Who are we? We are Drew Rae and David Provan, two employees of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. Listen to future episodes to learn more about us and what we do. Catch the first episode a week from the date of this intro episode.
Welcome to an introduction to our new podcast, Safety of Work. In this podcast we will discuss how safety works. We aim to provide listeners with examples of safety processes that exist in the real world and how they can use those processes in their own lives.
Topics:
Quotes:
“We don’t want to be disconnected from the safety of work; we want to be closely linked in…”
“We want to help our listeners demystify, devolve, and declutter safety.”
“...There’s a lot of things that safety people do, which have legitimate purposes, that are not directly geared at safety of work.”
Resources:
Drew: You're listening to the Safety of Work podcast Episode Zero. Today, we are asking the question, who are we? Let's get started.
David: Hey, everybody. My name is David Provan and I'm here with Drew Rae. We are from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia.
Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. This is an introductory episode before the main podcast gets started. The first real episode will drop next week, then we'll have an episode every monday after that. Drew, what are we here to do?
Drew: There's a lot of philosophical arguments about what safety is and how we achieve safety. Ultimately, no matter how we define it, safety is something that comes from operational work. People are kept safe or get hurt because of how work is done where it's done, who it's done by, what's it done with, and what's it done to.
That's something that is easy to lose sight of when we are doing safety work. Most safety practice the stuff that safety people do is at least one step removed from the operational work itself. Managers and safety practitioners don't do the operational work. They try to influence it using a wide variety of safety tools and practices.
That's really what we are here to talk about, is talk about the tools, talk about different practices, and talk about the evidence of what works and what doesn't work. Where things sometimes get mixed up is people start thinking of the tools and practices themselves and safety. They get confused between the goal—keeping people safe—and the means to that end, which is also called safety.
When David and I started working together, we realized that it was important to the both of us to separate out those different types of safety, to talk clearly and separately about what we are trying to achieve and the things we are trying to do to achieve it, so that we can have open and frank conversations about what works and what doesn't work.
While some safety academics can be really quite abstract when they are talking about safety. That's what we are trying to get away from. We don't want to be disconnected from the safety of work. We want to be closely linked in to what keeps people safe at work. We think that there's a lot of good research out there that we can bring to you, our listeners, to draw that link between research that is about safety and what practical and safety practitioner it is trying to do to make work better.
In each episode, we are going to take some aspect of safety practice and we are going to look at the evidence that surrounds it. Wherever possible, we'll be trying to draw the great link between the work of safety and safety at work. Our goal is to make safety research more accessible to managers, safety practitioners, and frontline workers. Ultimately, we would like to see better more evidence-based safety practice.
David: Through this podcast, what we want to do is help out listeners to demystify, to devolve, and to declutter safety. What we mean by that is demystify because we believe that safety practice should be based on sound research, but to do that, that means getting safety research understood by the practitioners in a format that isn't confusing or needlessly complicated.
What is to demystify the safety science research that is out there? We want to devolve that research because we believe that each aspect of safety should be managed by the people best equipped to understand what is going on and to take action. We won't tell you what we think you should be doing, but we want to put tools on your hand. In this case, the findings of this academic research and then equip you with our insights and practical ideas about how you might make sense of them in your own context and in your own organization.
Then ultimately to declutter because we believe that a good understanding of what works and what doesn't work is going to lead to a simpler, less bureaucratic, cheaper, and more effective safety. You'll be doing those things that you have a strong understanding of and evidence around that work and you might be able to change or stop doing the things where there's no good evidence that is going to improve the safety of work.
Drew: Because this is the first episode, we are probably sounding a little bit overprepared and overpreachy. That's not we are going into this podcast. In the regular format, our aim is to have a simple back and forth conversation in each episode about a clear question and a piece of research that talks about the research and to help that be a conversation between David, myself, and you our listeners. We want to tell you a little bit where we are coming from personally, why we are doing this, and what we are hoping to achieve.
Over to you, David. Who are you?
David: Drew, I'm a career safety professional. It's actually the only full-time job I've ever done. I came to Griffith University for the first time in the mid-90s and studied Behavioral Science with majors in Psychology and Workplace Health and Safety. At the time of my undergraduate degree, Safety Management was heavily engaged with legal compliance.
There was a huge amount of new legislation around safety and that meant a huge amount of new jobs for safety professionals in industry. I left university and took a job in the [...] industry. In that role, I was almost exclusively focused on safety management systems and the emerging safety cases in high-risk industries.
I was convicted at that time that having the right set of safety standards and process was the key to creating safe work outcomes. It wasn't long before I realized through this work that this limitation of safety management systems and I started really exploring ideas around risk management as a key ingredient for safety.
I went and studied Masters of Health Science in Risk Management in the early 2000s. Then I joined a large engineering construction organization as the head of safety. It was here where I started to really contemplate the limitations of our safety processes and our safety risk management theories, and more broadly, a lot of the things we are doing safety about the actual ability of those things to influence and shape the way that work happens in the organization. When I started MBA in Finance Economics, I was in a very heavily commercially-driven organization and I really wanted to understand how the organization function more broadly and how it makes decisions.
