Using Multiple Safety Theories to Implement Critical Risk Management

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Josh Bryant, a General Manager of People, Risk and Sustainability who’s worked in the mining industry for over 20 years and implemented an award-winning critical risk management system.

Josh has always been open to different workplace safety frameworks and uses scientific reasoning to decide which elements to adopt or reject. He’s not tied to any particular theory, and gives HSE professionals a great overview of his journey of exploration, combining different approaches to safety management.

There are a lot of safety theories, frameworks and ideas, and it can be confusing for EHS professionals looking to implement the best solutions for their organization. Josh demystifies Safety-I, Safety-II, Safety Differently and Human and Organisational Performance (HOP). He explains how these approaches can be combined and tells us why he came to focus on critical risk management.

Josh maintains that flexibility and curiosity are crucial qualities for HSE professionals who should always practice humble inquiry regardless of your approach to workplace safety.

- [Mary] Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice."

There are a lot of theories, frameworks, and new ideas floating around the safety world. It can be confusing for someone who's perhaps new to the profession and really wanting to find the best way to practice safety. Our guest today is sharing his story of professional development, where he started, which ideas he embraced, which ones he rejected, and how his approach to all things safety is grounded in scientific principles.

He's particularly interested in critical risk management, its importance to the world of safety, and practical ways to implement it. Josh Bryant is the general manager of people, risk, and sustainability for Mitchell Services Australian drilling operations. Mitchell operates in surface and underground mining operations and in remote environments helping clients discover critical minerals.

Josh began his career as a geologist and has since moved into senior management for technical and safety concerns. In his seven years at Mitchell Services, Josh has led team delivery of safety, training, risk management, and operational learning. He's implemented a human and organizational performance framework and created an award-winning critical risk management system.

These and other improvements have developed Mitchell Services into Australia's leading exploration drilling company. Josh is currently surviving raising two teenagers, Lachlan and Zoe, with his wife, Sally, and he joins us today from Brisbane. Welcome.

- [Josh] Thanks very much, Mary. Surviving is absolutely the operative word there. They love what I do, they love the passion that I've got for it, but they will jump in the car when I pick them up from school and go, "Why are you listening to, like, a podcast on safety? Like, what's this Safety Labs? Why are you listening to a podcast on fatalities? Why are you listening to an audio book on human and organizational performance?"

They're like, "Get a life." So, yeah, I'm surviving, but they are brilliant kids.

- Yeah, yeah, of course. In order to understand your approach to safety, I think that it makes sense to go through the chronology of how different ideas affected your practice as a safety professional. When you began in safety, you say that safety to you was at the time about campaigns and you had sort of a mindset of fixing the workers.

Can you tell me a bit about that starting point for you?

- Yeah. So, again, career was a geologist and technical management of people, particularly contractor management. So, I was actually looking after drillers, which is who I work for now. So, I think I'm paying for past sins. But it was always around what did the person do wrong, how can we fix the person. It was always, like, how can we almost, like, bullet proof the procedure?

Let's put another line in. Let's pull all the people in. So, if we had an incident involving one person, let's pull 120 workers in and almost, like, retrain them. What about the 119 who did nothing wrong and didn't really understand what happened with the event? So, my personal view was always, yep, something's happened, try and understand it, but, you know, it's got to be the person has just done something wrong.

Moving, I sort of changed my view when I stumbled across safety differently. So, I know there's many schools of thought and it's been out for a while, but I was first introduced to it by a gentleman called Daniel Hummerdal and Sidney Dekker himself, and it was almost, for me, it was almost like a switch overnight. Like, that's how big an impact it had on me.

I was like, "Have I really been doing this wrong?" So, you know, that framework of Safety Differently was about people or a solution behind us and not a problem to control. And I'm just like, "You know what, maybe I've been going about this the wrong way and just trying to change people and not really understand their situations and trying to improve this." And I've been involved in numerous behavior-based programs and I've always got the fact that you are trying to make improvements to the working environment but the cons always came around to, well, the person was in the line of fire and the person was doing this wrong and the person need to fix this and the things we need to focus on this month is slips, trips, and falls, and hazard management.

I wasn't actually changing anything in our business. So, that's where Safety Differently also had an impact for me to go, "I've actually got an ethical responsibility here for people who work for me to make their workplaces better and to actually understand what they're going through day to day, what's their constraints, and actually, what do I need to do to put in place to make things go well?"

