S15Ep3: Your Gut Told You So, but We’re Listening

What if human factors were your organization’s secret advantage, not a list of hazards to police? We sat down with returning guest Peter Batrowny to flip the script—spotlighting intelligence, creativity, adaptability, empathy, intuition, passion, and especially resilience as performance multipliers across safety, quality, and culture.

Host: Tim Page-Bottorff

Guest: Pete Batrowny

Individual-organizational-learning-loops

Transcript

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Tim Page- Bottorff

Hey, welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm Tim Page Bottorff. We tend to think of human factors as human error. And sometimes, yes, we know that that's not the right thing to do. But just for a second. What if we flip that coin over? Today's guest has given that question a lot of thought. For long time listeners, you'll recognize the name Peter Batrowny. He's been a guest on this podcast before, as well as a frequent member of Larry Wilson's experts’ panels. So, you know he's got to be smart. It's Pete. Hey, welcome back to the podcast.

Pete Batrowny

Thanks a lot, Tim, and thanks for having me back. It's always a pleasure to sit down with you and your audience. I'm really looking forward to our chat today.

Tim Page- Bottorff

Yeah, me too. You know, I touched on it in the opening, but um, when someone thinks of human factors like rushing, frustration, fatigue, and maybe even boredom and distraction, obviously those are the ones that quickly come to mind for our listeners. But there's another side of that coin, ain't that right?

Pete Batrowny

Yeah, you're exactly right, Tim. And, you know, when we think about Safe Start, you know, we talk about the individual as well as the organizational learning loop. And Safe Start itself, Safe Start Now, we help people develop skills. And as you master them, you naturally notice fewer mistakes. Uh, might be accidents or uh more likely performance errors that are reduced if we can learn these skills and master these skills, which is a really a positive aspect of human factors that sometimes we don't give enough thought to or leverage enough in our organizations. You know, we all want to reduce the number and the severity of outcomes related to human error. But as you pointed out, you know, we, the big picture, WE, you know, all of us, are a lot more than just errors. You know, there's uh a lot to think about when it comes to human factors and the positive aspects. Some of those positive attributes that that I've noticed in us as people that could be very advantageous to us as leaders to kind of capitalize on those are things like our intelligence. Uh we can be very creative. People are also adaptive. You know, we learn from mistakes, we can bounce back from error. We're very sensitive. You know, we can kind of get in tune with our surroundings, and when we see something that isn't quite right, we can often use that sensitivity to avert some disasters. We can be empathetic towards each other. You know, one of the things, Tim, that you and I have seen a lot in high-performing organizations is that people look out for each other. And with that empathy, you know, you can take that looking out to each looking out for each other to a different level. We're also very intuitive. People can be very passionate, especially about the things that they really care about, things near and dear to their heart. And people can also be resilient. You know, I know it's related to being adaptable, but being resilient, being able to, you know, kind of learn from our mistakes and move forward uh better, stronger is a really, really good positive aspect of human beings that, again, we can take advantage of as leaders.

Tim Page- Bottorff

I like that. I really do like that a lot. That's a great list, and it does come back to what we do in our business because it's a lot easy. It's really easy for people to come back to us and say, hey, you guys only focus on human error. But your list is all on the positive end. And ironically, I know you did this intentionally. Um, you left with resiliency. So, I know you well enough and to know to know that you would put resilience with intention on the end. So why did you choose to end with resilience?