Not long after that, I always had this idea that I wanted to work in an organization that was facing major accident event risks everyday and that safety will be central to the management philosophy and their organizational practices. Industries like oil and gasoline, aviation or nuclear power, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to join the oil and gas company as the head of safety in 2010, only two months after the Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.
It was many years after that, almost 2014–2015 when I might have been having a very bad day, but I almost sat back and went, “What is it all for?” More specifically, what does any of the work that safety professionals do? Or any of this work that I've been doing throughout my whole career? Yet to what extent is any of it add value to the safety of the people who are doing the work in the organization that I'm working in?
This led me back to Griffith to complete my PhD on the role of safety professionals. Maybe we'll talk about some of that research in a future podcast, but I suppose it was during that research that an early idea for this podcast or I didn't think of it as a podcast at that time was born because I've done 70 interviews with safety professionals. I have more than six months to understand what was driving their work and their decisions and ultimately their safety programs within their organizations. Not once in those 70 interviews did I have a discussion of get the answer that we are doing this because there is strong evidence in the research that doing this in our situation or context will have an impact on improving the safety of work.
That was something that is really resonating with me for the last number of years. So now, I'm really excited that we turned that idea into a podcast. As part of that, I believe there is no silver bullet to safety management. We are not through this podcast trying to search for the answer to the safety puzzle that we all face, but what we are trying to do is communicate our belief that safety is an incredible complex undertaking, it's a trans-disciplinary science, and that organizations need to know what research is out there and how they can use that to inform their safety practices.
That's my career in a few minutes, Drew. Tell us about your background.
Drew: I got quite a different background in safety than you, David, but with some eerily similar points which we've been involved in the same experience as we had the same ideas. I'm not a social scientist, or psychologist, or an organizational specialist. I'm a computer systems engineer by original training and I always envisaged myself spending my life designing robots, working systems, and that sort of thing.
In my early career by pretty much accident, I got focused on providing safety insurance for large engineered systems. Submarines, ships, helicopters, and eventually trains, and safety cases and safety management systems [...].
Because I did not have a background in safety, early on I was pretty occupied with learning the methods of safety. I was trying to be an expert in all sorts of safety techniques. I wanted to know what was the right way to do hazard identification, how do you do failure analysis, fault free, safety cases, human factor analysis, anything that there was a method for I wanted to learn the method and be good at that method.
I could see that there are a lot of problems with how the methods were used. I was trying hard to get the methods right, so black and white engineer. I could see everyone else were getting the methods wrong. I thought that if only we make the methods better and make the training better, we could make sure that things were applied properly.
One idea that I had and I was really quite committed to for a while was why don't we do these things automatically? Why don't we just train computers to do safety analysis and then all we have to do is create engineered models of our systems, run them through the automatic programs, and eliminate the human error in the safety analysis side of things.
But the longer I spent trying to perfect the safety techniques, the more I became worried about what really was a good safety practice. Sure, I could do a fault tree myself. Sure, I could teach a computer how to build a fault tree. But how do I know whether the thing that the computer has built is any better than the one I’ve built, is better than someone else has built?
I started to ask the dangerous question of whether there are any safety practices that could be proven to make systems safer. I say that's a dangerous question because as I found, it's really like challenging someone's religious faith to ask them, "Does safety work?"
There are some safety practitioners that just absolutely refuse to talk about it. You just raise the question and they will immediately dismiss the possibility that anything they do for safety doesn't work because it's unthinkable that they might have devoted their careers to building fortresses of safety documentation on top of sand dunes of evidence.
There are some people that will entertain the question briefly, but there have been these very well-practiced and really quite spurious arguments as to why they know the safety works. You know that the arguments are dumb because they would never use those same arguments in one of their own safety cases. These are experts in arguments. They know what is good and not good evidence when it comes to safety, but they are not willing to apply that same will of skepticism and scrutiny to the safety practices themselves. They say things like, "Of course safety practices have to work because of course things are safer than they used to be."
Over the course of my career, I really only dealt with a handful of people who've been willing to seriously talk about whether the safety practices work and to talk about that with the same passion and energy and care for people that they apply to safety practices themselves.
That’s maybe not as quite as bad as you might think because the more you dig into this question, the more you realize the question doesn't have an answer. We are not talking about the fact that safety practices don't work. We don't have evidence that they don't work. It's just that there's a near complete absence of evidence that they do. That's got problems when it comes to selecting which practices we should do, which practices we shouldn’t do.
When I got to that point, I just about gave up researching how to make safety better. I started investigating why we do safety the way we do it. How did we end up with what's basically a faith-based profession filled with people who are mostly if you ask them about their identity consider themselves to be professional skeptics and truth finders.
What should we do about that? There's one thing that is an article of faith for me. In all aspects of life, I think that evidence matters. Where there is evidence for what works and doesn't work, we should be getting that evidence into the right hands and people should be using it. Whether isn't good evidence, we should be pointing that out, acknowledging it, and doing something about it.