So, that was a big shift and then sort of fell into the HOP space and the HOP language, so human and organizational performance. I know you've had, you know, Andrea Baker on the show. So, if anyone's not familiar, she's a leading expert. Go and watch that webinar. But falling into HOP, the language of HOP really resonated with us as a business, and that's where we started to make changes as leaders as well.

It was a simple framework, the five principles plus six, as Tesla recently said, "We've been using six for a long time." So, but those six principles really resonated for us and it wasn't about workers, it's about leaders' approach to safety and to work.

- A couple of things, I want to go back a little bit and give some context about how you were working at that time before these things came in. So, Mitchell Services is a contractor and there are a couple of different levels of safety oversight by which I mean your job context changes depending on whether your current client is like a giant, multinational company or a small operator.

So, in your early days there, how did that affect your critical risk management? I know I'm walking backwards a bit here, but I'll come back through some of the stuff that you just talked about.

- Yeah. Good question, Mary. I guess I'll frame it this way, that one of our operations managers originally said to me when I joined Mitchell Services that we're only as good as our clients. And like that actually scared me. So, what that said to me is that we were relying on the systems that our clients had in order to be safe. From a regulatory perspective, some of the mining areas that we work in are quite prescriptive about safety management systems and who you operate under but for us, the critical risk systems or the safety management systems didn't really focus on the drilling operations that I was responsible for in ensuring that the controls that we had in place or that we needed to have in place were in place.

So, their systems would verify quite generic stuff or related to their mining activities but not actually to our drilling activities. And what we found is like the example that you said is like working with those higher tier level-one miners, a lot of money, a lot of resources, large systems embedded, but if I'm working for a junior mining company, they are trying to get value for money. They want to spend all their money to, like, basically get rocks out of the ground.

So, they're relying on me and my systems to ensure that my people are safe. So, that [inaudible 00:07:47] was almost, like, a wake up moment for us to go, "You know what, like, we actually can't rely on clients to keep us safe. We need to really look in our own backyard and make sure that we've got these critical controls in place so that, you know, we know that our workers are protected and we actually can understand then what are the controls that they need and they rely on to be in place for them to have, you know, continuous and safe operations."

- We've talked a little bit about Safety Differently but again, one of the things I think is important to your story is that you have a background as a geologist. That has an important impact on your approach to safety. I'd like you to talk a little bit for you about what the connection between science, your scientific background, and safety practice is for you.

How does your scientific background affect it?

- Mary, for me, you know, hopefully, I don't offend anyone but what I've found is as a geologist, you're always researching, you're always trying to find the latest things that were coming out, how are people doing different studies at different deposits, it can be overseas, what systems are they putting in.

And it was always like just trying to learn, like, you know, reading more on papers about how people are doing alteration studies or how they're doing geological modeling. So, and then you would try and embed that back into your own geology practices to go, "Well, you know, let's try and get better here." I don't see it in safety. I don't see a lot of it. Like, it's almost like when a safety professional was coming to a site, the way that safety is done at that site is the way it's done.

So, who am I to challenge that? Who am I to really do it, like, I just need to know the systems and just make sure that they're almost, like, stronger. So, from my geology and like a science background, like that's where I've actually done a little bit more exploration coming into the safety space. So, that's actually made me, like, want to read more and understand more and actually try these concepts.

So, you know, I've seen LinkedIn posts and I was like, "There's no science behind that." It's like, well, come out and have a look at the difference in the interactions and what the focus is on a business that Mitchell Services has done as a result of learning about these practices and trying to try and apply them in a practical way. It's made a massive difference on our business.

And I've actually seen articles that go, "Well, it hasn't made that big a difference because, you know, your public trip results haven't really changed." Well, that's crap. Come in and have a look. Come and lift up the carpet and you'll actually see it's made a dramatic difference to our business in terms of understanding work, improving work, and particularly improving our critical risk management.

- Yeah. Well, I think that's what's interesting about you is that not everyone subscribes to, you know, one point of view or one theory or another but you've sort of used this experimentation model to say, "Okay." You know, when you encountered Safety Differently, that was something new, and let's try that. And so, just sort of a very experimental meshing of learning about new theory but also putting it into practice.

