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SafeTalk with SafeStart
SafeTalk with SafeStart
S13Ep8: Rethinking Safety Strategies: Human Factors, Leadership, and SIF Prevention
What if traditional safety strategies are failing to prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs)? Join us as we chat with experts about situational precursors in risk management. Learn how leaders can manage human elements—especially during unplanned or emergency situations—and discover the importance of preparedness in high-pressure situations.
Host: Danny Smith
Guests: Peter Batrowny and Teg Matthews
Danny Smith Host
00:07
Welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm Danny Smith and on today's agenda, serious injuries and fatalities, commonly referred to as SIFs. Now there's a ton that we can seem to get you know, kind of overwhelming information that's out there and all sorts of theories about this subject. So. I decided to call up a couple of friends here and just well see if we can kind of sort this all out a little bit. It doesn't really hurt. They also happen to be some of the smartest guys I know. First longtime listeners will recognize Pete Batrowny. Pete has appeared on SafeTalk with SafeStart several times and he's also a frequent guest on Larry Wilson's expert panels. And also, with us today is Mr. Teg Matthews, and Teg is one of our VPs of sales and he is also a contributor to Larry's expert panel. So, gentlemen, for both of you, welcome to the podcast today.
Pete Batrowny Guest
01:02
Thanks, Danny. Thanks for having me back.
Teg Matthews Guest
01:03
Yeah, pleasure to be here absolute pleasure and, as both of you, welcome to the podcast today. Thanks, Danny. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, pleasure to be here, absolutely pleasure.
Danny Smith Host
01:07
And, as both of you know, I really want to just kind of pick your brains today, just kind of I want to say kick the can. We've got some order to the direction that we want to go with this conversation, for sure, but just really want you to just expand on your background and knowledge in the area of SIFS. Expand on your background and knowledge in the area of SIFs, particularly in the areas of how the human factors framework can be used to prevent serious injuries and fatalities, and just also some interesting concepts in SIF prevention and practical implications of the framework in SIF prevention. So, Teg, if you don't mind, we'll start with you. So how did you really become interested or involved in this concept of SIFT prevention?
Teg Matthews Guest
01:52
Right. So, it was a bit of a slow burn for me, really. Well, it started off that way.
02:02
I have a safety background. I've been working in safety for about 22 years now in some form or other, either executive responsibility or the last 14 years advising principally in that cultural kind of space. And then the organization I was working for at the time, about 12 years ago, started looking into serious injury and fatality and strategies organizations were using to tackle it. And at the time, you know, everyone was still using very much the Heinrich kind of triangle as their strategy. Well, no one uses and that goes back to the late 1920s, early 30s this idea of you know what happens at the bottom, you know if we can deal with that, then it gets rid of the fatalities and stuff at the top. So, but the truth of matter was that the stats that are out there just don't reflect that. Look at us bureau statistics, you look at the HSE in the UK, all these sort of things. It shows that we've not been very good at reducing sort of fatalities. So, a strategy, if you like, which was to try and squish the pyramid or squish the triangle, simply wasn't working. So, um, the, the organization did some work and then it did some pretty good work in that and it came up with this concept of precursors, which I know you want to talk about a little bit later on, but uh, but there was. There was a bunch of other stuff that kind of came out on the side, tied in with the way that culture was supporting things or not supporting organizations in this kind of space.
03:27
And it was part of my role at the time was to talk about these findings and, if I'm honest, I got a little frustrated because a lot of the organizations kind of heard some of these findings and some of these ideas and there was a little bit of so what about it?
03:44
Right, and you'd have thought, and I don't want to preach but it but you'd have thought if anything would get anyone's attention, right, serious injury and fatality should be the thing that got everyone's attention. And it almost morphed then into this kind of academic kind of conversation around you know, day-to-day to capture what organizations could do, as opposed to a much more practical kind of conversation around you know, day-to-day to capture what organizations could do as opposed to a much more practical kind of way of dealing and addressing it. So that slow burn has turned into a fire with me over the last, particularly the last four or five years, actually about. You know what organizations can do differently, how they can address things differently and how they can focus in these different areas, just to be better in this, to me one of the most important areas of safety,
Danny Smith Host
04:30
Sure Pete, I know your background with SIFs.
