In this episode, we examine the role of narrative skills in safety education through Robson, Holgate, and Randhawa's 2021 Oxford study "Storycraft: The Importance of Narrative and Narrative Skills in Business." Based on interviews with FTSE 100 business leaders, the research challenges traditional distinctions between 'hard' and 'soft' skills in professional education. We explore a framework of five core narrative competencies - narrative communication, empathy and perspective-taking, critical analysis, creativity and imagination, and digital skills - examining how these relate to communicating organizational values, achieving persuasive outcomes, and managing change initiatives.
Drawing on insights from business leaders and contemporary educational theory, we propose that effective safety professionals require both technical expertise and sophisticated narrative capabilities. The findings suggest significant implications for safety education and professional development, challenging institutions to reconsider how they prepare safety practitioners for increasingly complex organizational environments. Rather than perpetuating false dichotomies between hard and soft skills, we argue for an educational approach that develops both technical and narrative capabilities in an integrated manner, particularly crucial for safety change management where success depends on both procedural competence and compelling storytelling.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“There are different skill categories, but they’re mostly about specific skills versus transferable skills.” - Drew
“One of the things that Griffith [University] was specifically set up for is based on the idea that education is important for social mobility.” - Drew
“A narrative in business is the communication of a business activity or idea…it’s the ability to tell your story or your direction.”- David
“if a business can convey some narrative or strategic vision about who they are and what they’re doing, they’re going to get much more useful work out of their employees.” - Drew
Resources:
Storycraft: the importance of narrative and narrative skills in business
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David: You are listening to the Safety of Work podcast episode 127. Today we’re asking the question, should safety education focus on hard skills or soft skills? Let’s get started.
Hey everybody. My name’s David Provan. I’m here with Drew Rae, and we are from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety Work Podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it.
Drew, you found this report and suggested we talk about the paper that we’re going to talk about today. Would you like to give a little bit of background about this topic and why it interested you?
Drew: Sure. David, this isn’t one of those podcasts where we spend the first 15 minutes just going back and forth about what’s happening in our lives before we get to the content. I don’t know if our listeners even know that the Safety Science Innovation Lab sits within a School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science. It’s not in science or engineering like a lot of safety labs are.
Even though I’m an engineer by original training, my life at the moment is helping to put together a restructured Bachelor of Arts. As part of that teaching work, I came across this report we’re going to talk about today.
I thought it was fairly relevant for the Bachelor of Art students to explain the value of a humanities degree in the modern environment. But I also thought it was fairly interesting, given the way we have these online debates about whether university education is necessary for safety practitioners. And I’m always very uncomfortable with the framing of those debates.
On the one hand, it seems to just devalue the knowledge of other people regardless of how they got their knowledge, but it also tends to misunderstand what university is for. I think people who’ve never been to university seem to have a very skewed idea of what we’re trying to achieve with university education. And I thought this particular report was actually quite a useful way of thinking about it.
David: Great. I also clearly have some views about the education of safety professionals and the role of higher education in that process, so we’ll share those today.
But also, the title, hard skills and soft skills, I thought just before we jump into the paper because there’s always a lot of debate about those as a categorization. Are they soft skills, are they people skills, are the soft skills as important as the hard skills? I personally don’t like the distinction at all, but I’m curious about your thoughts about that as a way of thinking about the skills that we need to be professionals.
Drew: It’s funny. I put hard skills and soft skills in the question for this week as a little bit of clickbait because I thought people would be interested in it. But yeah, also for the Bachelor of Arts, I’ve just been preparing another video where I’m explaining that the distinction between hard skills and soft skills is nonsense. So peeling back the curtain there a little bit.
The way I prefer to think of it is there are different skill categories, but they’re mostly about specific skills versus transferable skills. There are some skills which you only need for doing a particular task. They’re usually things that we can train and that you can learn by just doing that task, and you can assess by doing the task and having someone else judge you on that task.
