day depending on your brain mode. So we've got to try and get people to understand that first, and that's really what the whole first session that we teach is about. It's just getting them to understand that inattention is part of life. Now, once we get them past that, then really it's a question of repetition.

And repetition consistency is much more important than intensity. That's kind of what the brain science is telling us. So we have structured the key habits that we need people to have, and they're only about six of them, how to manage those. And then we put a structure in place, a framework in place, in order for the organization to manage enough repetition in order for people to get across to the other side.

So it's really a question about going from habits with inattention to habits with attention built in. That's really the whole sort of transition that we're trying to facilitate for people.

- So it's kind of getting their wiring to default to the safer.

- Yeah, that's exactly right.

- The safer mode.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Because most of their habits are default, right? But, you know...

- Yeah.

- And all that kind of stuff we do by default, like breathing, or brushing your teeth, or coming here, whatever it happens to be, they serve us well. But when we get into some of these brain modes that sort of entice inattention to come into play, that results in an incident more often.

- Do you ever have anyone push back? Because I imagine...I think humans like to think that we're in charge of our own destiny. Do you ever have any one push back and say, "No, no, no, I always... Everything is conscious with me," they don't like the idea of the subconscious directing or habits directing. Has that happened?

- Mary, I'm in Australia, all right? I don't die guessing, they tell me, right? Usually when they're trying to tell you that you're wrong, it starts with, "Listen, mate," that's kind of how you know, right? And that's fine because I've got to start where they're at. So what we find is we find...so the workforce in general is pretty good, they get on board really, really quickly.

Management tend to think that conscious control is much more dominant than what it actually is, so they sort of struggle a little bit with it, so we kind of start with them initially, try and get them on board. The people that we find most difficult to get on board are the safety professionals.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- And why do you think that is? Just because they're ingrained in first and second generation or...?

- Yeah, they've invested so much in that. And I know how it feels, because that's where I used to be, right? I'm a safety person, you know, I got system certified, I did a whole bunch of leadership stuff, and it's really difficult to say, "Maybe there's something else that I need to consider as well." So the way that I sort of came...or sort of got across it was to say, "Okay, first and second generation are important, I still need to do that, but there's a piece missing that brain science is telling me drives most of my behavior, I also got to get good at that."

And once you start getting into brain science, what you find is that is a significant piece. So that's how it comes about. So, look, we allow people to start wherever they are. And what we find is we find that, you know, 25 to a third of the people in the audience, they're fairly proactive, they'll get on board, it's not an issue for them.

There's 2% or 3% down the other end, that it doesn't matter what you do, they're not going to get there. The battle we fight is the people in the middle. So our audience is from 25 to that 98. And if we can persuade most of those people to give it a go, and they can see the benefits, then usually they get on board.

And we don't talk about safety at work. Everything we do, because inattention is not something that you turn on or off depending on whether you walk through a gate or not, right? It's part of life. So all of our training is about safety everywhere. And what we say to people is we say to people, "If you attend the training and you do the practice that we ask you to do, you will be more attentive than most other people. And this is simple enough for you to take it home and teach the people that you care about."

It's amazing what people will do for somebody they care about that they won't do for themselves.

- Yeah, that's...yeah, I've observed that, too.

- So we use it to our advantage.

- Yeah, yeah. In your book, you have a section that's dedicated to mistakes, or...maybe they're habits that cause inattention. So you specifically mentioned...I've got four things, and I'm wondering if we can just kind of go through and you can let me know how they contribute. So the first one is rushing.

- All right. So let's just go back a bit first, so the mistakes don't cause inattention, inattention is something that causes unintentional outcomes. That's kind of... So the inattention comes first, and then sometimes when we're inattentive and we have unintentional outcomes, that's when people go, "It's a mistake, this is that, it's the other." In order for me to explain how sort of rushing comes about, we need to first step back and understand how the brain makes decisions or how it determines behavior.

So the brain essentially has two parts, and this is a very simplistic way of looking at it. So two parts is, the first part is this conscious processing. And that is the conscious mind, that is the prefrontal cortex, that's the bit just here behind our forehead. Everybody understands that, because that's who we are, where we are, and so, that sense of identity.

The second part, that is invisible to us, is the subconscious. And the subconscious happens in the limbic system, and what it does is it generates automatic responses for the things that we have seen plenty of times before. So if I have to explain to you, "Okay, how do we come about a behavior?"