Uh, it's been on your radar for quite a while now as well. Right, and, if you would kind of like we did with Teg there, if you don't mind, just take the listener back to when the concept of sifts really just caught your attention initially.
Pete Batrowny Guest
04:49
Sure, Danny, and really going to answer this in kind of two parts.
04:51
And you know I've worked in some, you know, for organizations and in industries where you know decision making bad decision making if you will have some pretty high consequences and that was in the military and healthcare and then in the energy industry.
05:07
And you know I've always had a passion for, you know, of course, preventing serious injuries. But you know, when I worked for a company that was expanding relatively rapidly we were operating high-risk businesses, we were doing heavy construction and also acquiring businesses that had various backgrounds and cultures is when I really, you know, got passion for taking a systematic look at serious injury and fatality reduction. And you know, I think that you know, especially with the new businesses that were coming on board and some of the construction projects where you don't really have a lot of time to assimilate cultures together, it was very important to have that systematic approach to serious injury reduction and also, as we all know, it carried over into a lot of the you know performance and quality aspects of the of the projects or businesses as well. So, kind of a long-winded answer to your question, but that's how I developed the passion for that systematic approach to SIFs prevention.
Danny Smith Host
06:20
Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned the different cultures that that people bring with them. You know, I always find it interesting if you have an acquisition or you have a short-term project like you're talking about, you do see that everybody kind of merge into your culture now and you certainly have to account for that because that's going to be a contributing factor into how things are for you moving forward.
Pete Batrowny Guest
Right, exactly being open-minded enough to take the good things that come with those new cultures as well and make those part of right. It's not just a transformation is really a melding of cultures. That makes the combination a lot more valuable, a lot more interesting.
Danny Smith Host
7:11
Absolutely, you can get some great synergy from that, and sometimes we do tend to look at it just in the negative aspect, but you're right, there are a lot of positives there as well. So, Teg, thanks for coming back to you for a moment. You were talking before about kind of the traditional view of SIFs and specifically SIF prevention, and one of the things you mentioned before as we're kind of chatting about this just getting ready for the podcast is you just felt like there always seemed to be something that was missing from that traditional view. So, what kind of struck you with that?
Teg Matthews Guest
07:45
Well, it was tied in with this idea of precursors, right, so, the, the general thinking was that, and again, it tied in with that. So, what kind of thing? So this, this idea of precursors kind of came out and they'd either fall into a situational or a type of job type of thing right, so you'd get emergency shutdown would be an example of a situation or a type of job might be working around mobile equipment and so on, and you talk to organizations about this and they kind of go well, yeah, it's kind of a little bit obvious. And you kind of go, well, yes, and, and what and what they were trying to do, that the resolution seemed to be you needed to put additional control, management, control around these particular areas.
08:30
But weirdly, I was preparing a presentation on this very subject precursors actually and I was just doing some background reading and looking back at the old work and the old research and stuff, and there was and there was one, um, there was one sort of bullet point, there was one sort of finding that seemed to be overlooked about, how 29 of SIFs related to changes in exposure or risk that people hadn't picked up on. Now. in SafeStart language, you could perceive that as complacency, right, and I was kind of. I was starting to start to think about, well, these human factors, the bits that's missing from this, because if you think about it from a situation on a type of job precursor, that's, a safety person sandbox, it would get academic, it would get we could get into all sorts of lovely engineering control conversations and all those sort of things, but you're ignoring the people who are engaged in the activity. So, I took a fairly logical thought process. I was thinking well, if I'm a leader of a, a plant, let's say, right, and we have a situation where the plants on shutdown for emergency maintenance, something is broken, right, and that emergency maintenance needs to be on the roof, then you have two sorts of precursors on that. But that's just the reality of my Friday morning. Sure, that's just the reality of what I've got to deal with. Right, but the? So, there's no variable really around that. The variable is tied in with the engineers that we put up to fix the problem. Right, it's the, it's the human element.
