S14Ep8: The Evolution of Behavior-Based Safety

Over the years, there have been many discussions about the usefulness of behavior-based safety (BBS). This discussion (not interview) between Tim and Shayne takes us behind the curtain of BBS implementation, revealing both its foundational strengths and historical missteps.

Host Tim Page-Bottorff
Guest: Shayne Arnaud

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to BBS Discussion
• 3:21 Origins of BBS and Foundational Elements
• 8:55 Evolving Beyond Blame in Safety
• 15:08 Positive Reinforcement vs Gotcha Moments
• 21:54 SafeTrack and Rate Your State
• 28:33 The Future of Observation Feedback

Transcript

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

00:11

Welcome back to the podcast SafeTalk with SafeStart and I'm your host for the day, Tim Page-Bottorff and over the last decade or so, there have been many discussions regarding the usefulness of behavior-based safety, or some people call it BBS. 

00:27

With the resurgence of many different approaches, namely HOP or Safety 2.0 and quite possibly SafeStart with its new holistic human factors approach, BBS may be lagging and, in some circles, appearing to be sunset. Today we thought it would be important to bring in a consultant who has been around the BBS block but also traveled the highway of many safety initiatives. Shayne Arnault has been a consultant as long as Larry Wilson has and was there from the very beginning. Shane has lived up to the ups and downs of the industry and has great experience, but before his error reduction consulting days took off, Shayne also worked a little bit in broadcasting for a few years. And, last but not least, Shayne thought it would be important to have a discussion for this podcast instead of an interview, and I thought I would oblige. Not that we're going to get into a Lincoln-Douglas debate per se, but we will have a great conversation nonetheless. So, Shayne, thanks for coming to the podcast. 

Shayne Arnault Guest

01:26

Thank you, Tim. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

01:28

It's good to have you. You've got some great stories. I've heard a lot of the stories between you and Larry. Can you do me a favor? Give us and the listeners a kind of a Reader's Digest version of how you and Larry met and how that friendship blossomed? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

01:40

Sure, okay, it goes back to 75. We both went to the same school, Carleton that being the Canadian version of Carleton, Carleton University in Ottawa and we were separate directions, if you will, for the most part. But I happened to run into him a few years later at an airport. He had been in Los Angeles. I had been working on the oil rigs. He was returning home to work for the family business and at that time their only foray into BBS was with a company who had a program slash process. They did not even really, I don't know if we want to say they were too smarter. Anyway, they were cagey about it, they didn't refer to it as a BBS offering and it was one of the major petrochemical companies in the world, anyway. So, he was elected to sort of take over that initiative and he knew that I had some field experience and with it just being a burgeoning sort of you know, very, very out of the soil sort of initiative, he didn't have a lot of employees. He asked me to help out. I said hey, I'm no safety professional but I do know risk. You know I've worked a lot of rigs overnight. I worked underground and in mine. Smelters work, Overnight I worked underground and, in mine smelters, tore up rails for CN Rail as summer jobs, so I was one of the fortunate ones. I don't know what kids do nowadays now that a lot of the factory jobs are gone, but I'd seen risk and had been a party to good and bad safety. So, I agreed to help and so I shadowed him for a while and then got going on it. He wanted to turn the corner. He had asked for some changes to be made because of what he saw as being necessary for people to accept BBS. And if I could just maybe go back, maybe that's enough of an explanation as to how I met Larry and how he enlisted me. 

03:18

But I think a basic definition needs to be said here, and from some of the early founders they would say that if you are doing BBS or calling what you're doing BBS, it has to have behavioral analysis as one of the founding parts, one of the foundational cores. To that I guess you could add a little bit of some of the elementary aspects of TQM total quality management, some statistical process control, and then of course there are the nuanced things that we have to know how to speak with people, how to listen and how to avoid conflict, because I think one of the better definitions I mean it is she isn't. It it's safety, health, environment or HSE. And so even though when you're doing behavioral safety, we're not really concerned with a person's overall long-term health, but I would venture to say, and I think you'd agree, that if I'm at a press or a lay they're working, you know, doing some industrial job that has risk, and some fellow comes along. Some person comes along and says, excuse me, can I observe you for a few minutes? Unless he and I are on, you know great terms and I think there's no risk here. I'm not worried about being turned in or him critiquing me unnecessarily. 