Then there are other skills that can be learned in lots of different ways and where you only get better by using them across a whole range of circumstances. I don’t like to call them soft skills because they can be things like computer skills which fall into that general skills category. And they can be personal skills like a lawyer cross examining, which is a very task-specific skill. So they’re not really non-people skills. They’re just about how transferrable a skill is versus how locally useful it is.
David: I think along a very similar line, I see there are definitely technical skills, like you mentioned the task skills there. There are things like a nurse taking a patient’s blood pressure. It’s a technical skill, it’s a task skill.
Then often when we talk about soft skills, we lump everything to do with communication and relationships. I still think there are some very technical capabilities within things like communication.
There’s a lot of science behind how we communicate, how we influence others, how we build relationships, and like we’ll talk about today, how we develop and communicate narratives and stories. I was a bit uncomfortable with the title, but I think by the time we get to the end of this episode, our advice for people will be pretty clear.
Drew, do you want to introduce the paper? It’s a little bit of a different type of paper. We’ve done some similar things, but not many. Do you want to talk a little bit about the paper and what it is?
Drew: This is an interesting one to do our source evaluation on, because normally we go for which journal was it published in, was it peer reviewed, things like that.
The title of this paper is Storycraft, the Importance of Narrative and Narrative Skills in Business. The authors are all academics—James Robson, Ben Holgate, and Ashmita Randhawa. That particular trio is for a particular reason.
Professor Robson runs a research center at University of Oxford, which is really about the politics and economy of the tertiary education sector. Then the other two authors are specialists in humanities skills and in STEM skills. We’ve got the power trio there looking at the topic.
But this is not a journal paper. It was published in 2021 as a standalone report, which means that they got their internal peer review by having an advisory group over the paper. But rather than presenting it to a journal, they just presented it directly to the public as a report, which is an interesting way of doing it and perhaps a little bit of a sign of the times when it comes to the point of academic publishing and its usefulness in getting the message to the right people.
It ticks all of our boxes in terms of authoritative authors, a process for safeguarding that it’s not just the author’s opinions, and particularly important for (I think) this work, this is not just humanities researchers patting themselves on the back and saying, look, we’ve produced a report that says that humanities is important.
David: I agree. Definitely as we get into the details of what they did going in speaking to business leaders and doing that, we don’t know the rigor around that. We would if we had a method section in a paper. We don’t know exactly how they did it, but they did talk about their interviewing style and their analysis method and things like that.
I think in one other episode we looked at the Safe Work Australia strategy and things like that, so this is a broad public publication by credible authors from a credible institution.
Drew: And their method is very straightforward. They basically just interviewed a range of business leaders. These are all in the UK, these are major companies that are listed on the FTSE 100, and they tell us that the schedule of the interview is around a set of key questions about communication and narrative in business.
I guess some things to note is that all of the participants are industry, so it’s not just professors talking to professors. Around 25% of the interviewees had an arts or humanities degree, so there are some people who would’ve had an arts education and lots of people who didn’t. And this is all big companies in the UK.
If we are translating to Australia, probably fairly similar for the big companies, but we should be careful when we think about whether this translates to medium and smaller businesses. Probably not.
David: I’ve actually got a humanities degree, so look at us. Fifty percent of the podcasters got a humanities degree, but I think maybe if we just talk a little bit, this paper does two things.
One, it actually talks about higher education in the higher education sector. I’ll probably ask you to share some comments about why this paper dragged the higher education context when it was specifically titled about narrative skills in business.
Then they essentially used a paper to propose a framework for how to think about developing the narrative skills necessary for business. Your thoughts about the context of why there was such a lengthy discussion about the role of higher education in the paper?
Drew: I think this is probably relevant for our safety listeners as well. We are part of this global conversation at the moment about why universities exist. What is the value that they bring to the table?
I think part of the reason for that conversation is a circle where university has got more and more expensive for the consumers. Along with government stories, that is the right thing to do.
Basically, if you go back to the 1980s in Australia or the 1990s in the UK, university was free at the point of entry. Someone could go to university without having to pay upfront fees.
In Australia, we had the, what was back then the hex system, which started from literally zero cost to being a very low interest, low cost loan. The UK had a similar system where some people had it completely subsidized, other people had these tiny loans.