Pete Batrowny

Well, the reason I put that at the end of the list is that I would hope you'd ask me to expand on it a little bit, Tim. And as you know, you know, you and I have worked together uh with a lot of uh on a lot of projects with a lot of businesses in different industries. But one of the topics that comes up a lot is that resiliency. You know, businesses strive to be resilient. We know that things uh that we don't want to happen are gonna happen. And the way we respond to those undesired things is really at the heart of resiliency. If you think about the high reliability organizations, that's one of the characteristics of a of a HRO, something that those businesses strive for and actually uh you know try to develop that mindset in their peep in their people. And to me, that uh, you know, being resilience, people is at the heart of it. You know, people have a remarkable ability to learn, uh to bounce back from mistakes. You know, recently uh when people share a story with me, either in Safe Start or Safe Lead that's related to a near miss or an injury, I've been asking them, you know, before that incident happened, or before you know you made that error or almost had that uh injury, did you hear a little voice in your head telling you maybe don't do that? No, did you hear that? Vast majority of people say, yeah, I heard the voice, but I chose to ignore it, right? And self-triggering on those gut feelings can be a good way to build resiliency in individuals that's going to translate to the organization. And there's another SafeStart concept that that's related to resilience, related to the high reliability organizations. And, you know, it's stated as a preoccupation with failure, you know, kind of looking for things that that could go wrong and head them off before they cause a catastrophic outcome that we don't want. And you know, I like to rephrase that a little bit and just say it's a healthy preoccupation with failure, looking for things that may be out of the ordinary, things that uh could be uh you know out of the norm with a process. And, you know, of course, you know, Tim, in SafeStart, one of the things we do when we're telling SafeStart stories is ask, how could it have been worse? You know, that's an important element of a good SafeStart story. It's related to the resiliency concept that we're talking about, also related to those characteristics of high reliability organizations. So that's kind of why I left it there.

Tim Page- Bottorff

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that's great input in regards to um in regards to the storytelling because once you say what it could have done in terms of how it could have been worse makes you really analyze the situation on how it could have been worse, but then also you're pretty lucky to be here. Or maybe you did self-trigger. So, the resilience captures I think fascinating, and I appreciate you bringing it up. As a matter of fact, I knew intentionally that you would put that on a list and at it last. So, I appreciate that. As you know, we uh we talk a lot about here at SafeStart, we talk a lot about the errors and of course the states that cause them. However, in our version of behavior-based safety, which we refer to as SafeTrack, we talk a lot about positive reinforcement for safe behaviors. But if I heard you correctly, um, we should expand our concepts of human factors just beyond safety and errors. Is that right?

Pete Batrowny

Yeah, exactly, Tim. You know, it's obvious that we're gonna learn from our mistakes. You know, that immediate negative feedback, you know, that sort of thing, it it's it's healthy. But vast majority of the time, you know, the people that we work with or the people that we're surrounded with are really doing great things, you know, a lot more than great things. And I believe it's uh good for leaders to be on the lookout for those things, recognize those good things that people are doing, those positive aspects that we talked about. When someone does something that shows creativity or adaptability or resilience, you know, we should not only be on the lookout for it, but we should let people know. Give them that specific feedback that we notice that they're, you know, doing the right thing. And if we do that, those good aspects of uh the human factors are likely to get repeated and spread through our organization and teams.

Tim Page- Bottorff

Now, I know what you said there in that list is good, and from a resilience perspective, I we've made mistakes. And from time to time, people they don't make mistakes and they get they don't necessarily get caught for the times they're doing great things because it's expected. But when a leader actually catches them, you're talking specifically just about that a good catch. And so, the difference in our uh behavior-based safety systems that we have out there that are out there, whether you're using Safe Track or whatever, you're solely actually looking at safe behaviors and obviously putting that down on uh percent safe. And so, what you're suggesting, Pete, though, is that we look at our employees not necessarily just in safety, but as a whole. In an entire group, like quality and performance. Is that right?

Pete Batrowny

Yeah, that's right, Tim. You know, I think that uh we as safety leaders and leaders in in general have a tremendous opportunity to impact the overall culture of a business, right? By doing so, we can impact all the performance KPIs. It's not just safety, we can impact the quality, we can impact the you know, reduce the number of uh defects, those types of things, the things that are gonna make our business more profitable and a better place to work. It's not just safety. You know, how many times, Tim, have we we've done uh SafeLead together? Have we heard our uh folks that we're coaching say, wow, this isn't just about safety leadership, right? This stuff's gonna work in all aspects of my job. And it can work at home, right? Because a lot of uh situations away from work, we're leaders there too. It might be at uh you know uh church function or even being a parent, right? And these skills that we develop as leaders can help us in in a lot of different aspects, not just for safety.