04:23

There can be some nerves, and I think so in some of the processes that I'd seen out there, some of the applications that I'd seen, as opposed to allegedly, we were out to make people safer, but I think in a lot of cases we went the reverse direction. In fact, I had people that told me, man, I was really nervous during that thing. So Larry, with his insights, he saw that and he started making some much needed changes, and so some people were saying that what we were doing way back when, 22 years ago wasn't real BBS, and I'd venture to say that now that some people have dropped out of the game and aren't offering their products, they were saying that it had to morph and had to change. He had made those changes a long time ago, saying that it had to morph and had to change. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

05:05

He had made those changes a long time ago and they were quite good. They were quite good In terms of S-H-E yeah, it could be she, it could be E-H and s. I mean H-E-S there's so many acronyms out there when we're in the world of safety but as far as Larry's concerned, I think you and I could probably sit down at a campfire, probably with several, maybe thousands of drinks, and have maybe a conversation about Larry all night long. Unfortunately, the podcast really isn't about Larry and in this situation, it really is about what you, perception wise, think about BBS. So, you gave us kind of a little bit of an intimate I don't know, I would call it kind of a definition of BBS. That might need a little bit more fleshing out. So, if you could, just, yeah, could you just kind of give us a 20,000-foot view of what you think BBS is? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

05:57

Well, its main goal, of course, is to achieve better safety, to reduce injuries, to reduce the close calls that are behind it, right, and so it's a systematic approach to achieving better results. You know, where safety is concerned, typically within a company and that's a point I want to bring up here, as I said, is that these were always company initiatives and a lot of people would like to say that this is something you can take home. But you know, we use a picture in our SafeStart presentations that shows probably one of the worst pictures ever taken of my wife, and I took it. She didn't really volunteer, but I slapped her, slapped, I threw, I asked her. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

06:35

You asked for permission. 

Shayne Arnault Guest

06:36

I'm using rig language here. Right, I slapped a hard hat, you know, with ear protection. I said, here, wear this. And she was just starting to cook up a sauce or something. She said I feel like a jerk wearing this. I said it's okay. I said the only reason I want you to wear this is I want to be able to show this in a presentation and say that we have all these wonderful things that safety professionals, all the tools that we use at corporations, including observations and BBS, but we're not going to use some of those fundamental things like PPE in the kitchen, you know, or in the bathroom. So, I think it made the point. I'm not sure she ever appreciated the picture being circulated globally, but anyway. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

07:16

It is global. I mean it's on literally every train, the trainer's desk, because it goes through a great. It's really good for a segue about. Is this what your house looks like at home and from a behavior perspective? That's a great point that you made. And then to get her to take the picture, I'm impressed. That was good. 

Shayne Arnault Guest

07:35

So, there's an expression just let me just tie the knot on this one, tie it off and close the loop. There's an expression in French il prend quatre ans sous pour faire une pièce. That's Quebec French as opposed to French French, but basically what that means is man, you're taking four quarters to make a buck. So, you asked a while ago for a definition and I got into it and segued away. But just to complete it, BBS, or behavior-based safety, typically can be said to have five or six components. To have five or six components, you know, number one is that we have to identify. You know, at a baseline level, we have to identify target behaviors or important elements that need to be done correctly or adhered to right. So, these are the things that we would put on a checklist. Now, slight departure from the order of what some companies say. You know the order in which you have to do things, Larry. 

08:20

I thought wisely put in plan to observe, you know, as opposed to identify target behaviors and then make up an observation card that has all these things listed. He put plan to observe and that was fundamental in a big change in the process called SafeTrack, because the idea was that if people don't really want to do it and they just willy-nilly decide to go out on the floor and one, two, three and I'll pick the third person. There's a good chance, towards the end of the week or the month of the cycle, that some people have been over-observed and some people have not been spoken with at all, and so you really do want this to be a uniform thing where, at the end of a month or a quarter, you can say that we have spoken with everybody in the plant or wherever it is, and so that planning to observe was a big thing and of course using the checklist was necessary, and then a bigger deal was, of course they call it observation feedback these days, don't they? 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

09:12

Yeah. 