Now in Australia, those fees just steadily ratcheted up through the 1990s and the 2000s. In the UK, they had so much pressure that they couldn’t steadily go up. So they had these big jumps where it went from one year people would enter university and it would be free; the next year they’d be paying a considerable amount of money, life-changing amounts of debt.
Naturally, that’s going to provoke a pretty strong public discussion about what is the value of university education. The simplest way of thinking about it, and I would argue the most wrong way to think about it, is that it’s like buying a car or a pair of shoes.
The value of the education is to the consumer, so the consumer should pay for it. That’s where you do things, like say how much more does the university graduate earn over their lifetime on average? That’s how much they should pay for the degree as an investment in that higher salary.
Which totally ignores the fact that nurses and doctors have to go through similar amounts of education for very different salary scales throughout their careers, and it costs more to educate an engineer than it does to educate a police officer, but the police officer is going to be serving a vital public function at a low salary. The engineer might profit off their degree, unless they decide to use that in engineering education to help other people in which you can’t do these. Just assume that someone is doing it as a personal investment when there is so much social value.
The second you could do is just look totally at the social value and say, well, society’s got an interest in skilled people doing necessary jobs. In safety we might just say, the world is probably safer if we have more safety professionals and those safety are better educated.
But the narrative, which seems to be dominating the conversation, which the authors of this report are both uncomfortable with but then write an entire report using as the framing, is we can think of this in terms as investment in the economy.
An individual business is not going to work out who they need to work for them five years in advance. Put that person through an education. So it’s up to the government to educate the people that we are going to need to have a successful economy.
Then just to quickly finish off this discussion, there are some people, mostly people who teach at university, who think that we should educate for education’s sake. In other words, you are a better version of yourself when you are educated, regardless of whether you bet it could do a better job or could help other people. Just your knowledge is good in its own right. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s not usually compelling to the people who are funding university education.
So yeah, the reason for that background is just that, it is important as we go through the rest of this and we are talking about what does business need to recognize, that this is really only one side of quite a complex debate about value. We are leaning into the economic side of it, but we are doing so with caution, like the authors of this report, recognizing that there is value to universities beyond just what percent they add to the economy.
David: Iguess I hadn’t, before reading this thought, too much about. I must admit, for most of my life I’ve fallen into camp one, which is that individuals invest in themselves through university. But (I think) just listening to you then, the importance for society of having people educated in different ways is absolutely critical.
People think about if they couldn’t go to a doctor or if there were no doctors, or if there were no engineers, or think of any other important job that we need performed in society. So it does become a really interesting political discussion about, is higher education a consumer product, or is higher education a social good and therefore how should it be available and funded?
I still know that there are countries in the world, understand still in some Scandinavian countries and places like that where higher education is free or available to more easily to people. I think it’s an interesting debate, Drew. I’m not right in the middle of it like you are, but I think it’s important that we think pretty hard about it.
Drew: One of the things that Griffith was specifically set up for is based on the idea that education is important for social mobility.
One of the real traps that you can get into—I would argue that Australia, the UK, and the US have all fallen into this trap recently with the political price as a consequence—is that you get into this cycle of treating education as a commodity. That commodity is only available to people who’ve already got money. It just drives this social gap between people with education and money and people who don’t.
You are investing in having a good society when you invest in closing that class gap and creating social mobility, which is one of the most powerful things that education can do. We lose that when we get into this discussion about what’s best for the economy, because then it becomes what’s best for billionaires rather than what’s best for us getting along with our neighbors.
David: Interestingly enough—we’ll move into talking about narrative shortly— I guess what we’ve actually just done and this paper does in a very applied way, is actually just described a range of different narratives around higher education, a range of different ways of providing meaning, sense, persuasion, direction, and change, which we’ll talk about soon. Are we ready to talk about narrative and should we start by with a few definitions?
Drew: Yes, David. You should start by defining for us what narrative is.