So the last step before we do a behavior is conscious process. That's the only piece we're aware of. And from the time that we're aware of it till the behavior happens is very short. That's why we think everything is conscious. Brain size leaves no...

- We attach to that moment.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- Exactly.

- I mean, I become aware that I want to jump for whatever reason, and I jump. So therefore, I think that I've made a decision, when, in fact, brain science shows that 95% of what we do originates in the subconscious. Now, the subconscious, so what brain science shows is that the conscious mind processes what the subconscious serves up to it, and the subconscious works on models of how the world works, the kind of...I'll call them internal patterns, and those internal patterns are invisible to us.

Now, those internal patterns generate automatic responses that have been established from the outcome of our experiences, usually through repetition. So, out of that comes four brain modes that determine almost 100% of what we do. So before I get onto rushing, because that's more of a disruptor than anything else, let me talk about the other two brain modes that are the main ones.

So you've got brain load number one, which is conscious control. That's the one we're aware of. Now, that's really good when something is new, novel, or different. Now, when something is new, novel, or different, there's no internal pattern. So we need to focus in order to work it out. Problem for the brain, though, is that conscious control is very slow and uses lots of energy, so it only uses it when it's absolutely necessary, about 5% of the time.

That's how that comes about. Now, the second mode is autopilot and habits. And when I talk about habits, I talk more about mental habits than physical habits. People tend to think of habits as something physical because that's what they see. But essentially, you take people's brains out, and there's no habits at all, right?

So it's all about what's going on in people's heads more than anything else. And so the remaining 95% of things we do, we've done plenty of times before. And because we've done them plenty of times before, there's an established internal pattern or a habit that generates the automatic response.

Now, habits are fast and use minimal energy, so the brain prefers to use habits whenever it can, and that's where you get the 95% from. Now, the automatic response from the habit is fed to the conscious mind, right? Because the conscious mind is the last step in the process. But there is little or no scrutinizing because the conscious mind has seen it a thousand times before. So what tends to happen is that it can regulate the behavior, but it tends not to because it's seen it a thousand times before.

So we just end up doing it. So if you think about text while driving, and I've spoken to people about this plenty of times, I go, "You know it's illegal?" They go, "Yeah." "Do you know it increases risk?" They go, "Yeah." "So why do you do it?" "Because I've done it a thousand times before and nothing bad has ever happened."

That's what the conscious mind thinks. Now, when we're in autopilot and when we're using habits, because we're not focusing 100% on what we're doing, it results in mild inattention. It's by far the most common way by which we are inattentive, but it's relatively mild because a lot of our habits have attention built in.

Like, if you have a habit of the shoulder glance, like you were saying before, then that's a habit with attention. If you have a habit of just changing lanes without looking, that's a habit with inattention. And sometimes we migrate from one to the other without intending to do so. So most of what we do is, if it's new, novel, or different, it's about the conscious mind, that tends to be 5%.

If it's something we've done plenty of times before, which is most of what we do, it tends to be autopilot and habit. Sometimes they have attention, sometimes they don't, most of the time there's some inattention involved. That's the main play. Now, what tends to happen is that there are a couple of disruptors, and the first one that you mentioned is rushing. I'll put rushing and frustration together because from a brain science perspective, it's pretty much the same thing that's actually happening.

When rushing and frustration come into play, whether it's one mode or the other, so if we're short of time, if something gets in our way, brain chemicals, like adrenalin and cortisol, get released into the whole body. What happens is that it's physiological, the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex begins to restrict.

So enough blood gets to the prefrontal cortex in order for the brain cells to stay alive, but not enough for them to operate. So essentially what it does is it sidelines your conscious mind. Now, why does it do that? Because I think it's a survival technique. You know, if you sort of...if you go back 1,000 years, our brain hasn't changed for 10,000 years, a saber-toothed tiger comes up, you haven't got time to deliberate which way you're going to go, this is a response, you either fight, flight, or freeze, right?

So that needs to happen very quickly in order to survive. So that's really what the brain does. Now, in the modern day, the threats are not so much a saber-toothed tiger, they tend to be social, "I'm running late for a meeting, what will they think?" All that kind of stuff. So rushing and frustration tend to entice us to take shortcuts.

So that's the internal patterns, you get a shortcut that goes to the conscious mind. Now, because of the adrenaline and the cortisol, the conscious mind is not in play, it can't regulate it. So what happens is we end up taking the shortcut. And with rushing and frustration, we get considerable inattention because we're focused on what's in front of us, we're not sort of focused on what's going on around us.