Shayne Arnault Guest

09:12

Yeah, and that's a good thing, because originally in BBS people said, well, we would go and observe people, but nobody talked about the idea that maybe it was considered a no brainer, that we would also communicate. And, more to the point, we would also communicate. And, more to the point, we would listen and ask questions, you know, constructive questions that got them thinking and didn't leave them nervous. Final two steps, of course, were to track and record all these things and that's part of the statistical process, control, part of what they do in big-time quality initiatives and then to analyze and seek out solutions for some of the problems that were brought forth. And the final thing I guess just to tie two things together here is he thought that those five or six steps are all wonderful. But well, let me ask you a question, Tim. I don't know, I've never even been in a car with you, but would you say that you're a safe driver, 90%, 95%, 99% of the time?

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

I would love to say that yes.

Shayne Arnault Guest

Yeah, okay, okay, we'll stick with that. So, what I'm getting at, even if you want to exceed the speed limit by, you know, as far as the highway patrol are concerned, acceptable limits I think most reasonable people would say, yeah, we, we, we drive safely most of the time. So doesn't it get our goat if the only time we get stopped by the police is one of the few times that we've done something wrong and we wish we could hold up a tape and say, look, look, look, look, look at the last 3,000 hours of my driving. You know it was impeccable. You know, let me off. It doesn't work that way. And so, the idea of planning an observation in advance and saying, okay, I'm going to pick a name here, I'm going to go see Tim, your name would never go on the card at the end of that. There's none of that whatsoever. But I knew that I was going to see you, and so there is a 90% chance, 99% chance, that you're not going to be doing anything unsafe. 

10:50

And some people say, well, what's the point? You know we can't catch him doing anything wrong, and I thought you're the same guy that said, when we started this thing, that you didn't want this to be a gotcha thing and trying to catch people. So we were out to do three things, if need be, get rid of the at-risk behavior, which, as I said, is minimal in a well-managed place with a good workforce. Number two is to make sure that, if I can use the term, recidivism or something, to make sure that all safe behaviors didn't slide backwards, you know, and start to form into to be not quite so good. And then the third thing, of course, which is at the crux and I'm sure this is going where we're going to go and that's to lend some positive reinforcement to the ideas of eyes and mind on task. I mean, if you've been at the same machine 48 weeks a year for 15 years, chances are we can figuratively do it in our sleep, right, yeah. And yet we know we can't, we shouldn't at least. And so, the idea was let's find some really good creative ways at asking the guy questions about his knowledge, training and ergonomics, whatnot. 

12:00

But we were out to provide what we call positive feedback or positive reinforcement, and a lot of people think that positive reinforcement is attaboys or attagirls. Right, you know somebody coming by and say thanks, Jim, for doing a good job. You know, thanks for wearing the glasses, and you'd be looking back at me and go. But it's a condition of employment. You don't need to thank me for following the rules a condition of employment. You don't need to thank me for following the rules. 

12:28

And again, I don't think he I hate to keep referring to Larry and Larry Wilson, but I don't think he had a background in psychology per se, but I think anybody that played on a team in sports realized you want genuine feedback and positive reinforcement. From a psychologist standpoint, the idea meant that you are adding to or reinforcing in a positive, positive way, meaning adding to what is going to strengthen that behavior. And so anytime we could have a conversation that it didn't have to specifically say how do you keep your eyes and mind on task, but if we were going in that general direction, that helped increase those, those neural pathways that we speak about, right, it helped the subconscious aspect of safety, yeah, that okay. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

13:10

So, you made like a couple of great points, and this is going to be good for the next question. 

13:14

You kind of teed it up for me as if we practiced. 

13:17

I have to say that there's a couple of things in the in the background that always is an underlying thing for a lot of BBS opponents and that is that BBS in their mind and it's been a negative marketing ploy, that BBS has always blamed the worker. 