David: Well, it’s interesting, I just threw a whole bunch of words out there, but the authors of the paper used a very simple working definition that a narrative in business is the communication of a business activity or idea. That’s one thing, so primarily about communication. Then the paper, when they get into the detailed discussion about narratives, pull in a further range of definitions from some different authors and participants in the interviews.
Starting with one of the participants, one of the board directors in the study described, narrative is the ability to tell your story or your direction. There’s a reference from Herman in 2007 saying that a narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change.
We’ve also got another definition from the literature, narrative is somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened to someone or something. These are all narratives.
It’s about influence, understanding, direction, and change. As we talk through this rest of the paper, I think our listeners can start to think about how important narrative becomes to business.
Drew, do you want to add anything too to those definitions or bring any of those ideas together?
Drew: The only one I’d throw in is something that I heard back talking about fiction. That is that a story is a sequence of events with meaning. You can separate your narrative from story or story from just a sequence of events and say that everyone’s always got data. There are always a set of things that have happened. But it’s only once we start crafting a narrative that has meaning.
That meaning is more than just an act of statistical analysis. There are always lots of choices. We are making interpretations that we are making. And that’s really what businesses need to do. We will get into the specifics of this, but businesses need to create meaning and communicate meaning. The way they do that is with narratives around data rather than just with raw data.
David: Absolutely. I think I have this conversation with someone at least once a week, this idea, particularly in relation to safety performance reporting, which is this idea of narratives, making sense of numbers, graphs, and statistics. I think your point there, Drew, about giving it meaning.
This paper talks a lot about the importance of emotion in influence and decision-making, so a really important topic. I’m glad we spent a bit of time defining it because we were quite critical in our safety culture episode last week of the absence of enough time and attention to defining what it is we’re talking about. We took our own medicine in that regard. Should we dive into the narrative skills framework?
Drew: Let’s talk about the purposes that business leaders say they need narrative for. Most of these come to three main purposes, although there’s a lot of detail within each one. Remember, in this report they’re not talking specifically about safety, but I think we can very readily just translate what they say and say, okay, this applies to safety most of the time.
The first purpose is, narrative is used for communicating business purposes and values. We can split that between employees and non-employees. If we start with employees, people don’t just come to work in order to work. I say that as a universal. There are people sure who the money they get from their work is the most important thing. But businesses can’t succeed if everyone just comes to work for a paycheck for doing the bare minimum.
There’s a reason why people have work to rule as a type of industrial action, because if people only follow the rules, every company would grind to a halt. That means that the business actually has to provide their employees something to believe in. They’ve got to have a story about what the business is doing, and we’re the bad guys is not a great story. Might appeal to some people. Not likely to motivate your average employee to put in a little bit of extra effort.
Whereas if a business can convey some narrative or strategic vision about who they are and what they’re doing, they’re going to get much more useful work out of their employees. David, your thoughts?
David: The paper talks a lot particularly about you mentioned employees there, and I think there’s a broader purpose in communication that the paper talks about to stakeholders outside of an organization as well. So talking a lot about communities and governments, and we’ll talk about customers, shareholders, finances, and a range of different stakeholders.
The paper was saying that these skills are becoming more and more important because the narratives in the audiences are becoming more and more complex, divergent, and difficult to be clear about or as clear as we need to be about them. The paper also talks about good narratives having meaning and clarity, and I think that’s really important.
Drew: A fun little exercise you can do is have a look at the website of a business from 20 or 25 years ago to today, and just look at the categories of things that appear on the front pages of most businesses. You’ll realize that something like safety, if people define safety as everyone goes home safely, everyone goes home not being injured. So why does it appear on the front of a website? The business has a safety policy and has a safety system.
It’s because it’s now part of the story that a business tells to the world, not just the story that they tell to their customers. People are increasingly demanding that businesses have social responsibility, care about the environment, and care about the communities they operate in. That’s expected as part of the social license of the business to exist in a way that it wasn’t in the past. That’s part of the story a business needs to tell, and it’s part of the job of a safety person is to tell that part of the story for the business.
David: Drew, if the one of the first purposes is communicating business purpose and values, the second purpose of narratives in business in this paper is about persuading and (I guess) influencing.