- Yeah. So, we were at campaigns and we were having a number… Everyone thinks everyone gets injured at Christmas because their mind turns off the job. So, you know, the challenge the board put to us is like, "We need a campaign to get, you know, people thinking about work." And we were just like, "This is just absolute crap because it's not sustainable. It's not going to work." So, when we were learning about these Safety Differently principles, the way we applied it, we used a theory by Don Ash called the 100 Small Things.

So, it's doing those 100 small things consistently with deliberate intent in order to make change. So, it wasn't a wholesale let's put up posters and, you know, let's put badges on or let's change our shirts, etc., we made subtle changes to the way that we would communicate through like safety meetings. We would change our prestart meetings, we would change the way that we would communicate events.

We would change, like, some of our forms. We'd actually start, like, really decluttering and making things easier and go away. Because, you know, and then we would start really working with our workforce. So, it's almost that we like we did it, like we called it ninjaing but, yeah, we sort of ninjaed it into the business and changed it that way. Not everything we did worked.

Like, some of the things we put in place, the thing that tried to measure the variability of people's work during the day, so, we would say, "Oh, you know, what was your plan this day? How did you plan go? You know, give me a rating between 1 and 10," it was an absolute disaster. Like, lasted about three weeks, the guys were like, "This is absolute crap. It doesn't tell anything. It doesn't give me any information. It doesn't help me make decisions."

You know, we failed. We stumbled a number of times thinking that we were doing well. But the things that really succeeded were always about workforce input. It was always about asking them for their solutions, asking them about their problems. How do we make things go well? And I honestly believe that us doing that work and building that trusting relationship and open relationship with our workforce is what opened the door and made it so easy for us to implement critical risk management and to get their involvement in the creation of that program.

- So, you mentioned last time we talked, and I hope I'm not putting you on the spot, but there were three philosophies you said from Safety Differently that kind of landed with you or landed with the company.

- Yeah. So, we learned about Safety Differently and shared it with the leadership [inaudible]. It's going to be a new way of thinking and it's going to push it and it made them, like, really uncomfortable. It made our leadership team quite uncomfortable. So, it was, like, safety is not just the absence of accidents, safety is the presence of capacity and controls. So, it just means, well, so like we have to care about when nothing is happening, we have to, like, understand that?

And it's like, "Yeah, you do." We understand why things go well, that people are a solution to harness and not a problem to control. And that's probably the really big one, that it wasn't just blaming people when things go wrong. It's actually, like, well, let's try and understand that. You know, let's go and work with them out in the field. Like, drilling, and, you know, I would get, "But drilling is drilling and you'll never have to change it."

Like, that's crap. Like, talk about it and you've got new people and new ideas and they see things a different way. Like, try and understand that. And then that last one was, safety is an ethical responsibility, not a bureaucratic responsibility. So, it's not about just controlling paperwork and making bulletproof paperwork. It is about you have all these people working for you, they are in your care. It's on you to make sure that you are working with them and understand that they are operating safely and you're creating a safe environment for them to work in.

It was very different for our leadership team. It was, like, well, you know, you're not just going to get up there and say, like, don't hurt yourself and don't hit yourselves with a hammer. It's like, no, like, it's not actually going to do anything. Our campaign was really, you know what, we actually put our hearts on our sleeves and talked to our workforce, all the leaders went out to all the sites and said, "You know what, we've actually been getting this wrong and we're really sorry and we're going to take a new approach. It's called Safety Differently."

Now, the big thing with that, Mary, and this is where alarm bells went off, is that as soon as you call it Safety Differently, your clients go, "Well, that's different to ours so it must be crap or it's very different to ours, it can't be right. If you're saying it's Safety Differently, you're saying ours is wrong." And we're like, "It's actually nothing to do with you. It's actually to do with us and our relationship with our workforce."

So, we actually had to wind back that language of Safety Differently because it actually turned some of our clients off. It didn't turn our workforce off at all but it actually turned some of our clients off.

- That's a really good point. I think that people are scared of change and I think people are scared of like, oh, is this some newfangled flavor of the month or, you know, like, as soon as there's a name attached to something, then people think, "Oh, you're just going to follow this theory even if it doesn't work."

And you mentioned one thing that didn't work. Was there anything else that didn't work? And was it difficult to admit it when it didn't work and to move away and just say, "You know, let's reject this. It's not going to do it for us?"