10:02
So, we started thinking instead of looking into. You know how strong was this human element kind of piece. So, we started doing some work on that, and we started looking specifically originally into rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency, not surprisingly tied in with SafeStart and, we started doing this work with live audiences. When we used to work with live audiences, right, and big groups of people and hundreds and hundreds of people took part and these quite stark numbers came out when they were talking about their own piece, if events right and, and it came out, the rushing was prevalent in 61% of these events, frustration in 18, fatigue in 49, and complacency in 70% and upwards. Now they're big numbers, right, you add them together that comes to near enough 200.
10:55
But the other interesting thing that happened during these conversations and during these sessions and sometimes you know you'd have 80, 90 people in the room taking part in these things People started coming up and going well, actually, it's none of those, it's panic in my case, right. So we started measuring panic as well as another human factor that when things started going wrong, they started making decisions they wouldn't normally have done right if they've been, if they've been more prepared for overthinking, logically, and so on. So we started putting all this information together and it became, as I said, really quite stark that if you think in terms of precursors, then you know, yes, you have the traditional precursors situation, type of activity but then these human factors, they're amplifiers of risk because actually there's certain things that, as that plant manager, I don't have control over, but there's certain things that I do have more control over. So actually, I have it within my control or within my power to reduce that overall likelihood of something happening.
Danny Smith Host
11:53
Would you say that some of those precursors you mentioned, some of those things where you have the differing tasks or the differing challenges that come up, that come up and you know, as you said, you know it's for some people it's like okay, especially when we talk to operations people and maintenance people in particular. I think you know it's like well, you had this, this and this happened okay.
12:12
Well, that sounds like Tuesday, you know I mean, that's just right that's just a normal routine, you know a normal part of the day. But do you do, do you find that, those kind of upset conditions, those spur of the moment type activities, do you think that those in and of themselves are a bit of those precursors, or feed some of those precursors?
Teg Matthews Guest
12:34
The unplanned things. That's a traditional kind of precursor. So, then I guess you have to make the decision when you're facing these things am I competent or do I feel confident doing the task? So that human element kind of plays into that as well. Right, and you can see. You can see that the pre-toss planning piece comes into it. But can you plan for everything? So if you look at what the military do in a lot of these kinds of situations, what they do is they come out with situations or they put people in scenarios where their training kind of takes over, right, but then you have an infant number of scenarios. If you're talking about something that's unplanned or an upset kind of condition or something, are you going to plan for absolutely everything? I'll tell you.
13:25
I'll tell you that the panic thing, the thing it struck most for me, was that when I was in, I was doing a conference speech in South Africa about four or five years ago, and in the middle of the night because of where I was living, the time zone for me was easy and I was up preparing for the speech I was doing.
13:46
Actually, it was about three o'clock in the morning. At three o'clock in the morning there's an alarm that comes out in the hotel, okay, and it says everyone evacuate. We have a situation. It wasn't a fire alarm; it was a verbal warning alarm. We have a situation it wasn't a fire alarm, it was a verbal warning alarm, and we didn't know if it was a terrorist event, if it was a fire, if there was a structural problem, didn't know what it was Right. So, it was quite an interesting situation, because I didn't have a grab bag ready, I immediately thought, what am I going to pick up? So, I picked up my laptop, picked up my briefcase, picked up my key to my room, my wallet and my passport.
14:20
That's all I had. Okay, and I'm coming out my room and I'm quite high up in this hotel and it's it was. You had one of those hotels with a big open atrium and I could see all these other people. Some people were pulling all their luggage out, other people were literally running out in their underclothes, right with nothing, and then there were all these people queuing up for the lift, for the elevator. Right now, you know, and I know, that one of the first things you're trained on, whenever there's them, you take the stairs right, and it and it was fascinating to me because there's people tapping the, tapping the keys to the elevator, trying to call it, and they're not doing anything else, they're just standing there waiting. We don't know what's going on.
14:59
So actually, I went up to this and there was a big group of people, like 15, 20 people, waiting for this elevator and I said “take the stairs, that's what you do, right”, and I just carried on. That's all I did, right. But to me, you know, that's that thing about panic, that decision making piece, that lack of preparedness, right, when you put into a situation that you weren't anticipating. Unless you've been trained heavily in that kind of situation, right, it's quite likely you're not going to take that moment to step back and think about things kind of logically, so that human element becomes so critical in all these situations? Does that make sense?