That's the first disruptor.

- That sounds similar to anxiety as well, just the release of those particular chemicals and the same kind of reaction, right, fight, flight, or freeze.

- Yeah. It's the same response, and it kind of depends on the severity, whether it's rushing frustration or whether it's anxiety. And if you get triggered continuously by it, then that kind of disturbs your life, and then we call it anxiety. But these things are relatively mild for most people. They just need to deal with the rushing and the frustration a little bit better, that's all.

- Yeah, I didn't mean sort of as a condition, although that's certainly out there, but it sounds like biochemically, like, a moment of anxiety, and a moment of frustration, and a moment of rushing are all very similar.

- So, physiologically, they are, it's just the degree to which that blood restriction takes place, I think. And it's also because we all rush, we all get frustrated, but what we rush and get frustrated about are different, and the level, even the trigger depends, right? Sort of varies for different individuals. But I've met people that you can't get them to rush.

And other people are rushing doing everything. The same brain, the same functionality, it's just that the things that entice them are different and they entice them to different levels. So the other one, the other sort of disruptor is fatigue or tiredness. And when we're low on energy, what happens is that our brain is clogged up with a whole bunch of waste products we have accumulated during the day, typically adenosine, or ATP, if you know any biology.

What that does is that gets in between the brain cells, and it impedes communication. So it slows the brain down. So when we feel tired, what our brain does is the brain wants us to have some rest. Best rest is your own bed at home, even if that means you got to get in the car and drive there. Now, that automatic response gets fed to the conscious mind, the conscious mind is not working very well because the brain is slowing down, it's all clogged up.

So we end up getting in our car, and we end up driving. That's kind of what happens, so the conscious mind doesn't regulate it as well when it's tired. And when it's fatigue or when it's tiredness, it's more like significant inattention. So that's kind what is [inaudible]. So we know from brain science that autopilot, rushing, frustration, and fatigue, they're responsible for 95% of our behavior.

And that 95% of our behavior is mostly autopilot. The conscious mind is not in play or it tends not to get in play when it can.

- You also had mentioned complacency. Where does that fit in? Is that akin to fatigue, or is it a different...?

- No, no, no. So I've gone away from using complacency, I sort of used more sort of autopilot and habits because that tends to...the brain science tends to be about habits more than anything else. But, you know, when people talk about complacency, what they're talking about is they're talking about autopilot and people doing things with habits with inattention.

- Okay. So, you know, 95%, we're not going to change the way our brain functions and we're not going to get rid of all inattention. I think that's...it's kind of endemic, and in some ways it's helpful, it's functional, otherwise we would just burn out, having to think consciously about everything.

So how can a person, on an individual level, manage the pitfalls of inattention? I guess they have to become aware of it, and then creating the habit is just conscious practicing until it settles into the subconscious mind.

- Yeah. So the temptation, I guess, is to just say, "Well, look, you know, the conscious mind is not in place for 95% of what we do. Why don't we try and get it in play?" But that's working against our biology, right? And let's face it, whenever you pick a fight in biology, guess what? Biology is going to win, because it ain't going to change, right?

So, rather than do that, which is what I see sometimes sort of being presented at safety conferences, we've sort of looked at the subconscious mind and gone, "How can we use the functionality of the subconscious mind, which is much more powerful than the conscious mind, to our advantage? Can we use the subconscious mind in order to help us keep people safe?"

So we've identified the habits that people need to take on board, and there are six of those that can prevent most incidents. And then it's not a question about getting inattention to zero, because we're not going to do that. It's about having habits that will enable you to see things earlier, and if you see them earlier, you're able to get out of the way.

So we have a saying, which is, you know, if you look, you see, and if you see, you can avoid. You can't avoid what you don't see, and you don't see if you don't look, right? So if you're driving down the road and you're looking at a mobile phone, and something unexpected happens, it's a matter of luck whether you get hit or not. If you're looking at the road, which is, you know, a habit with attention, then you've got a shot at seeing it as early as possible, and that gives you a chance of avoiding it.

So that's kind of what we do. So we start with getting people to identify hazards that they have with inattention, we show them the safer habits, and then we show them a process by which to go from one side to the other. So what we talk to people about is we talk to people about the conscious repetitions are important, but you need to be able to do them consistently enough, and every time you do a repetition, it's like you move a little bit further into the habit mode of your brain.