- Yeah. There's a couple of bits and pieces. So, yeah, labeling it, like our original campaign was called, like, homestretch. And again, it was a campaign, but we never labeled… We never tried to put… We tried to add Safety Differently, like terminology in some of our documentation. We handled some of that back as well just because clients were like, "Okay, what's this?" So, it's just getting too difficult to go, "Well, if you're not comfortable with it, you know, so be it."

And also, we looked at our language of, okay, tell me about your work. What controls do you need in place to make sure that goes well? How do you know it's working? Is that enough? The thing is, well, we didn't actually understand the controls in the first place. So, you know, who are we to go, "You know, do you have the right controls in place for your work?"

And they're like, "Well, what controls am I meant to have in place?" So, you know, it's actually… We were thinking that the worker already knew everything and we were just, like, assuming that. So, that fell over as well. But it was more trying not to label a program. I think that's the biggest thing, and you need to make it part of your actual DNA rather than I walk out the door and the next person comes in and they shove a "Zero Harm" sticker and then off we go.

That's another campaign. So, we needed to really make sure that it wasn't going to be something that was short-term, it was going to be part of how the business operated.

- Yeah. And one thing that you said really, so, we started with no critical risk management and then incorporating some Safety Differently ideas. And then, you said that human and organizational performance was really what expanded and, like, speaking of working it into the DNA of the company. I think that what you told me was that HOP really helped expand some of these improvements and ideas widely through the company.

If I understood correctly what you said, that that different places got really involved.

- Yeah. So, HOP is where the leaders really started to come on board within Mitchell Services. And I think it's because it was the simplicity of the language, but like how powerful the principles actually are. And what I loved about it more than anything else is it's not an off-the-shelf solution. HOP is not a let's go and get the HOP dictionary and go, "Okay, part one, go and do this."

It doesn't actually work like that because I think what it actually…what HOP forces you…what human and organization performance forces you to do is understand how your business operates. How does the business communicate? What does it make important?

What do leaders make important? What does the workforce make important? And then for you to implement HOP, if you don't understand that, it's going to fall flat. I think that's where some people, you know, I guess they stutter and they go, "Oh, you know, HOP is great but, like, where do I start?" We started with our leaders. It's always been about the leadership team and the supervisors and if they can understand it and they can implement it, then we will have absolute success.

I've had a couple of supervisors go, "Oh, this HOP is great. Like, when are we going to roll it out to the workforce?" And it's like, "Well, it's not actually designed for the workforce. It's actually designed for us as leaders to implement." So, the simple thing with the HOP principles is like, you know, error is normal, even the best make mistake. People make mistakes. And taking that view every time that we have an incident or something minor happen, and even my CEO now, Andrew, will go, "[inaudible 00:19:39] on that rig, would we have done exactly the same thing?"

It's like, "Yeah, we probably would have." So, it's that acceptance in the business and that blame fix is nothing, that's been one of our business principles for a long time. You know, never openly criticize. Blame fix is nothing that's been on a Mitchell Services value. So, that blame fix is nothing fit in really quick. The systems in context drive behavior. People, I think with this one think systems drive behavior, oh, it's my paperwork, it's how things are made difficult.

It's actually context. It's like, what does your organization make important? What messaging does the CEO give and what does he make important? Or even care for, like, you know, what books does he have in the background? Like, you know, if he's doing a quick video, there's like, you know, a book that's all just about money, etc., then what type of message does that give you? You know, it's creating that context.

So, also understand their work, you know, how difficult is it to get equipment, how tricky is it, do we give them the right planning, etc. And then a big one is response matters. What do we do when things go wrong and how do we handle bad news? This has probably been the biggest shift in Mitchell Services I recon in the last two years, how do we handle bad news?

How do we handle events and how do we respond? And it can be taken that if you don't suddenly go, what the hell is going on? You know, you mustn't be a human being but it must be a hang on a minute, stop. What can we learn from this? Is the person all right? You know, let's move on as a business. And then the sixth principle for us is always controls save lives.

So, you know, that's where our critical risk management actually came into play and interweaved really closely in with HOP as well.

- You mentioned last time we spoke that one of the most important things you did involving HOP was to change the language you use to remove blame from the language. So, how did you manage that? And you already talked a little bit about why it was critical but practically speaking, how did you... Yeah.

- How did we do it? Freaking hard. That's how. For you to put out a document, put out a notification on an event, watching that any language that you use in your communication doesn't actually blame an individual is quite difficult and we have a…it's almost like a lot of peer support to, like, can you please check this to make sure that there's no language of blame in this document, in this communication, etc.?