Danny Smith Host
15:35
Absolutely yeah, and it's interesting, as you were talking about the human factors behind things.You know, bringing it back kind of to the workplace example of you know you've got the breakdown, you're trying to get that back up and running. You know we talked about how human factors can be positive and negative. You've got the drive that somebody wants to do the good job, they want to get the equipment back up and running. They've got that. And then you've got the negative side of it where it's easy to get into the. You know, let those human factors kind of take over a bit and, you know, get in a rush where you make a mistake, not thinking about where your hand position is, or your body position is right related to the energy or energy or whatever. It's so many things that are in conflict with us, but yet if we can recognize some of those precursors, yeah, that can keep us from getting in getting exposed to the hazardous energy in those situations, right yeah, and there's kind of a build on that too right in the sense that we can pre-warn people or just remind them, in effect, self-trigger for them.
Teg Matthews Guest
16:39
So, there was a couple of years ago I was talking to I'm going to be a bit careful here I was talking to a senior safety, global safety leader in an industry where they happen to get a lot of incidents, serious incidents, and he was talking about why would I be interested in human factors tied in with SIF? And I gave him a scenario. I said well, imagine you've got they have a lot of engineering type work and a lot of it is in a confined space. It's not a pleasant work environment, working around live equipment. I said imagine you've got an engineer that is working at height in closed space around live equipment.
17:19
You know, it's, if something's going to go wrong, it's going to go wrong badly right. And I said if you put me into that space, I'd be so hyper aware of everything that was going to be. I'll be checking something, double checking it, triple checking it, everything before we go, before going to task. But if you put an engineer who's a 15-year veteran into that situation, that level of that level of that's going to be second nature to them, they're not going to trigger it so much, and so something dramatic or serious is much more likely to happen. And he said you just described 90% of the incidents we get in our industry. Wow, and it's true. You know, it's that human factor piece, those other hazards working at high at Randall Live Equipment. That's just their reality because we haven't built a machine to do that job yet, right, right, but you put the person as the machine. Right. It's the person, the control and what you can do to influence how that person acts in that space. That's what we have the most control over.
Danny Smith Host
18:22
Sure, yeah, Pete, if I can come back to you for a second, I know you've done a lot of work where you've implemented SIF programs. So, if you don't mind, take us through some of just the really practical implications of how you would develop and just manage a SIF program and walk us through a bit of that, if you don't mind.
Pete Batrowny Guest
18:43
Sure, Danny, and you know that in techno there's a lot to this, but you know three areas that are probably worth focusing on for the sake of this conversation. You know one would be the methodology for identifying and classifying. You know especially the pSIFs precursors and other metrics you're going to use to support that system. I think is a very, very important element of the program. The other one, you know Teg has, you know, mentioned human factors a lot and it's really important, as you're putting these programs together, to realize that the human factors not only affect the individuals and the individual learning loop, as we say with the human factors framework, but there's also some very important human factors that reside in that organizational learning loop, the things that Teg had talked about. You've got to understand how people are going to interact with these programs, and you know how you're going to keep those programs in a continuous improvement loop.
19:47
And then, I think the last thing that I'd like to mention in this conversation, and we could get into a little bit more detail about this later, Danny is the importance of the leadership's active support of the program. Their responses to these, you know, pieces, especially or near misses with a potential for a serious outcome, is very, very important and it, you know, kind of permeates all aspects of your program. So, leadership important. I can't, you know, can't overstate the importance of that. So, leadership important.
Danny Smith Host
20:20
I can't, you know, can't overstate the importance of that. So, what do you think if you would, what would be? Just some practical implications, specifically with metrics. We talked a little bit about how you would, you know, get leadership involved, and we know leadership is driven by metrics. Right, we have to put a number on everything. You know what's the famous thing what gets measured, what gets done Right. So that's right. Talk a little bit about the metrics here.
Pete Batrowny Guest
20:46
OK, so let me start out with you know, with the classification. You know every business goes through a process of trying to define. You know what is a SIF, what is a pSIF, and for me that's got to be uncomplicated, right. It's got to be something that's well understood throughout the organization. It's got to fit the culture and the realities of your organization. So, what might be considered a SIF or a pSIF at one business, it may be a little bit different or have a different nuance at another.