And if you do enough of them, hard enough for long enough, then essentially what happens is you end up building that habit. The neuroscience says that... It depends on the habit, you know, the 21-day thing is a myth, forget that. What I have seen is I've seen studies that people can change habits, anything from 60 to 167 days, I think, depending on the habit.

So for me, what I find is I find that, you know, if I want to get a habit of drinking a glass of water when I wake up, that's not going to take me long to sort it out. But if I want to have something that's a bit more complicated, sort of involves a lot more sort of, you know, moving parts inside my head, then it tends to take me a lot longer.

- Do you have an example?

- Look, I'm...

- Like quitting... I don't know. Quitting smoking or something? I'm trying to think of, like, [inaudible]...

- I don't smoke, so I wouldn't know what that's about. But so two years ago, I decided that I wanted to move more. So I said to myself, "I'm going to do 10,000 steps today." Started on the 12th of September, 2020. One rule I have, "I don't walk 10,000 steps today, I don't get to eat tomorrow."

- Oh.

- How many days do you think I've missed?

- Very few.

- Yeah. So I do allow myself to miss a day if I get injured and I can't do the 10,000 steps because I've got [inaudible] sit down for a couple of days, or if I have to go into surgery and get something done. But if I'm able, that's what I hold myself accountable to. So I haven't missed many days at all. So it's beginning to be ingrained in a habit, and it's been going on now for almost two years.

That one's tough because, you know, it's much easier to sit down and do nothing. If tomorrow you said to me, "Okay, so I'm not going to do it anymore," I'd be quite happy just to sit down and not do the 10,000 steps. But what we find with habits is that you need to make the habit easier to do than not do it. That's what that accountability sort of does for me, right?

So that's me, that's kind of what I wanted to do, because, you know, you get to a certain age and you use it or lose it. So, you know, "Cristian, eat less, move more, that's what you got to do, otherwise you're going to be fat." So that's kind of what I decided. But it's interesting because people say to me, "Well, how do you know that you've actually gotten to the habit strength stage?"

And the way that I say to people is that, "Okay, so if you went onto site without a hard hat, without safety glasses, or if you got into your car without putting your seat belt on, how would you feel?" And it feels uncomfortable, yeah. And that's because it's a habit, right? So I'm getting to the stage now, after two years, mind you, Mary, I thought it was going to be a three-month thing, where if I'm not moving, it feels uncomfortable.

I go to the airport, everybody's sitting down, waiting for the plane, I'm walking loops at the airport because if I sit down, it feels uncomfortable, so I'm getting to the habit strength stage. But yeah, that's a fairly complicated habit to have, 10,000 steps a day, so it takes a lot more time, a lot more repetition, and you have to be a lot more consistent in order to get there.

- Okay, so bringing this back to safety practice and the safety profession, you know, working on habits, in many ways, is very individual, right? Like, for example, the rule that you created, for someone else that might not work, they might need to use some different tactic to achieve the same goal. Where is the balance with individual responsibility and kind of organizational responsibility in...?

You know, the organization is responsible to help develop these habits, but they're learned on an individual level.

- Yeah, it's a fair question. So, the interesting thing about safety that I've sort of recently became aware of, I guess I kind of noticed, is that we keep saying everybody is an individual, but we prescribe safety generically. Everybody just does the same thing. We don't do that. What we do is we explain to people the different options that they have, that they may wish to try in order to change their habits.

So if they want to change a habit, there's different options that they can take. It's for them to choose what that is. So our job is to provide, I guess, the knowledge, the understanding, and the structure, in order for them to do it for themselves. So it's kind of interesting because, you know, when we first start the training, we go through this sort of little exercise with people.

And we look at the different fatalities at work, on the road, and not at work, not on the road, but from accidental injury, right? And we say to people, "So you've got a safe system of work?" And they go, "Yes." I go, "Is it always effective 100% of the time?" And people go, "No."

I say, "So what keeps you safe when the system fails?" People go, "Oh, me." I go, "That's a function of how much attention you were paying at the time." And then we ask the question about outside of work. We go, "What keeps you safe most of the time outside of work?" Sometimes people go, you know, "Road rules," or whatever it may happen to be, but at the end of the day, it's yourself, to me. I go, "That's a function of how good you are at paying attention generically."

And everybody goes, "Oh, okay, that's fair enough." When we look at the different sort of fatalities from different parts, in developed countries, in the U.S., in Australia, for every fatality at work, there's anything from 20 to 35 outside, from accidental injury, right?

Now, the reason why we have one at work is because safety systems are good are keeping us safe. The reason why we have 20 and 35 outside is because we're not very good at paying attention.