13:34

But you actually went straight to the point and said that it would be good to uncover unintentional error and it would be good to talk about things that are habitual as opposed to the deliberate error, and I've heard this between you and Kevin time and time again about how people should approach and that there's a hat for deliberate error in that it doesn't say SafeStart or SafeTrack on it and when you put that hat on, you go after that person and then you have to uncover for sure that's deliberate risk or deliberate error and that you can discipline them in that way. But when it becomes a disciplinary game, it also leads to. Well, what most people say that are against BBS is that it's a blaming game and you're going to hear quite a few unions that say that. So, other than this transition away from being a blame game, is there anything else that's been major in either BBS or, as you refer to it, and it's been in circles as an observation feedback system? Has it evolved? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

14:30

Absolutely, and I think, like anything else, if it doesn't evolve, it's going to die an ugly writhing death. The one thing that you and I did mention before we did this and some people it's an untoward analogy or example, but I used to like it, and I used to say this in classes. I'd say, you know, I'd pick a guy or a person sitting right there and I'd say, hey, so you and I have never met. But imagine you're standing there, you know, waiting for your drink, your coffee, your, your beer, what have you? And I'm 40 feet away and down the length of the bar and, and you know, the eyes in the back of your head, so to speak, are picking up on it. And finally, you lock eyes with me, and I can, I can see, even though you haven't spoken. Your message to me is buddy, you better be somebody I knew in high school or something that I can't really place right now because you're really making me uncomfortable. And so, even when we took great pains to have information sessions to let people know this is not going to be a blame game, we're not out to intimidate whatnot some people just couldn't get away from that thing of stop looking at me. You know you're making me nervous. I don't like it. 

15:39

Unfortunately it is true, and I think you know there are probably five major schools of behavior-based safety out there, or at least five major providers historically and I was doing some reading, you know, a few days prior to this, and both of them, both of the big ones apart from our own, Mr. Wilson said that all too many times the process was not done as it should have been done and people being people, they would wreck it, you know, and they would go after somebody. The biggest thing that we used to run into many, many years ago, of course, was and I remember this was always coming they'd say, okay, you guys say that this is not about disciplinary action. We'd say, you're right, it's not. I wouldn't be standing here; I wouldn't be doing this as a job if it was. They'd say, okay, why do you have lockout tag out on the card then? Then, because that's one of our seven deadly sins, that's a fire able offense, and so on and so on. Right, and I said, fair enough. I said but you take a guy that's been at it for 30 years. He's everybody's godfather, everybody loves this guy. He's skilled, he's nice, and one summer weekend there's not enough people to cover the night shift. And so, he says I'll cover the night shift, I don't mind. And so, he does. 

16:48

But for the last 29.9 years lockout was a three-stage thing. There were three bits to it, and we just recently added a fourth. And this is the same guy that actually signed off on it said I like the change, I used to think that should be part of it, and so, yeah, I'm hip to it. But somebody walking by or somebody doing an observation is talking to him about something, and all of a sudden, they look down and they realize, oh, he hasn't done the four steps Right. And so, somebody said well if I'm a leader, I can't walk away from this. 

17:18

And so, what I used to tell people is that if we, let's say, you have 500 people in a place, if we did enough observations that were about other things and we built a consensus that this is about helping people, it makes it easier to tackle that other subject. But again, we do not wait, we don't go looking furtively, we don't go looking for that infraction. What I would do is I'd walk up to you and say hey, Tim, I know you don't have to lock out right now, but can you show me how you would do it? And you'd show me exactly how to do it. I'd go, that's amazing, and you'd show me exactly how to do it. I go, that's amazing. And I'd say what are the odds that anybody under stress, if they're rushed or tired, could maybe forget to do that? And so, the word spreads right, and so I think there's always a better way to approach some of these contestable things, and that's what we always tried to do get at the problem before it became a problem. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

18:09

Great point, get at the problem before we get the problem. That's really what most SHE professionals look for is to basically try to eliminate, and I think we collectively I'm talking about Larry and the masses have done a really good job at coming up with things like anticipate error and being able to put yourself in a situation that you can do that from the inside out. But you and I both know that that zigzag of complacency, moving up and down with external stimulus and observers and all the stuff that goes with behavior-based safety, should be, I think, perceived to be one of those things that should be good, Whereas the evolution, as you mentioned, can always go towards the negativity because, quite frankly, they probably did it wrong, they didn't do it right the first time and then you got to go back and fix it. So, I mean, have you ever been privy or part of a group that had to go back and fix something that went bad? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