Danny Smith Host
21:19
You mentioned the term pSIF there. Just for our listeners not familiar with that. We talked about serious injury fatalities, so go into that just a little bit exactly what we're talking about with pSIFs.
Pete Batrowny Guest
21:29
A pSIF is an incident or you know some type of an occurrence that has the potential to be a serious injury or fatality. So sorry about that you know how we get with these acronyms. Dan, exactly, it just struck me as we were going through this.
Danny Smith Host
21:44
You know, maybe not everybody knows what we're talking about when we're talking about precepts or pSIFs, rather. SIFs it is those potential right, and that's what we're talking about with that. Very good, so sorry to interrupt.
Pete Batrowny Guest
21:55
So I was just saying that you know those metrics have to fit your culture. They have to, you know, integrated part of your organization, organizational culture. You know, and that can be kind of a delicate point when you're starting to develop these programs cross-section of folks involved with those discussions, to make sure that whatever you end up with is going to fit the you know, the needs of your organization at that period in time and have the understanding that it's going to evolve over time. You know it might change, might morph, but important thing is keep it uncomplicated and have it something that fits your culture. And then, really important, with the metrics, it's got to be embraced by the folks at the front lines.
22:45
Teg and I have worked with businesses where the safety professionals and maybe a few of the executives can articulate really clearly what a SIF or a pSIF is. But when you ask the folks at the front line you get a little bit of head scratching and not really able to articulate it. And if we really think about it, those are the guys that we're trying, the people that we're trying to, you know, keep safe right. So, it's really important that the frontline folks not only embrace the program but have a real clear understanding of what it is, and then that's going to cascade into all the things that that Teg had mentioned. Right, if you know where the risks are because that's what we're really talking about is risk management we can start to move that from you know, being a reactive type of program to be more proactive and even predictive. Is is where you really want to move it.
23:37
Another really important aspect of the program is how you integrate it into the other elements of your safety management system, like your, you know, pre-job planning, for example, or you know leadership contacts. There's a lot of incident investigations, audits. All those things really need to have the, you know, sif concepts integrated into them for, you know, for support and also to shift that risk management into the proactive and you know. The last thing I wanted to say is you know, has to do with near misses and you know don't get me wrong Near Misses are very, very important but they're not really proactive or predictive enough, right, so we think about it a near miss, we just relied on luck, especially when it comes to a potential SIF or one of the peak precursors. So you really wanna make sure that you design that program to shift your risk management into the predictive.
Danny Smith Host
24:38
Sure, I always get tickled with that term near miss. I've always thought that was kind of an oxymoron, because you did have a miss, you actually had a near hit, what you actually had right. So, you know you can learn from those. But, like you said, those are a bit of looking in the rearview mirror, right.
Pete Batrowny Guest
24:55
Exactly, you know, people call them good catches. We've heard a lot of the you know kind of the new parlance for those.
Danny Smith Host
25:08
But at the end of the day they're still. You know, we relied on luck. Yeah, exactly, it came back to that luck factor and that's what we're trying to get away from right. So, Teg, coming back to you again, it may seem pretty obvious that frontline support is also really important to the success of any SIFs program. But getting that is, you know I think Peter kind of alluded to that just a minute ago we got to make it in language that they understand first of all, and make it real to them, right? But what are some other implications there for frontline folks?
Teg Matthews Guest
25:37
yes. So, I mean you're now talking about and it feeds into systems, right? You're now talking about that that the front line understands what it is that the organization needs and why. So that definition piece that people's talking about, that's huge, right. So, the and then they understand how to feed that information on whether it's on near miss or near hit, whatever you want to call it. Right that that we, the organization, captures that in a way that that is usable for for the leadership and whoever else needs to make those decisions.
26:10
if you're getting a piece, if because of a piece of machinery not functioning correctly and that requires capex and machines to be switched out or whatever it is, or anchor points being put in, you need the leadership because they've got the checkbook right, they can change that piece and then you know. So. If you've got an untottering or whatever, or if you've got a situation where you're getting people who are fatigued and that fatigue is starting to be an issue and it's starting to obviously become an issue in the human factors thing, the leadership need to know that so that you know they can make the appropriate decision. But to get that feeding you have to build that trust, and that goes down to leadership, then doing things with information, feeding back to the front line what they're doing so that everyone understands it's for everyone's benefit.