David: Drew, I remember when we first explored this idea which we labeled Safety Work versus The Safety of Work because I know I just came back from my PhD data gathering sessions and I sat through a four hour meeting with my managers and safety professionals. I came back to you as my supervisor and reflected that not once do I think in that four hour meeting, we actually discussed the specific safety issue or risk that was facing our frontline workforce. I was listening to and we were discussing all these generic issues about culture, administration, organizational politics, and things that need to be done far removed from where the work and the risk actually existed in our organization. I remember coming back here baffled and trying to help you make sense of what all these safety activity was in the organization I couldn't see linked to actually keeping people safe.
Drew: That's where I drew the link to some specific stuff I've been looking at in the role of risk assessment in major accidents. With some colleagues at the University of York, particularly Rob Alexander and Mark Nicholson. Within looking at this idea that activities such as risk assessment seem to be there to tell what is a risk and what is not a risk. It's there right in the name.
Risk assessment is about assessing risk, supposedly. What we found in that work was that risk assessment is far more about meeting these organizational concerns. It's about reassuring people that things are safe. It's about making sure that the risk paperwork is done and properly administered and about demonstrating to people outside the organization that things are properly managed.
It's very seldom about changing people's minds about risk. Even less often does risk assessment lead to changes in design or to changes in the way people go about work. After we had this conversation, we realized that this is a problem that's not much broader than risk assessment. It's really something about all safety.
David: I think when organization say safety, they don't necessarily have a nuanced conversation about are they talking about their safety practices? Are they talking about the safety of work activities? Are they talking about safety as a goal, or a target, or the number of injuries they have?
Because safety is so important to organizations and the broader community. Any nuanced discussion, or questioning, or critique about any aspect of safety is met, as you said earlier with this deep-seated judgment that a person doesn't care enough about safety and what we wanted to do with that [...] is say it's not about not caring. In fact, it's probably a much stronger demonstration of care if you do actually try to have a detailed conversation about what's working and not working in relation to safety in your organization.
Drew: It's where the paper came from and the paper in turn created the name for this podcast. We wanted to start off by acknowledging that there's a lot of things that safety people do which have legitimate purposes that are not directly geared at safety of work. Once we acknowledge those things, we can in a certainty put them aside.
We can acknowledge that people have to do things to comply with legislation. People have to keep clients happy. People have to have management systems in their organizations. People have to promote a culture where everyone feels that they are safe and they are good guys.
Let's just accept that some safety stuff is for those purposes. When we put those things aside, there is still a central concern about safety which should be about making work better. That is direct work, so people doing dangerous operational tasks, and things like designing work where we are creating systems or transport the people are going to need to travel on or when there’s a public danger. Ultimately, the question should always be, how is my safety work? The things that I do as a practitioner linked to that operational design and operational activities.
David, tell us a little bit how the podcast itself is going to work?
David: The Safety of Work podcast is about providing practitioners and any listener who's interested and hopefully manages and frontline workforce or other scientific disciplines in what evidence is out there for those things that we do in organizations in the name of safety that has a contribution or not a contribution to the safety of work.
Each of our episodes from next week will follow a similar format. We'll introduce a question and that will be a question that's based on a particular research paper. We'll go to the effort of explaining why it's an important question and how we might see that question being relevant to organizations then we'll talk about the research that might help us understand that.
We'll talk about how the research was done, we'll talk about what the study found, and we'll devolve the research process and the research findings to our listeners. Then, we'll provide our own thoughts and discuss what that might mean for real world organizations. We both got quite a lot of experience in trying to make this work in organizations throughout our career, so we are hoping that we can combine our understanding of the academic literature with the nuanced challenges of what working real life organizations to provide you, the listener, with some ideas about what you can do to ultimately enhance the safety of work within your organization.
Drew: So we are expecting people will come to this podcast or find the podcast through a number of different ways. I'm sure there are at least some of you out there who are listeners from my original podcast, DisasterCast. Maybe some of you are those people who've been anxiously awaiting the next episode and asking me about it every month for the past two years.
Just to clarify, is DisasterCast finally dead? Probably. I'm going to keep the back catalogue in the web page accessible and sometimes on this podcast, we'll be using accidents as framing devices to introduce the question of the week.
If you love the disaster stories, they haven't disappeared but they won't be showing up on DisasterCast. What we will do is commit, and we've had a careful discussion about this to a very regularly schedule of this podcast coming out. That means we may occasionally, to make sure that we have episode each week, drop in a disaster episode by Drew or an interview episode by David. Just to make sure that we have the continuity of one episode every week. In most cases, we'll stick to the question, evidence, implications formula. Looking at one particular piece of research each week.
David: So that's us. That's who we are and that's what we are hoping to achieve. We thank you for joining us on this ride and that's it for the introductory episode. We are now sitting in Drew's office and recording our initial batch of episodes. The first full episode will be out in our feed exactly one week after you see this introduction.
We do hope that you find the episodes thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety at work in your own organization. You can send any comments, or questions, or ideas for future episodes directly to us at feedback@safetyofwork.com.
Drew: See you next episode.
David: Thanks.