Can you please make sure that, you know, we've got that right. Another thing with the blame side of things is investigations. Almost opening investigations and learnings with that hang on a minute, if we blame this individual, we're not actually going to fix this, they might, you know, they might withhold information or not feel comfortable to tell us.

So, if we can remove that essence of blame and actually, like, make it comfortable for them to speak, you know, and know that we just really want to learn first, you know, that actually makes a better environment as well. So, the blame language, it's human nature. I recently attended a training course with Bob Edwards, who's like a, you know, he's a HOP guru, and he just said, "It is human nature to blame. You are not going to get rid of it."

Just know that the principal though is about blame won't fix anything. So, you can learn and punish or what is it? You can blame and punish or you can learn and improve but you can't do both.

- Okay. So, there you were making great strides, improving the workplace a bunch of different levels and then there was an event that jolted you and provided the impetus for a new focus on critical risk management. So, can you describe how that shift happened?

- Yeah. It's probably… This is a personal one but I'll take it back to Mitchell Services and, you know, in some ways, I wish I would have gone down this path earlier but I don't think we had the trust in the workforce to do it properly. But at an organization where I used to work, we were having lots of hands and fingers injuries. Hands and fingers, like, were impacting the truth and they were…some were minor injuries but they might need a stitch here and there.

So, that impacted total recordable injury frequency, right, it impacted the stats, everyone freaking out, hands and fingers campaign. Josh, you're manager improvement, hands and fingers is your be all end all. You'll be doing this until it improves. So, every month, getting people to sign their commitments to, like, hands and fingers safety and, you know, stickers on the walls and posters and making videos of hands and fingers and people getting hurt and what happened to the truth, absolutely nothing, kept going along.

So, we even thought outside the box and went into, like, the schools and started talking to, like, kids and going, you know, "Mum and dad are at home. You know, when they're home with you, they like to play and everything but they really need their hands so, you know, we need you to help us, like, look after them so they can interact with you and, you know, they can go fishing on the weekend and you can play sports together."

And, you know, some of the employees would go home and they would put, like, the kettle on a lot or the stove on and they go, "Oh, careful mum and dad. You know, that's hot." And they're just like, "Well, where did this come from?" Because we didn't actually tell anyone we were going to go into the schools. So, it was like a subliminal messaging through their kids. And that made some impact but again, that's hearts and minds.

It doesn't actually, like, change anything. Truths kept going along. And then at the operation where I was, we had a fatality underground where Brian lost his life and that impacted our community greatly. And I mean community in terms of the state, his family, the operation, the leadership team, and it actually changed the entire organization.

And suddenly, hands and fingers didn't matter anymore, because we didn't have critical risk management in control. So, when I've joined Mitchell Services, and again, weaving back to that story to go, we were relying on client systems. We were making sure that their critical risk management, you know, we just worked under that, it just wasn't going to be enough.

But for us to do what we did, we needed to have the trust of our workforce first. And that is what Safety Differently did and that is what HOP has done. It's actually created a safer and more open and, you know, I'm going to say it, psychologically safe environment where people can speak up, let us know their concerns, and we can work with them directly to make changes to our business.

- So, for you, Safety Differently and HOP kind of laid the groundwork, but you had also said that generally speaking, you think a company needs to get critical risk management under control before moving into some newer ideas, which is the opposite way that you did. So, is it a chicken and egg question?

Does it matter? Like… - I've actually been challenged about this a couple of times, which has been cool. So, you know, we talk about, you know, Safety-I, Safety-II, Safety Differently, HOP, New View, we had all that, but what happened in our industry, in our operations in Australia is that there were a number of fatalities in some underground mines where we operated.

So, none of our employees were impacted but there were some large reviews undertaken at the time by a gentleman by the name of Sean Brady, who did a thing called the "Brady Review" into mining fatalities. And he actually highlighted that a lot of these mines didn't have critical risk management as a core part of their business.

And we were like, "You know what, we don't either and we are relying on these." And they're coming in and doing these reviews and saying, "The clients aren't doing them well," like, we can't rely on this, we have to do this ourselves. And coming back, like if we've got junior businesses who are relying on us to have robust systems, we don't have critical risk management and control, and that's what started our critical risk process. It really kicked us off to go.