Danny Smith Host
27:00
Right, and it's the building of that trust kind of piece. So, thinking about that, you know trust is such we could open a can of worms with that one.
Teg Matthews Guest
27:09
I almost didn't say it.
Danny Smith Host
27:13
But it's so, it's. So. What's the old saying? You know it's one of those things it's easy to get, but once you lose it, it's gone. You know it's hard to get back again. Right, and that's very true with leaders and frontline workers. Right, you got to establish that rapport, and a part of that comes back to this. You know it's you got to get them to where they're comfortable coming to you with problems, and that's a huge part of this, right but yeah, but that, and this is going to be another.
Teg Matthews Guest
27:42
That's down to communication right, right it was interesting. Pete and I were doing some really interesting work and I hate to talk about it, but we were doing some really interesting work when COVID first started, right, and we had all these different organizations on these roundtables and what a lot of organizations saw is they saw their safety performance improve during that time because everyone was hyper aware of what they were doing. If you remember, we weren't sure if we caught it for touching stuff, so people washing their hands all the time and wearing gloves and we were hyper aware of all this stuff. But the other thing that organizations did was they had their supervisors and people talking to their front line much more often. They would do, they would do sort of temperature checks on people and a lot of organizations put in supervisory mechanisms to do that right. They'd have the supervisors doing it, but the supervisors were also talking to their frontline right. Supervisors were also talking to the leadership much more because of this problem, this common problem, this common enemy that we were facing right. So, we improved our communication, that trust kind of built up were facing right. So, we improved our communication, that trust kind of built up from that right.
28:46
What happened, interestingly, was we almost engineered that solution out by putting in systems so that the supervisors talking to the people on the front line every day. We engineered that out because it was a better solution. But what you then saw, interestingly again, was you then saw just incidents actually starting to creep up in these organizations that had these fan, that had performances they'd never seen before, right, so? So, that trust building piece, that communication piece, and there's a responsibility with the leadership, then just saying, right, you're going to give us this information, we're going to do something with it and we will feed back to you what we're going to do and how we're going to deal with these problems. It's that. But, like you said, you know you can do it. You can get it right 99 times and then you get it wrong once and everyone remembers the one time right. So, it's not. It's not an easy thing to do Right for sure.
Danny Smith Host
29:42
So, Pete, talking about leadership a little bit, do you have any examples that you would like to share?
Pete Batrowny Guest
29:48
just thinking about some lessons learned, I guess you could say, as it relates to leadership and leadership support and kind of how you garner that trust or how you could potentially lose that trust as well, right, sure, so probably all I can do is paraphrase what Tag has already shared with us, but kind of in a practical, more practical sense, Danny, and you know really that I worked with an organization that their leadership was very keen to, you know, reduce the serious injuries and took a very good you know, on paper at least, approach to the, to the SIF reduction.
30:27
But when they started getting the near misses or, you know, minor injuries that had the potential to be a SIF, then you know some of the leaders had a, you know, less than optimum response to that, if you will, a reaction I should say wasn't a response, it was a reaction.
30:47
And what that tends to do, you know, if they, if they don't treat the, that information and try to use it to build trust and see the value in it, and actually view it as a negative thing, it tends to drive that valuable near miss or potential SIF reporting underground and you're really maybe deploying your resources to fix things more often than you need to.
31:16
So, it's really important the reaction, if you will, or the response of leadership, to those pSIFs when, you start seeing them right, when you start getting them reported up. And on the other side of that coin, I've worked with organizations where leaders really embrace that and they saw the value and would actually call those SIFs or those potential SIFs, the golden nuggets. Right, and let's fix these before something bad does happen. And that's when you start to build the trust you start to get people coming forward with. You know, with that information, when it starts coming forward, how they talk about it with folks. You know celebrating the fact that we have an open communication channels for these. And you know, like you say, the old saying is you can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is.