In here you talk about a lot of business communication is about persuading an audience to do something. I need my people to buy into an idea, I need my customers to buy my product, I need people to invest in my company. This idea of the purpose of narrative to (I guess) influence and persuade people.
Drew: I think we forget just how much of what seems to be doing other work in a business is about persuasion. When you produce a project plan or a safety plan and you ask the project manager for their signature, that is an act of persuasion. You are trying to write something that will convince them to sign their name to it or to adopt the plan and to follow the plan.
When I write a course profile for one of my courses, essentially what I’m trying to do is persuade a student to take the course, and to per se persuade the education regulator to sign off on the quality assurance for that course. Anytime you want someone else to take an action, you are telling a story to persuade.
We’d be nuts if we thought that that’s just simply about giving them data as if that data was devoid of any story. You’re creating a table of data. Just the act of creating a table is an act of storytelling, presenting the data in a particular way to get a particular result.
David: I don’t think you have to spend too long convincing any of our listeners who are safety professionals or practitioners the importance of influence and persuasion in getting things done in the organization for health and safety.
You can even imagine that safety plan, how the safety person has sat down with a leader and tells the story of this is what I did, this is where the information came from, this is who I spoke with, this is why it’s a good idea, and this is how it helps you. Now I need you to sign it for me. So absolutely.
Drew: If we don’t have to persuade further, let’s get onto the third one, which I think really drives home why narrative is part of this. This is the idea of driving and managing change.
This is where stories have a power different from other sorts of communication, which is that a story can describe a reality which doesn’t exist. Fiction is real, it’s a thing.
If you are trying to get someone to change, part of that is describing a possible future to them. Now in safety, we do it in both directions. We can tell a possible future which is scary and dystopian. We are trying to persuade someone away from a course of action. Or we can make a future that sounds attractive as a way of implementing a new system or implementing a new program.
Any change management is basically the hardest task of managers (I think) because you’ve got to get people off the current path, you’ve got to get them onto the new path, and you’ve got to manage that through the transition. Having a clear sense of imagination about how attractive it is to be on that new path is what motivates and steers people as you’re going through that change.
David: And I think you mentioned before, Drew, the idea of importance of change in business and in safety roles. The way I always like to talk about that is that everything we do is about driving and managing change. Every incident, investigation, and action that comes from that, every improvement plan, every new procedure, so much of everything that we do in an organization in safety is about driving and managing change.
The story and the narrative behind that is so important because if we need people to emotionally connect with an idea, to take it on board and move towards it, then the narrative becomes as important as the action that we want taken. Or more important perhaps.
Drew: If we are not constantly driving change, what are we doing? You say that as a joke, but the only opposite to driving change is really trying to prevent change by keeping things on the steady and narrow, which also requires a story about why change is undesirable and…
David: Stability is desirable, and reliability. We’ve got these three purposes from the paper. In talking with these researchers, in talking with these CEOs and directors of these big companies, I need narrative skills in business because I need to communicate business purpose and values. I need to persuade through story. I need to drive and manage change.
Do we want to describe a little bit more now about what narrative skills are, and then perhaps we can talk a little bit about the framework within that that the researchers proposed?
Drew: They suggest that there are five core skill sets. The first one is the most obvious (I think) which is narrative communication. What they mean by that is basically mastery of what you might think of as technical communication skills.
So being able to produce the written word in a sophisticated and interesting way, being able to have one-on-one conversations, being able to work with small groups, being able to present to an audience. Those are the main formats in which people need to communicate.
But at the heart of that is just really strong writing, something that can only be developed with both training and reflective practice. You’re constantly learning how to write, learning how to write better, having your writing critiqued, producing new and better writing in different formats.
The second one is empathy- and perspective-taking. The big part there is something that’s core to communication theory that gets forgotten a lot, which is that communication is not just about the message you create. It’s also about how that message gets received by the listener. There’s no such thing as a perfect message that the listener doesn’t understand.
When you are dealing with a diverse audience, that becomes a really complicated task. How often have businesses produced internal memos that have been leaked on social media and gone to a totally unintended audience with a totally unintended effect?