19:01

Oh, absolutely yeah, Kevin, and I had to do that a couple of times, certainly by myself I've had to. You know, Larry's probably ended up with half a millionaire miles doing just that. And you know, that's not to fault the, the implementation by whatever company, that's not to fault even any of the individuals. I mean, we're people, human beings know how to mess things up, right, you know. And so unfortunately so unfortunately, I mean anytime you invite into the mix, and you ask people to go out there and critique their fellow, their fellow human being, um, it's. I mean, we almost need a doctorate in in in the soft touch, right? Yeah, we have to know how to do it, and so I guess one sitting on the outside, you know, could say I did.

19:49

This whole thing was going to be problematic from the beginning, and so, if I can just go back to your question of, has it evolved? Yes, it has and dare I say that I think some of the evolutionary aspects that are in SafeTrack, they were done a long time ago. We actually don't use the process all that much anymore because, again, there was a tidal wave of ABS happening many, many years ago and a lot of things, some of which you mentioned before and the one that's closest to all of our hearts, SafeStart. They tend to have taken the place and unfortunately, I think, just like it is in fashion and music and car styles and anything else.

20:30

We live in this world where it doesn't matter how good something is, people feel the need to move on. You know, I mean what's said in academics you publish, or you perish, sort of thing. So right, that's, that's unfortunate. But you know, just let me close off on this note with this, and that's okay, you can get rid of some of the, the big, uh, polysyllabic terms like discriminative stimuli, and you know, getting rid of all of the big, you know nine syllable, polysyllabic psychological terms and that. And I used to get fellow l riggers sitting there looking at me like what would you do? Eat a dictionary yesterday, buddy, I mean bring it down to earth, will you, so we can get rid of that stuff. 

21:08

We can focus on the unintentional, we can really make one of the foundational bits helping people okay while we're getting out there. But you know, the two most basic aspects to me of BBS that are going to help it evolve is keep it centered around doing a bit of observing but a heck of a lot of communicating and listening and taking those findings back and making sure if Tim says to me there is not enough light in this area and if I put that down on my card I shouldn't just hope that it makes it over to the lighting electrician shop. I should be following that thing, running it up the flagpole, as we say, and making darn sure that some of the concerns I took the trouble to ask you what's wrong. You told me let's move on it right, let's get it fixed. But as far as some of the heavy end behavioral analysis and looking for trends to develop, if a place only has 200 people, an accident could have happened before you see a meaningful trend. So, I think that's the biggest part of evolution. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

22:05

I like it. Actually, there was a disagreement I'm sorry, a disagreement debates same stage in a major safety conference where Conklin and, you know, Geller got on the same stage and talked about the differences between, you know, the old BBS and the new HOP or the new Safety 2.0. And there was a great discussion about that. What you just talked about, if you were to find during an observation something systematic like lighting that needed to be fixed, was that a systems approach or was that a behavior-based safety approach? And it doesn't matter to me how that was found, it just it just was found and that if a person is able to give you feedback during a systems analysis or a behavior-based safety observation, you shouldn't care. You got the information and now you're doing something about it. So that was a perfect, thank you, grateful point. I appreciate it. Okay. So next question is then what does SafeStart, the company, the organization, what does it have that closely matches observation and feedback? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

23:10

Well, the closest match is what I've mentioned a couple of times SafeTrack. You know its name says it all it's about safety and it tries to track behaviors and trends, whatnot, and so it's substantially different in some meaningful ways, although if somebody was to just give it a quick flyby, and you know they looked at that card versus one put out by that red and white thing that was put out by a massive chemical company that's still going, but they may not see much of a difference. But yeah, its name is SafeTrack. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

23:40

Okay, good, and then I think you mentioned Rate your State along the way. Is there any difference? Is there anything differences between the two, SafeTrack and Rate Your State? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

23:50

Yeah, I think of, one is a full-blown sedan, and the other one is a sports car. They'll both get you there. You know you can't. You can't put as much baggage, or you can't put as much or take as much out of one. And Rate Your State is again just; I don't want to fall all over myself. You know sort of pandering and congratulating who named it. I don't know who named it really, but that's it. We are just asking people to can you Rate Your State? And sometimes we'll say hey, Tim, have you got a moment? Would you mind if you could just take a minute here? I'll give you a card and I'll hold on to one. So, we're both looking at the same roadmap and you know it's got sliding scales, figuratively speaking zero to 10. And could you Rate Your State for me? And then you'd maybe just tell me. Well, I'm actually in a real rush, so I'll mark that as eight and that's you know. Note to you, Shayne, get out of here, leave me be, and if you stay too long, I'll be at a seven. But long I'll be at a seven, but right now I'm calm, I'm good, I'm at a two. 