Danny Smith Host
32:20
Sure, yeah, it reminds me, as you were talking about that. I was talking with a group one time and I've obviously named withheld, right Kind of thing. But I was talking with this group once and we were somehow we got into the conversation about and I was not a part of the conversations actually to two supervisors that were talking to each other just during the class and kind of went off on a tangent and they got to talking about their behavioral observations. That were talking to each other just during the class and kind of went off on a tangent and they got to talking about their behavioral observations and they were going through OK, well, I understand how you fell out in the front of this and everything and all of this is good. And then they talked about the backup and he says, well, what do you do when you get over to the part there when the things to correct?
33:08
And the second manager looked up and he said I don't ever put anything back there and I won't use the language he did. They don't want to hear that stuff anyway, we'll say stuff. Right, they only want to hear the positive things here. Now, what's interesting with that is that their safety director great guy and very well intentioned, but one of his comments to me totally unrelated to this conversation, back weeks before this had been. You know, in our observation we're getting like 92% safe behaviors and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah dah. Well, why was that? Was it really safe or were people just telling them what they wanted to hear, right? So that comes back to that idea of just having that open and honest communication, right yeah.
Pete Batrowny Guest
33:48
And the irony is those things are out there, right, those behaviors, those unsafe conditions are out there, and creating an environment where people aren't, you know, forthcoming with that information can be very, very counterproductive, if you will.
Danny Smith Host
34:08
Right, like the old saying, the road to. It's amazing that just having that communication two way there, it's got to be both ways, and I forget which one of you said it, but you know getting the, you know, okay, we've got a problem, okay, well, here's going to be our solution. Or even if it's hey, we can't get a solution in place for a few weeks or a few months, Teg, you mentioned, maybe it's a Capex project that we've got to implement here, for capital expenditure to replace a piece of equipment or whatever it is, or get a new piece in. Just communicating that back downstream and just continuing that communication process is huge for this, isn't it.
Teg Matthews Guest
34:50
It is, it's massive, massive, it's massive and it's just that feedback piece and it solves, it solves.
Danny Smith Host
34:58
It's how you build that trust piece right sure, and if you, if I, as a frontline worker, report something and I never hear anything back from it, then well, why should I bother reporting something else or offering another suggestion?
Teg Matthews Guest
35:11
Right, yeah, but there's a build on that too, to something else, or offering another suggestion, right, yeah, but there's a build on that too to something else that you just said. Right, and I know we're swapping war stories a little bit here, but it's your example about your two supervisors. Right, that if the supervisors are expected to make and it goes to Pete's point about KPIs and systems too If the supervisors are expected to make observations, right, and if they don't see any change driving out of it, right, then it becomes easy to take shortcuts on those observations. Right and. But the way that organizations typically react to that is they insist on more observations, right, but the observations are not real to start with. So what? So, people do? Um, we'll call them what you want corridor observations. They, they fit, they, they work the KPI right, but they don't, they highlight problems, they just, they just give, uh, effectively, pieces of information that confirm everything's all right. So, you're getting this false number. So, the number you superficial information, yeah exactly and so.
36:12
And that's when you, when you get into these conversations, then when organizations say everyone's running swimmingly, we've got 99% safe, and suddenly we've had three incidents in a week all around the same piece of equipment or the same thing, and we've never had nothing's been picked up on it. And so, the quality of information coming in is important, how it's captured, that building of trust, the responsibility of leadership to do something with it.
Pete Batrowny Guest
36:36
Sure.
Teg Matthews Guest
36:36
If I can just add to that a little bit, Danny, Go right ahead.
Pete Batrowny Guest
36:40
A piece of advice that I got a long time ago, when it wasn't actually a SIF program but another program that I was involved with leading and implementing and implementing and a very smart individual was a mentor of mine at the time had recommended that I start to understand organizational change management, especially the communication aspects of it, and that's a good thing to mention.
37:04
With the, you know, if you're either evolving or implementing a new SIF program, it's an organizational change and one of the most important things I learned about that is it's not so much the formal and the semi-formal communication where people get their opinions or get their desire to either support or passively resist organizational change. It's really the informal conversations and I would urge leaders that you know, whatever your initiative is, to make sure you get involved with those. Don't try to control them but get involved with those informal conversations and try to win the hearts and minds that way, Very, very important tool that I've used throughout my career and it's certainly applicable here, and you know some of the points that you and Teg had brought up.