- You must know, you know, typical... Well, we've talked about some of the typical habits that people may need to get into. And you said that you mention...you give them the structure, you give them tactics basically.

- Yeah.

- And, I assume, count on them to know or at least to be willing to experiment and figure out which is going to work for them.

- Yeah.

- Do you attack things where, like, "Okay, we're working on this habit," or do you have sort of a, "These are the common habits that need to be changed," and individuals kind of decide, like, "Oh, I'd better work on that one?"

- No, no, no. So we get people to decide for themselves what's most important for them. Look, the organization...you asked about personal responsibility against organizational responsibility. So the responsibility of the organization is to help them get there, wherever it is that they are going.

Now, if they want to deal with rushing better or fatigue better, or they want to look before they move, whatever it is. So what we have done is we've created a coaching process that is crucial to the success of people changing their habits. Essentially, it's ask the right question at the right time in the right way, in order for them to work it out for themselves. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but telling people what to do, I've got children, right, that doesn't work, right?

So I can tell my children, "You're being inattentive, you know. Slow down." That doesn't work. So this kind of process came out of me trying to help my kids to start realizing that they're being inattentive and they're being in one of the subconscious brain modes. I noticed that I'm not always there with them, so I have to teach it for themselves, and that's the bit that we teach.

We teach a system that lives entirely in somebody's head. They own the whole thing. The good news about that is they can take it, it goes with them wherever they go. That's the strength of it. And they're not doing it for me, they're not doing it for the safety person, they're doing it for themselves.

- Okay, so we've got...you know, our audience is safety professionals. What do you think is the most...? What would you like them to take away from this episode? Like, an understanding, or do you have something that you think they should do or...?

- Well, what I think is useful, and this is what we get sort of potential new clients to do is we get them to look through their incidents and map the subconscious brain modes against each of those incidents. So, the organization needs to convince itself that rushing, frustration, fatigue, and autopilot are a part of the incidents that they're having.

Now, the interesting thing about that when it comes to organizations is that... I've done enough in some investigations to know that once you find a gap in the system, you think that's the cause, and that's all you do. So sometimes you have to go back, and you have to talk to the person, and go, "What was different about this time? I mean, you've driven a forklift 38 million times. Why did you hit the bollard today?"

And usually, it comes down to either rushing, frustration, fatigue, or autopilot. So the first thing I get people to do is I get people to convince themselves that they've got a problem that they want to fix. And that's the way that you do that, you look at your incidents, you might look at the last six months of the last year, and then... So we've probably gotten about 50 of our clients to do that. The lowest number I've ever got back reported to me is 81%.

And then we keep track of this, average is about 93.7, if you want to get technical with numbers. So four out of five incidents have either rushing, frustration, fatigue, or autopilot involved in them. So that's the first step. And then the second step is go to your corrective actions and classify them under first generation, second generation, or third generation.

And what people find is that first generation's 80% to 95%, second generation is 5% to 15%, third generation, you might get, "Be more careful, take more care, write a procedure about looking before stepping," but there's nothing there that does any good. And what we say to people is that once you do that exercise, you will see the massive mismatch. And you will see an opportunity for improvement.

If you can just get people to manage these four, you know, subconscious brain modes better, then they're going to see the hazard earlier, they're going to be able to avoid more hazards, and your incidents will go down. And that's what we find.

- Well, we're almost out of time, but I have a few questions that I like to throw at my guests. So one is, if you were to train tomorrow's aspiring safety professionals, where would you focus in terms of the non-technical training? What core skills, do you think, that maybe are not being looked at right now that you would...?

Yeah.

- Okay. So, for me, the issue is not that the soft skills aren't good enough. There's plenty of ways by which to be more care caring, build trust, have healthy relationships. The issue, for me, is that we don't seem to want to look at the scientific evidence about what drives most of our behavior.

And it's about getting that fourth destination into play. So what I would do is I would give training to people in the core skills, but not just to, you know, fix the work environment, improve the management system, or get people to think more about safety. Also, how do you go about influencing people's subconscious habits in order for them to be safer? That's where I would focus my attention.

- Throw in a little neuroscience so they understand and maybe are looking at that, thinking about that even before they go into the profession.

- Yeah. Because I think the first time in human history where we're actually starting to see what's going on inside people's heads, it's fascinating. Once you start reading neuroscience, you know, you go, "Wow." And the problem is that it's counterintuitive, so a lot of the stuff that have been going around for the last 50 years in safety doesn't [inaudible] kind of world, and these things have been around for 50 years, so they seem familiar, we never question them.