We've got these reviews. You know, everyone will say it's the most terrible thing ever. COVID was almost a godsend because it allowed us to stop and then go backwards and look at, okay, let's look at our operations and make sure that we've got critical risk management, like, covered off.

- Do you think there's a right way to do it or is it just get it done? Like, I mean, sort of an order of, do you know what I mean? Like you said, Safety Differently and HOP sort of laid the groundwork. I think you weren't as sure that your critical risk management would have been as successful if you hadn't done that first.

- Yeah. I think a way to look at it is using the Safety-I and Safety-II framework. So, Safety-I is about having processes and procedures and making sure things go right all the time whereas Safety-II is that, you know, understanding why things go well, working closely with your workforce. We didn't have that Safety-I aspect right. Oh, hands up, we did not have it right and we needed to get that right.

So, it's almost like we're going to this mindset of let's make sure things go well and let's work really closely with our workforce and understand them, but we actually don't have a very robust safety management system that includes critical controls. We need to go back and fix that and then we can keep going on with our HOP journey.

- And in the end, you have an award-winning critical risk management system. So, can you tell me about some of the really practical ways that you set that up? What worked? What didn't?

- Yeah. What we've seen with…and it's not vanilla. You know, whenever I talk about critical risk management, I'll put up a tub of vanilla ice cream and go, "Critical risk management isn't vanilla or nothing." The thing with us is by doing Safety Differently and HOP, we really engaged with the workforce, understood their work, understood where the controls were, and that actually led us not working in a back room in a spreadsheet and go, "Oh, these are the material of unwanted events. This is how we think they would happen. Here's the controls."

We were like, "Let's review everywhere that there's been a fatality and could that happen on one of our drill sites. And then let's work with the workers." So, we would go out to each of the site and go, "If we've got an entanglement risk, where can that happen on this site? What can happen here?" Oh, that thing spins and that does this and that does that and also, oh, well, when would it be likely that we would interact and that would happen?

Oh, you know, we'd had this open or we'd do this. Oh, so what controls do we have in place? We put a cage and we put an interlock here and we do this and we do that and just, oh, wow, okay, excellent. The ICMM guide to critical control management, which is available online, was a very good, like, follow the bouncing ball until we involve the worker because they were like, "Well, we don't actually agree with your flowchart that says that's a critical control. If that's not in place, I'm not working today."

And I'd just go, "Cool, no dramas, that's a critical control. We'll do a performance standard for it, we'll put verification activities in place." The other thing that the workforce did with their critical control management is, oh, my God, more paperwork. What other crap are you going to get us to do today? Thanks for making my life even harder as a supervisor and burning more time. So, we worked with them to understand, so, what's the routines that you're around your workers and, you know, maybe learning or maybe doing an inspection, and we actually wove critical risk management into their preexisting activity.

So, we didn't create any clutter and any extra, I guess, noise for them. And another, I guess another thing with it is we didn't want critical risk management to be about pure metrics. So, I mean, we're not a statistically-driven organization.

We try not to have any stats on any noticeboards, no injury free days, no what the truth is. And we were going to apply the same with critical risk management. We wanted it to be these are the things that we found doing critical risk management, these are our opportunities for improvements and where controls failed, and giving that feedback back to the workforce to go, "We found these things. Thank you for highlighting them. Let's work together to make improvements to work by improving these controls."

- Yeah. And I imagine that engenders trust too because it's one thing to be asked what you think but it's quite another to see that you've been listened to and that it's, you know.

- Yeah, yeah. And again, just to stress, is that feedback loop, it is that really giving back to the worker. They put in all this effort, they do these pre-task risk assessments. What's it used for? So, what's my critical control verifications actually used for? What's the organization doing with it?

And the biggest step change I saw too was the importance that our board placed on critical risk management. So, our board packs, I guess, the safety section used to be, you know, here's our total recordable injury frequency, right? Here is the number of injuries that we've had. Here's what we've done about it and here's what we've learned. That's now pushed down in the board report.

And the first thing that our board actually discuss is critical risk management. Where were the files? Where were the opportunities in improvement? Are there any actions? Is that applicable across all the business? What systems are involved that we're responsible for that led to that control failing or needing to be improved?

And then the board focus on planning task observations, which is about let's see what the paperwork and the safe work instructions that we have for our workers. Do they reflect how they do the work rather than reversing which is I'm going to make sure that this person is following this procedure to the latter. The board are more interested to go, "Do our systems reflect work as it's actually done and the best way to do it?"