24:47

Frustration, and most people that know themselves and know the game would never give themselves a zero at complacency, you know, unless it's something that they're doing for the absolute first time. But we just ask them to rate where they're at. You know, and one of the finer points we used to say where are you at right now? And to me I fiddlesticks. I mean, if a guy wants to say I'm okay now, but this morning I was actually peaking at a nine for these two things, and at the end of the day I'm probably going to be about a seven of complacency because I will have done it. So, I'm not really time sensitive, I'm not really caring. I can imagine some people go no, no, no, I just want to know where you are right now. But if he wants to divulge more information and what he's doing, of course, is saying aloud what he's anticipating, where he's going to be or where he was, and I think that's all relative. 

25:34

The most fun I've had on Rate Your State, though, was I asked a guy who was in Chicago outskirts, and I said have you got a moment? And he said no, no, I do not get out of here, and I said OKAY. And I said he, like he knew SafeStart right. I said so it sounds like you're at about a nine or a 19 with the frustration. He said, yes, I am, and you want to know why? And I said another day, but you don't have time. And he said, no, I got time for that. And lo and behold, before you knew it, he had actually spent 10 minutes of his life 10 minutes he couldn't get back, telling me all about why he was so frustrated. But some good things came out of it, you know, and he vented, and he calmed down and he laughed at the end of it all and he goes there. I feel better. 

26:15

But no, it is really meant to be. I think it's a tool. I don't, you know. If I'm asking you, I don't want to say I don't care, I care, but you're not telling me, you're not rating your states for me, you're rating them for yourself. And if we follow that little initiative right through, of course well, you know the drill it's we're asking you to Rate Your State. And then, of course, we're saying what errors could you get into if you're in one of the higher realms of any of those states, and what could happen to you? And if you mentioned something kind of trivial, I say, well, do you think something worse could happen. So, we always obviously end up with how could it be worse? 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

26:53

That's a great conversation; I want to tell you. I think we were together in East St Louis and we went to, you know, visit a private company that runs a water facility and I ended up having that same conversation moving up the river towards Peoria and having these folks come in and there's a water distribution worker, you know, digging trenches, and same question like you got time for a rate, your state, he's. No, I don't want to talk about anything right now. I'm in the middle of something and you know, and literally he stopped, just like you just said. You know, I thought to me that I was walking away. He's like well, come on, and he literally calmed down in a matter of like 30 seconds and had that conversation. And I don't know if you know, if we hadn't had that conversation, I felt like it was an intervention at the moment. That was supposed to be, and you know who would have known what exactly? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

27:38

No, no, you're, you're quite right there, you know. Just a word on that. I'm just going to do what I'm famous for. I'm just going to leave my wingman here for a second. I know, I know what you're speaking about. I well, you mentioned Peoria, so I have to go here. 

27:50

This particular company had canceled doing an implementation twice, this particular part of the implementation, and so they called me down and I flew down and got there and it was really windy and raining hard. The plane barely landed. I was glad we made it onto the ground. I was awoken at 1:30 in the morning. I've never had a five inch, eight-foot-long bow go through the sliding glass doors of my hotel room. I mean, I've never had such fright. You know, you being a former Marine, you probably know that stuff, but me no. Anyway. So, I knew something was going on, and then, of course, the air raid sirens are going on, and what would have happened, of course, is a tornado went through Peoria I mean it's in the record books it went through Champagne, Urbana, maybe two hours later, or a different cyclone went through there. 

28:38

Anyway, we got together the next day to start implementing and Rate Your State was barely born then. But I remember thinking what am I doing here? I mean, these people are getting messages from friends and relatives saying, hey, I found some of your family pictures a half a mile from your house. I mean, their belongings were strewed over, some people had no place to live, and I just thought we have to cancel this. And somebody said, well, we've pushed it back twice so we thought we should go ahead. 