If you start reading neuroscience, you start questioning these things because what we're finding is that some of the things that we believe are true are not necessarily as true as what we think, which is interesting.

- So there's a challenge. There's a challenge to listeners, is learn more about how we think.

- Yeah.

- If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your safety career, and you could only give young Cristian one piece of advice, what do you think that would be? It's a tough one, this...everyone...

- Well, it's difficult for me to go back and say, you know, "Read more brain science earlier," because it wasn't there. Because that's what I would do. I would say, "Get into this sort of brain size stuff earlier." That's kind of opened up a whole new different way of understanding why people do what they do, for me. I don't think I would.

I think that the reason why I'm here is because I've done the things that I have done, and I've had to do those things in order to move along. I have a reputation for thinking about things differently, and the reason why I'm here is because, you know, over the years, you know, I'm a science person, and the reason why I mentioned that is because I've seen lots of different approaches to safety. And I've always focused on where the evidence is.

And what I'm talking about today is where the evidence has taken me. Now, I understand that that's not where most safety people are at, but I think I'm trying to open the door and get people to look inside, because once you start looking inside, you know, your view about what's going on and the way you go about trying to improve safety changes. It doesn't mean that we throw away anything we've already done, that's all been useful.

It's just that there's a piece missing, and the piece that brain science says drives most of the behavior is going on the subconscious, but at the moment we're not doing anything with, but it's worth understanding better. Because if you think about, you know, just, for me, we need to use...if we're really serious about improving safety, we need to use everything that's available to us.

And at the moment, you know, we don't have a whole-of-brain approach. We have a conscious mind approach. That's not all of it. So, I advocate for a whole-of-brain approach, but you got to understand what's going on with the subconscious, you know, to be in that space.

- If we've got some listeners who are interested in learning more about the neuroscience, about anything that we've talked about today, are there any particular resources that you would recommend?

- So you mentioned the book that I wrote, and I wrote it in order to give people an introduction into what's going on inside people's heads. So that's not a bad place to start. We've also, on our website, habitsafe.com.au, don't forget the .au because we're in Australia, we have a podcast called "Safety Frontiers," where we look at all these issues from a science perspective.

So if you want to know more, and only if you want to know more, there's either the book or the podcast, I'm happy for people to send me an invite on LinkedIn. From time to time, we post something that we find interesting and new about the neuroscience. So that's not a bad way of keeping up with what we're thinking about and where our thinking is going. So either of those three things.

If I had to recommend sort of other things that I've found really insightful and really useful, I usually tend to recommend two books, "The Brain" by David Eagleman, he's a neuroscientist, so that's an introductory kind of text. The one that really explains behavior quite well, it's called "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky, it's 400 pages.

But if you want to understand the things that come into play in order to influence people's behavior, that's not a bad sort of overall sort of process. And Robert Sapolsky's got some things on YouTube that you can listen to as well. So, there's a fair bit of stuff. He's actually...for people that are interested though. In COVID, I had to find something to do. So Robert Sapolsky's got 25 two-hour lectures that he does at Harvard University.

It's called "Human Biology" or something or rather, what it was, and part of it is neuroscience, part of it is culture, and it goes through the history of behavior, you know, what has been knocked out, what is still in. So if you've got 50 hours to spare and you can sit through lecture-style stuff, it's there.

- Okay, please don't start another pandemic just for that. But if you do have the time yourself, then...

- I only got halfway through it. It was heavy going, but it was interesting.

- Yeah, yeah, of course. So you mentioned LinkedIn. And the podcast. Is there anywhere else our listeners can find you on the web? Or are those the best places?

- Now, look, I mean, we tend to put everything on our web page, which is habitsafe.com.au. So there are blogs on there, there's a podcast on there, there's a recommended reading list, there's a whole bunch of stuff on there.

- There might be the odd YouTube video of me... I don't know, [inaudible]... I don't know where they put these things [inaudible]. I just do them.

- Well, we'll have the URL in the show notes, so people can look that up if they're interested.

- Thank you, Mary.

- I'm afraid we're at time. Thanks to our listeners and to our guest today, Cristian Sylvestre.

- My pleasure, Mary, thank you for having me.

- I'd like to personally thank the Safety Labs by Slice team, who, on both a conscious and subconscious level, are awesome human beings. Bye for now.