Danny Smith Host
37:56
I always joke. I've never smoked myself, I've never been a smoker, but I've hung out at quite a few smoker sheds when we used to have those back in the day. I know a lot of companies have banned those you know.
38:10
I would go and hang out in the maintenance shop or in the smoker shed and it's amazing what you can find out that's going on in organizations just by going and doing that, because that's where you hear the real things that are happening. Okay, we're just off subject, but we just implemented a new lockout program. Well, how's that working? Go to the maintenance shed, they’ll tell you, trust me.
Pete Batrowny Guest
38:36
Bring a pizza into the night shift and throw it on the table and in the control room and you'll get a lot of really, really interesting information in those conversations.
Exactly right, Danny.
Danny Smith Host
38:45
Yeah, for sure. Well, gentlemen, anything else, as we're starting to wrap this up here, just any other burning issues that you just feel related to SIFs, pSIFs, the leadership supports piece, the trust We've opened up a lot of cans here today. Anything else you want, not to go Jerry Springer here, but any parting or final thoughts here?
Teg Matthews Guest
39:08
I suppose, if I had one, you know there's been lots of good work that's been done out in this area, but for me, that human factor piece, that's the amplifier of the risk, right, and it's the thing that is most we like. Control and safety, obviously right, and it's the thing that we actually have the most influence and control over. Right. If you've got, you know, good engineering, controls and all that sort of thing, it's always the big variable. So, include it in your, in your data collection and management system. Consider it when you're looking at these things. Make sure that people understand where it's there. And if you're looking to seriously change things, you know that that has to be an area of focus.
Pete Batrowny Guest
39:51
Sure, I think I just paraphrased what Teg just said, Danny, and you know, to put it in kind of simple terms, you know, we know that working at heights is a high risk activity, but, you know, is it more or less risk at the end of a long shutdown, when that person that's up on heights has just been working 12, 14, 15 hour days? Is it more or less risky? And I think that's really, you know, just one illustration of how the human factors and fatigue in this instance can be, exactly as Teg said, a huge amplifier to the risk and also can point to, you know, where leaders need to be involved. Right, we're always looking for more efficient ways to do our jobs, and that knowledge of human factors can help leaders be more effective, more efficient, with their activities as well.
Danny. Smith Host
40:43
Sure, yeah, and the human factors is such a huge piece of this. You know you're talking about the fatigue that comes from a shutdown, and we've all heard those stories before. You know people who you know they're in the, you know the 12th hour, the 14th hour of their 15th shift in a row trying to get everything back up and running and, uh, the fatigue certainly kicks in. But I've also heard the, the horror stories then as well and I'm sure you guys have as well of the folks who are coming back off of the, uh, the shutdown, and everything is back to quote-unquote, normal operations and suddenly that we kind of drop our guard there. So, uh, yeah, there's, there's so much of those human factors that that can exactly.
Pete Batrowny Guest
41:28
Complacency kicks in after we kind of let our guards down and let autopilot take over a little bit. Exactly, Danny, good point.
Danny Smith Host
41:36
Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being here today and joining us. I think this has been a great conversation that, as we said, went really in a lot of different directions here, thinking about SIFs, SIF’S programs and SIFs prevention and SIF prevention. If you'd like some more information folks about this subject, or if you'd like to just reach out to Pete or Teg individually to talk a bit more about this, they would love to talk to you about it. Give you their email addresses really quickly. Pete's is peterba, that's peter-bravo-alpha at safestart.com, and Teg is T-E - G dot M, as in Mike. So, T E G dot M at safestart.com as well. So peterba at safestart.com and teg.m at safestart.com.
42:24
And if you didn't get that, you can just email me. My email address is a little easier. It's just Danny at safestart.com. So, between the three of us, we'll get you to the right person. So, you can just email any of the three of us and we'll get you connected to everybody there. So again, gentlemen, thanks so much for your time great to have you with us today and thanks to our listeners for your time as well. And, as always, take the time to enjoy this podcast, but we'd encourage you as well to share it with some other folks around you and some other managers and within your organization. Until next time, I'm Danny Smith and thank you for joining us for SafeTalk with SafeStart. Have a great day.