29:08

I just remember thinking I'm so glad we were doing something else. We were doing Classic, SafeStart, not Rate Your State at that moment, and I remember thinking this isn't good. So, when the program was finally born, I remember thinking this is sensitive stuff that we're doing, and so your example is entirely valid. You know about what we'll never know just how good some of those conversations were. And I think it's like fishing, if I can use the analogy, that when you go out, most experienced fishermen will say you go out for the activity, the relaxation. You're not necessarily always going to catch something that's worth taxidermy and putting on the mantle above the fireplace, you know. So, the so the benefits don't always have to be huge and extrinsic. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

29:49

Exactly. Yeah, you're right, but I you know, thank you for bringing that up, because it brought that, brought that memory back and I thought, maybe, perhaps we did, maybe we did save a life, and that's all it means to me. All right, last question we're running out of time. So, Shayne, in your opinion, what's the future state of observation and feedback? Will it survive? 

Shayne Arnault Guest

30:13

I think it will. You know, like I said, I weigh the flag. I'm a fan of it. I've had many arguments with many friends who are still on the side of industry because they're skilled at trades and I'm not, but I do think I agree with I'll mention his name, I mean, you mentioned Mr. Geller. It was Thomas Krauss, you know, head of BST, when he was the one that said it needs to change, and I agree. 

30:34

But I think the future is, I won't say necessarily bright, because between you and me and the listeners, anything that's called behavior-based safety, and then when we realize we need a better name for it, so we come up with observation, feedback, I don't know, you know, I mean change the name of the band, you know, sort of thing. 

30:51

Yeah, um, so, but no, I think those fundamentals, as long as we are on this planet or any other planet, I think we need to be able to see each other's points of view, we need to be able to communicate. 

31:02

And if I could just quote something I just found it on the internet, wrapping up here, it turns out that this was uttered by a man, Bill Bullard, who was a Republican representative and then senator, and he just died, actually I think December 20th or December 19th of last year of complications from good old COVID, but his quote was I think it's his but he said opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. 

31:28

It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, and for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. Okay, it requires profound purpose, larger than the self-kind of understanding, and so I think that is obviously meant to be applied to much bigger things. But in in a small little old observation a Rate Your State or a BBS observation I shouldn't be commenting on how Tim works and what you do just because of an opinion I have. I should be going out there firsthand to get real knowledge and understand what you're going through at that moment and help sustain where we're at and make it easier to go forward. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

32:09

That's perfect. Okay, so, having a podcast like this, we've got large amounts of good communication delivered to the masses, and I think one of the best success factors that I've seen through what SafeStart provides whether it's through SafeTrack or observation feedback or Rate Your State, it doesn't matter is the level of communication, and I think one of the big things that I've seen from you, Shayne, is over the years, is that communication is one of those traits in a behavior-based safety system that could make or break it. I hope that all of our listeners that are going through this get an opportunity to visit with Shayne. So, Shayne, if you need to do me a favor, let them know how they can reach you. 

Shayne Arnault Guest

32:45

Simply through email, shayne@safestart com. My English mother had to be different, and so she put a Y in that. So that is S-H-A-Y-N-E. So that's Sierra Hotel, alpha, yankee, november, echo at safestart.com. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

33:07

Perfect, Shayne. Thank you so much. You've been a great podcast guest, and I want to tell you that I think that it would be kind of cool to get you on to talk about the dirty little secrets about Larry. I think that's going to be the title of the next podcast with Shayne.

Shayne Arnault Guest

33:20

Yeah, the not so dirty secrets about Larry. Yeah, okay, yeah. 

Tim Page-Bottorff Host

33:26

If we can keep that at 30 minutes, all right. So, to our listeners out there, if you know, or know anyone or know of a potential topic you'd like to hear on a podcast, reach out to me or Danny at Tim at SafeStart.com or Danny at SafeStart.com, we would love to have you. On behalf of the entire team, Kevin Kelly, Danny and Tim we say thank you for listening and joining us at SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm your host, Tim Page-Botter, and we'll see you down the road.