So that means you’re really understanding how communication works, being able to anticipate how communication can break down and preemptively protecting against those breakdowns, understanding the context you are operating in, reading the room when you send a message. Anything else you want to throw in?
David: Yeah, on this idea of the first one being about narrative communication and the mastery of the written word. and then empathy and perspective, the view of the listener.
One of our listeners sent me an article, and I hadn’t shared this with you yet, but it was in the Neuroscience Journal and they were doing brain scans as people were, I think it was reading sales pitches. They provided them with sales pitches written by people and sales pitches written by AI.
They were looking at the actual emotional connection through brainwaves, and the highlights—I haven’t read the paper yet, but it might be something that we do an episode on now after this one—the AI significantly lower emotional brainwave activity than the human-written narrative.
If we think about narratives for persuasion and selling, and the use of AI for a lot of those modern-day narratives, we actually may be missing something here. Because there’s a danger that we talk about, well, we don’t need narrative skills anymore because the AI can just write all the narratives for us.
I didn’t know where to throw that into the podcast, but just as we started talking about narrative communication and all of these pieces, I just don’t want listeners to fall into the trap of the AI just writes all this stuff for us now, so it’s fine.
Drew: I think that’s something that we really forget when we think about university education, is most people learn how to write adequately by the end of high school. Not everyone, but most people can reliably craft sentences and paragraphs without grammatical mistakes.
But that’s not the standard we are reaching for here. That’s what AI does. AI can give you a perfectly adequate paragraph that does not have mistakes, but it is not good writing. Anyone who appreciates good writing can tell the difference and explain the difference. Someone who doesn’t appreciate good writing still feels the lack of emotional impact of the bad writing.
They can’t maybe tell you what’s wrong because it all seems grammatically correct. They just have this sense that it doesn’t land, it doesn’t connect, it doesn’t mean as much. And it’s that ability to convey meaning, which is the art and craft of good writing.
David: That’s an interesting thing for me in terms of connecting it with this idea and AI, because there was always this overarching narrative which is do the things in your job, uniquely human things, and then you don’t have to worry about AI coming and taking your job.
It feels like we’re using AI to write, and maybe that is a uniquely human thing. AI might be good for booking a doctor’s appointment next week by finding a doctor and looking at my calendar. But the best use of AI might not be to write narratives.
Drew: I suspect that we were using humans for some tasks that we didn’t actually need humans for. There’s a lot of very mechanical writing that we make people do in their jobs that would be better eliminated altogether, and failing eliminating it, we can get an AI to do it because it’s just meaningless writing. But the writing that is meant to have meaning, that’s the stuff that humans still take years of training to get good at.
David: So we’ve got these first two narrative skills. We’ve got narrative communication, we’ve got empathy and perspective taking. The third skill they talk about is critical analysis. Do you want to describe that a little bit, Drew?
Drew: I get so sick of people saying, oh, go to university to learn critical thinking. The first critical thinking skill you should ever learn is to be critical about concepts like critical thinking and how useful they are.
What they mean here is something quite specific, which is the ability to select relevant data and to synthesize that relevant data in a world of data overload. There are a lot of work tasks that are like that, where your boss says can you just write me a one page memo explaining this?
You might go onto the Internet and have 300,000 search responses. To be good at that, you need to do more than just let Google decide for you what are the most relevant things to go and read. You’ve got to use more than chat GPT to merge those things together into a useful story.
Working out what’s important and being able to select that important stuff from amidst all the chaff is the skill they’re talking about.
David: I think mentioned a little bit earlier the idea of purpose, meaning, clarity, and these things. You’re right. This is the skill they’re talking about here, which is the ability to actually write a clear, compelling narrative, easy to understand, potentially about some very complex issues.
I actually found a podcast called StoryCraft. It doesn’t look like they’re published an episode. They’re even worse than us, Drew. It hasn’t published an episode since 2022 or 2023. But they’ve got a whole lot of interviews talking about the narratives around climate change, politics, indigenous persons and things like that. These are really complex social issues that need actually very clear compelling narratives around them if we want to persuade and influence change.