Tim Page-Bottorff

 I can't agree with you, more. That's fantastic. And talking about um where those things can fit outside of safety, I just want to let our listeners just remind you that Danny and I did a podcast on the human factors’ framework. Um, that was back in March of 2021. And if you need a title, it's called A Guide to Improving Organizational Performance. And in that podcast, we actually discussed like among other things, uh, the individual and the organizational learning loops. So, to bring this full circle back to what he's talking about specifically, Peter, I just thank you. Pointing those things out, I just want to say that you can learn both organizationally and both individually. And that person to step up and say that they took this stuff home and worked on it as a parent, that's leadership. And it doesn't just have to be at work; it can go everywhere. So, it fits right into what we're talking about today. So, Pete, what do you think? Um, in terms of resilience, is there anything in from a characteristic perspective that we should look for?

Pete Batrowny

Sure. So, you know, you mentioned the human factors framework, Tim, and I think that's we, as we both know, it's a great lens to kind of look at the things that we're doing at work, looking at the organizational learning loop, looking at the individual learning loop, and see how we can use those positive aspects of human factors, including resilience, to kind of help us out, to help us get the outcomes that we desire. So, you know, from an individual learning loop standpoint, you know, all of those positive characteristics can lead to resilience, can lead to individuals and ultimately the organization having the ability to kind of fail safely that we hear a lot, right? The high reliability organizations have a focus on those front lines, on that individual learning loop. And we as leaders need to learn how to create an environment or a climate, if you will, in which people can use those positive elements of human factors like intelligence, user creativity, user adaptability to make good decisions, and make decisions that are going to lead to the positive outcomes that we're looking for. And from an organizational standpoint, when we think about how we design systems, whether they're technical systems or people systems, how can we take advantage of those positive human factors? How can we keep those in mind as we're designing these systems? You know, one example that that comes to mind is you know, if we have a metric, for example, for closing corrective actions, often the proactive metric is the date by which it's closed. And what that does is drive us to close the corrective action within a given period of time. But a metric like that might inadvertently result in plans, action plans, corrective actions that aren't optimal, right? We got it done on time, but what we often find is that we're going after that same problem again because we closed it on time, but we really didn't close it with a high-quality solution. So instead of having the date, or maybe in addition to having that uh that date for closure, we could do something like how often are these types of incidents or these types of upsets repeated in our organization? Or are we fixing them the first time? Right? So, if we're measuring that, it's really going to lead to results, corrective actions that are sustainable, that are going to correct the problem the first time. We don't have to come back and kind of uh revisit it in the future.

Tim Page-Bottorff

Yeah, I think adding those dates, you and I have seen this out in the field where you know you add a date and then all of a sudden it becomes an additional metric on follow-up, and then sometimes the employee won't feel like they're getting there, you know, whatever that is that they mentioned for corrective action, um, getting it done. And then the date, yeah, you're right. It just uh it just uh it just it creates unintended consequences. So, thank you for that.

Pete Batrowny

Yeah, from organizational learning loop, we can think about those things and bake them in ahead of time so that we can drive those behaviors that we want and also get them communicated throughout the organization. That's right.

Tim Page- Bottorff

That's right. Well, Pete, that's our time. Uh any parting thoughts for our listeners?

Pete Batrowny

Uh, I guess you know, one thing that I would say, and we've kind of uh alluded to this a few times, that you know, we've been talking a lot about the value of taking the concepts related to human factors, turning them into practical plans. So one thing that our listeners could do right away, you know, is think about the things that we've discussed today, uh, make a deliberate effort to be on the lookout for those positive actions, for those you know, good things that people are doing, and provide specific, consistent feedback when they observe those positive actions and behaviors. And if they do that, those things are likely to get repeated, Tim.

Tim Page- Bottorff

Perfect. Thank you so much for that, Pete. It was great catching up with you. And if the listeners want to reach out to Pete directly, you can actually do so at Pete at Safestart.com. Um that's P-E-T-E, Papa Echo, tango echo at safestart.com. So, Pete, thank you for joining us today. Uh, make sure you guys check out Pete's fine work on this channel and also on Larry Wilson Live. And to you, our listeners, thank you for spending some time with us today. And remember, make sure you share this episode and to tell others about us about this podcast. I'm Tim Page- Bottorff, and on behalf of Safe Talk with SafeStart, until next time. Keep feeding that organizational learning loop. We'll see you down the road.