And probably the third thing they really focus on is workplace insight. So, what do we learn about work and what's the business doing to look for those 1% improvements that we can apply across the entire business? So, it's just been…critical risk management has actually made this shift in the entire business, but the best thing about it is it's come from the workers down and been accepted by the board from an upward point of view.

So, it hasn't been a push down on to the worker, it's actually been like the two… We've all worked together to make this actually successful in our business.

- Yeah. And the irony there is that, you know, you say you're not focusing so much on the recordable injuries. However, since you incorporated critical risk management, you mentioned that your total recordable injury frequency halved even though you welcomed reports of it. So, it's not as though people aren't reporting them.

- Yeah. So, we actually saw… When we've put in critical risk management, we've actually seen an increase in the number of high potential incidents that we report or having reported. And yeah, we've seen a decrease in our injury severity, and that's because critical risk management has improved work.

So, it's not about control and purely just making sure things are prevented, we've actually improved work by understanding the controls with our workers. So, they've helped us make work safer, which has actually made work better, and they therefore improved the ability for us to recover from event or improve the severity. We don't share truth with our workforce.

Like, half of them don't even know what it is. But it's one of those things where we didn't work to control the statistics, we worked to improve work. And, you know, basically, the statistics dropped by themselves.

- So, you mentioned this a little bit early about safety as a profession and that you would have observed that some people train for safety, they get into an organization, and then they stop learning. So, here's the quote that you said to me was, "We…" No, it's fine. "We as a profession, we need to push each other to learn more and share each other's ideas."

See, that wasn't a difficult quote. So, how well do you think that safety professionals already do that and are there specific areas where you think the sharing could improve?

- Look, I think we do try. You know, I think there could be more sharing and learnings from events. I think events are pretty, like, kept in house and it's almost like you're trying to protect your company's reputation. You're actually preventing learning. We've seen other industries like oil and gas have, like, open slather, working together, all these companies working together and being very transparent in, you know, how they classify an injury, sharing their learnings, etc.

I think other companies and industries could do exactly the same thing, like really sharing those learnings. The ones that we normally see are from the regulator. So, if there's been a high potential event or a fatality, we'll definitely hear about those. But I'll go to another worksite and they focus on slips, trips, and falls and I'll go to this other site and they focus on hands and fingers, and you just go like, you know, "What's going on? Why? Why do you think you're having these things? Does your campaign actually change risk and does it change work? And if it does neither of those things, you're not going to see an improvement."

- Okay. So, speaking of improving the safety profession, now, this is more about the future, this is students, so what core human skills, this is the University of Josh question, I think you knew this was coming, what core, excuse me, human skills are the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals while they're still training?

So, what soft skill courses would you add to a certificate or a diploma program that would be most helpful to the students' future careers?

- I don't know if it can be taught but I would reach out and find a mentor who can guide you in developing curiosity, staying curious all the time, and actually remaining humble. Don't thinking that you've got the answers and, you know, you suddenly come onto a worksite, "But I've got a degree and this person doesn't so I must be smarter than them."

It's actually learning those soft skills of being curious, asking better questions, and being interested. Like, you're actually interested in the person. You're quite genuine about your questions, and they aren't loaded, i.e., they're not, you know, you're trying to tease something out of them. You are actually genuinely interested in them.

And what did Edgar Schein call it? It's humble inquiry. That's probably something I'd encourage people to read if I was a student. Read about "Humble Inquiry." And when you come to your site, start learning about work first, worry about the systems and learning, you know, the paperwork and the safety management system, worry about that second.

First thing you should do is go and be really interested in work and the work that people are doing at your workplace and what they make important and see what you can do to maybe understand that and share that with the organization or maybe remove some of their roadblocks.

- Yeah. It's a good question, can these things be taught? But I do think, regardless of your answer, I think that they can be focused on and if you have a mentor that's telling you, this is where you need to focus, I think that is probably a great way to improve. You knew this was coming too. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself, speak to yourself at the beginning of your, I'll say your safety career, not your whole career but your safety career, and you could give yourself only one piece of advice, what would that be?

- Be open to new ideas because you are exactly the same way as a scientist and as a geologist. So, make sure that you are open to new ideas and new learning. There was a gentleman by the name of Ian Long, he's the one who first introduced me to the idea of Safety Differently.