Drew: And if we swing into a safety space, should you be worried about the fact that your hand injuries have gone up 20% from last year? Or that your audit scores have gone down from 95% to 25%? And you could have hundreds of pieces of data like that that you could pick and choose from to tell a story about how safety’s going in your organization, which ones matter, and how do you convince someone else that those are the ones that matter? That’s what they mean by critical analysis.
David: So critical analysis. The fourth is creativity and imagination. Feels like another very human skill.
Drew: Absolutely. I think it’s probably obvious enough what those are. The bit that I think is worth mentioning is that people tend to think of those as innate skills. They talk of someone as being very imaginative or someone as being very creative.
But there’s reasonably good evidence that these are things that are developed in the same way that perspective-taking can be developed, or that critical analysis can be developed, or that writing skills can be developed. Exposure to different ideas makes you more creative. Exposure to different ways of presenting the same ideas makes you more creative.
Having an arsenal of different things in your mind and different ways of processing things actually makes you more creative. It’s not just that someone walks out of the womb as a creative person or a technical person. These are things that can be taught and developed.
David: And the fifth one here (I think) also maybe doesn’t need much of a description, this idea of digital skills, so necessary for electronic communication and navigating the world in 2025 and beyond. Drew, is there anything you want to say about digital skills?
Drew: Just that the main reason why the report brings them up is because of the pace of change which is associated with social media. This is why all of these things are becoming increasingly both hard for organizations and important for organizations.
If an organization can’t decide what their story is and then repeat that same story over 20 years, they have to very quickly respond to major changes in who is listening to their communications and how those communications are being used and interpreted.
David: We’ve got this idea in this paper that narrative skills are really important for business. The business leaders are saying it. They’re saying it’s really, really important for communicating purpose and values, for persuading through story, for driving and managing change.
Then we’ve got these five broad skills within a framework proposed by the authors. We need narrative communication skills, empathy- and perspective-taking, critical analysis, creativity and imagination, and digital skills. What are these skills more specifically and what’s a framework look like for developing them?
We mentioned in the title this idea of should safety education focus on hard or soft skills? Who then needs these narrative skills? Where do we need these skills or who needs to have these skills in our organization?
Drew: That’s where I thought the report was, perhaps most interesting and most defying expectations, because you might expect this report to come out and say, okay, and therefore humanities degrees are still very important in the modern world.
David: Or managers need to have these skills if they want to lead effective teams or something. Send them to our master’s program at Oxford.
Drew: Yeah. Basically what business was saying back to the universities is that they don’t like the way the universities split things up into STEM and humanities, and they don’t like the way high schools split things up into STEM and humanities.
The skills need to be integrated in the same person for the same things. But they don’t really want just engineering graduates with a little bit of a couple of compulsory humanities subjects along the way. They don’t want people with arts degrees sitting next to people with engineering degrees.
They would really rather something, which is in my understanding, much closer to the way America does their university education, with a lot more common education in core skills that are needed rather than forcing people really early in their lives to make a choice which path they’re going to go down.
Basically they would ideally like everyone in their organization to have some mix of hard skills or task-specific skills as well as this arsenal of narrative skills.
David: I think that makes practical sense. Everyone needs to communicate in their organization. No one’s really working in an isolated bubble from other people, other teams, and other functions, and organizations are so complex. Every person needs to be able to engage with others around their work and their roles.
Whether you’re an engineer, an IT person, a chemist, or whatever you are, chemist in the Australian sense, a pharmacist in the American sense, I think it’s really important and (I guess) it would be interesting to think about what does higher education look like if there are some significant humanities aspects to every degree.
Drew: The analogy that I was thinking of was we pretty much expect everyone in business now to have a very high degree of computer literacy, often to agree beyond what they’re taught in high school. We just expect that anyone coming out of university at least has basically you can sit them down in front of a computer and they can learn any software that you ask them to.
You compare that to 30 years ago when people were printing out their emails for their bosses and then scanning them back in to attach, because people would just refuse to use those skills.