And it was, you know, he's like all these books and everything. I was like, "Oh, you know, that's fascinating." And like, you know, here I am criticizing people today to go, "Oh, people don't read enough and they're not willing to look at things." I was exactly the same on day one as a safety professional, that someone said to me, "You should read this book on understanding human error. Go to understanding human error. And, like, that's fascinating reading all these books. Josh, listen to Ian, it'll start you on your pathway a lot sooner than you have."

- Yeah. That's a pretty common refrain is opening minds and maybe having a little humility.

- Yeah. Absolutely.

- So, practically speaking, what are some resources if there are listeners who want to learn more about some of the things that you're talking about here? What are some of the books or websites you think that they should look into?

- A good one for me was that Dekker's book, The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. Like, that's a really good start. I grabbed three of my favorites, right, and a little bit obscure of one of them, but Todd wrote a book on workplace fatalities and it's probably not his most popular book, Todd Conklin's book.

I don't know how many times I've read it cover to cover. I've listened to it in audiobooks. I cannot recommend it enough because he really challenges you in terms of understanding critical risk and controls and that it's not all about prevention, but it's also about maintaining control and recovery and it's a huge mind shift. It's a huge shift in your mindset when you're looking at critical risk management that you can't just put these brick walls everywhere.

So, that's a really challenging one. "Bob's Guide to Operational Learning," that's by Bob Edwards. It's quite a new one. It's so good because that's written by a humble human being who has the worker in mind and actually will set you up in terms of what's the initial questions and how do I do these things called learning teams. Like, what's that about?

And the big thing that I got out of that book is start small. Like, you don't have to change the world tomorrow. You can start small. And then the big one that changed it for my team is Todd's book, "Pre-Accident Investigations." That was just an amazing shift and it's easy language as well, so highly recommend that. In terms of resources, "Safety Labs by Slice."

Like, look at some of the guests you've had on. You've had, you know, Eliza and Mark and Kim Bancroft and, like, just, you know, they're amazing human beings. So, you know, listen… Mary, we've got to a stage where we're a small group, some are more interested in the safety science and learning about safety than others. So, we will actually… I'll actually put a link and then I'll go, "Oh, by the way, we couldn't be bothered to listen to this, here's a quick summary."

And that usually entices them to go up. So, highly recommend going back through episodes of "Safety Labs by Slice," "PreAccident Investigation Podcast," "The Safety of Work Podcast" by Dave Provan. That's always another cracker. And then there's other ones like, you know, "Safety on Tap" and "Rebranding Safety." So, you know, there's so much good resources out there. Just make the time.

Like, look for those little snippets. Like, most of the time, I don't set aside part of my day and go, "Oh, I'm going to listen to a webinar today." It is a I've got a 15 to 20-minute commute to work. I'm going to listen to this byte of this webinar. And then I'll actually go to work and go, "Okay, that was cool. What can I apply with that?" One morning, like I was listening to a podcast and Todd Conklin had a guest on and they mentioned the word like failing safely, and I was like, "That's really cool, like, failing safely."

And basically formed a meeting with the leadership team that morning and said, "How's this term, like, failing safely? How does that land with you?" And then we started exploring them. That's part of our normal terminology now as well. So, there's a lot of power in just listening to these bytes-size of these webinars and podcasts as well.

- Yeah. I listen to podcasts when I walk the dog. So, I'm doing two things at once, I'm learning and getting some exercise there. So, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Yeah. The best place is probably LinkedIn. I will usually reply. If you send me a message, I will reply. I usually accept connections as well. But the big thing is if you want to be a keyboard warrior and this goes on LinkedIn and you want to have a bit of a spray, I encourage you to send me a message. I'll organize a video chat with you and I'd love to see your point of view and where you're coming from so that you can understand where I'm coming from.

I just get upset when I read a paper that says, you know, 70% to 80% of workplace incidents are caused by work behavior. I think that's crap. And I haven't had the right to say that if I don't have critical controls and my workplace is right before I start challenging my workers.

- Well, that's great. That's a really good offer you've made and I encourage listeners to take you up on it. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks to… - Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much for having me.

- Yeah. Thank you so much for joining and, you know, sharing your story with us. And as always, thanks to our listeners for tuning in. And it is, I need to say, it is a scientific truth that the "Safety Labs by Slice" team are objectively awesome. So, many thanks to them for all that they do and bye for now.