But we still treat a lot of communication skills as if they’re specialist skills, as if we don’t expect your average person to have been taught how to tell stories well, or to write at a really high level, or to analyze data to a high level. It would be really interesting to think of what are really those core transferable skills that are teachable, and where is the right place in our education to teach them.
Because I recruit for a Bachelor of Arts, I will just throw into the mix to say that, based on the current structure of the way things are, these are all skills that you learn in the humanities and that you don’t learn in STEM. That is the conclusion that the report reaches, is ideally we want people to have both in practice. These are why the humanities are still so valuable because that’s where these skills get taught.
David: Yup. Bachelor of Arts was my second preference, but unfortunately I got my first preference at uni, which was [...] science, which is still pretty much the same thing.
Drew: I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned, but I’m a Bachelor of Arts dropout.
David: Dropout, wow. Bachelor of Arts. How’d you end up in the Bachelor of Arts?
Drew: When I went to university, we all thought that all the future jobs were going to be in Japan or dealing with Japanese companies. I had a Bachelor of Arts in Japanese alongside my Bachelor of Engineering and Computer Science. I failed miserably at the Japanese side of things, so ended up as an engineer, and now I’m back teaching Bachelor of Arts.
David: Drew, there are a few recommendations in the paper about universities embedding some of these skills in other programs and career services.
Drew: I don’t reckon any of those recommendations are really useful for our listeners. They’re mostly…
David: No, you can understand why they’re in the report, but let’s do our own practical takeaways to finish off.
Drew: The first takeaway I’d say is that when you think about what’s the value of tertiary education for safety practitioners, think beyond the technical skills. This isn’t about learning just the safety theories. This isn’t just about learning how to operate a safety management system.
University is a place where people develop skills in communication and sense-making. Those are really important skills for safety. But we do need to be careful at the moment about which tertiary education we are talking about.
Someone could have a Master’s or a PhD and still not have learned a lot of those skills. Maybe we should be picking our safety people not from, they’ve done a bachelor of science to learn about the toxicology of things, but they’ve done a bachelor of arts majoring in history and have really high-level writing communication, and sense-making skills.
I know I’d certainly rather have a trained historian during my accident investigation rather than someone who hasn’t learned how to properly think about counterfactuals and…
David: Going with a degree in French literature or something.
Drew: I’m still going to question the usefulness of French literature, except for those core transferable skills of storytelling.
David: I agree with you. I think that that university provides a whole range of transferable skills that are really important for safety professionals. Doesn’t have to be a safety degree.
Drew: The second one—I think this again speaks to how we currently think about safety education—is that narrative skills aren’t things you can learn in a short training course. As part of my preparation for this, I actually looked up things like leadership as well.
There’s really good evidence that you just can’t teach skills in a short training course and expect it to translate to the workplace. That works for task-specific skills. So how to conduct a very specific type of interview, or how to drive a forklift, or how to write a safety policy, maybe.
But leadership, communication, empathy, perspective-taking, digital skills, you can’t learn those in a training course. It’s got to be over a prolonged period of time across a lot of different experiences.
David: And then third and final takeaway, Drew,
Drew: The third one I thought was we’d make it a little bit more specific, which is about change management.
David, you said before that you thought everything we do in safety is about change. Then the bit I’d add to that is managing change is not about the mechanical processes of implementing change. That might be a trainable thing that you can learn in a short period of time, but managing change is a very broad leadership skillset that needs a lot of these narrative skills developed to a high level.
David: I totally agree. When I think about you mentioned the process of managing change, I see that as more project management skills—times, milestones, stakeholders, resources and so on, but the actual change itself—the leadership of the change itself is describing, communicating, reinforcing, aligning around that narrative, and the steps towards that narrative.
Drew, the question we asked this week, which I didn’t really like at the start, should safety education focus on hard skills or soft skills?
Drew: If you didn’t like the question, I think you will like the answer, which is no. We should stop dividing the world into hard skills and soft skills, or into STEM and into humanities. Just teach everyone both.
David: Perfect. That’s it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.