Have you ever had an idea, or heard an idea, thinking it was brilliant, only to realise that the idea is not that new, and didn't come from where you thought it did? Welcome to the discipline of organisational psychology.    Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap.    Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.   Industrial and organisational psychology, or IO psych as it is often called, is well over 100 years old.  It was labelled as the exploration of 'real life' psychology. It's official birth is suggested to be 1913, with the publication of the first text on the subject called Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, by Hugo Munsterberg.   How is it that such a field, with 100 years of history and research and development, is not that familiar to most of us working in health and safety?   Well today I hope that will change just a little, as I dialogue with Diya Dey, an organisational psychologist based in Melbourne Australia. Diya has experience in both consulting and working in-house, and is currently in a organisational psychology role focussed on organisational wellbeing in the Victorian State Government.   When I first met Diya, I found her curious, and generous. A great combination in my book, so it was only natural that I would invite her into a conversation with the Safety on Tap community about how industrial and organisation psychology relates to, and can enhance, work health and safety.   Here's my conversation with Diya Dey:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep218

You seem to have answers for everything, he said to me.  He was 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time.  This is a podcast about how that can be, and how you can engage with better answers.

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

Before you think that this episode will be a gratuitous brag about how good I think I am wrapped up in some parable of a story, stay with me for a few minutes. 

When he said to me, 'you seem to have answers for everything', he WAS both right and wrong at the same time.                                                             

He was right because to him, it did seem that I had answers for lots of the things we were talking about and working through in our coaching together.  He was wrong, because I wasn't really giving him answers in the way that questions are usually asked, or problems are usually solved with solutions.  What I was giving him was responses.  Responses to his question, to his story, to his context. 

Responses aren't answers.  Responses are what we do when it's our turn, in a dialogue two or more people engage in a turn-taking exchange. Dialogue is an ancient word, very central to modern human experience, which comes from two Greek words put together: dia- translates to through, and logos translated to meaning, dialogos, or dialogue, the movement of flow of meaning through the people involved. 

You can see turn taking all the time, which isn’t dialogue. It's more like tennis.  One person serves, another receives and returns the ball.  The object of tennis, and the object of a huge proportion of our interactions with other people, is to get to the end, to resolve the point, usually in favour of one person or the other.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep217

What does it sound like, to have permission to not focus on certain things in health and safety? What one concept are we missing from risk management that makes a massive difference?

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

My guest today is Tim Lie.  Is he a safety professional? I ask him that, so you'll have to wait and see what he says.  What I can tell you is that his roles have included group HSE responsibilities, lifecycle alignment, culture, and capability.  You don't often hear those things in people's job titles, do you?

I met Tim a while back when I was invited along to a national health and safety team workshop.  It took all of 2 minutes for me to be really curious about Tim.  He is broadly read, he has both a practitioner and academic background, he is an engineer who loves solving problems but is hyper tuned into the messy people side of business, and he talks in a way that gives you a deep insight into how his brain works, which is fascinating. 

So that's why I wanted to introduce him to you! We had a wide ranging chat, dove deep on a few things but still covered a fair bit of ground.  I hope you enjoy, here's my chat with Tim Lie:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep216

Radio, television, and the content we consume have changed enormously since I was a kid. This is a podcast about the physics, and the metaphor of this change and how we can change too, but only if we want to remain resonant. 

 Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

 Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

There used to be just a handful of TV stations, and a handful of radio stations. It was kind of easy as a kid, because the TV guide fit onto a single page in the newspaper, and the discussion about what to watch was easier because there were only a few options to choose from. Cartoons on Channel 7 on the afternoons we were allowed to watch TV, then Channel 2 at 6pm for the ABC news, on Wednesdays the highlight of the TV week was a bit of police drama with Blue Heelers on Channel 7 at 8.30, and Friday night football on Channel 9 kicked off the sporting entertainment of the weekend. 

Bandwidth used to be a constraint.  On the radiomagnetic spectrum, there are only a limited number of frequencies which TV or radio could use to broadcast their content to you.  Even if you have a digital radio in your car or at home, you can still see the remnants of this bandwidth constraint, when a radio station includes a number in the name - Mix 106.5, 104.1 Today FM. 

The number is the actual frequency (measured in Mega Hz for FM stations), the actual number of times the wave goes up and down per second.  That number meant it was easy for you to tune into the right station, to listen to what they had to offer, loud and clear.  If you were one point off, one tweak of the dial, and not only did you have the wrong frequency, you had garbled, snowy, or no radio content to listen to. 

 There is no doubt that the use of the radiomagnetic spectrum for communication, and its associated constraint of a limited number of frequencies, shaped our culture enormously. 

Until the constraint disappeared.  With the internet we went from limited bandwidth to broadband - because we jumped off the radiomagnetic spectrum and entered a world of limitless channels to choose from, unlimited space for broadcast, and people who were more than happy to no longer be constrained to the 3 or 5 channels they used to have to choose from.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep215

Are the ideas of science at odds with a humanist approach? Can we solve all the big problems with big data and analytics? Can you really succeed with tools and practices and not understand the philosophy behind them?

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

The healthcare industry is one of the biggest growing in many economies around the world as population growth continues, more people are living longer, and advances in medical care and pharmaceuticals are preventing more and more illness and death than ever before. 

Dr Satyan Chari has been hard at work in this sector for many years, and I've been trying to get him on the podcast for ages.  He is a great communicator, has done some cool collaborative improvement projects, and has always struck me as someone who knows his stuff but is anything but a know-it-all. 

It's been a long time coming, and a little longer than usual, I hope you enjoy, here's Satyan:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep214

Two quick questions for you: first, did you get what you got in 2023 by design, or did your year kind of happen to you by accident? Second question, what's going to change for you in 2024? I have gifts for you inside, keep listening!

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

This episode will be released on the 18th of December, and many of you may have even stopped work for the year.  The past few weeks are a unique time in the yearly cycle, when the health and safety leaders I work with turn their minds to those two important questions I just asked:

 - Did you get what you got in 2023 by design, or did your year kind of happen to you by accident?

 - What's going to change for you in 2024?

We are now realising that just focussing on preventing bad stuff is a pretty limited view of health and safety, and that many of our approaches are limited in the application and the quality of their outputs. So how would we broaden out focus to study and improve normal work? It turns out there are theories, models, and people who've doing this for 80 years.  Allow me to introduce Human Factors, Ergonomics, and Systems Thinking. 

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

My guest today is Associate Professor Gemma Read, from the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems, at the University of the Sunshine Coast. 

We talk about one of Gemma's journal papers to bring this dialogue to life.  The paper, called "State of science: evolving perspectives on  human error", is really quite readable (click here to download it) [hyperlink URL is https://research.usc.edu.au/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/State-of-science-evolving-perspectives-on/99571607402621]

Here's Gemma:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep212

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

If we want to improve our performance in ANY area of our life, work or otherwise, there are ONLY three ways to do it, three kinds of how before we decide what to do.  For most of us, the decisions we make every day, many times a day, about which of the three ways to take, is invisible.  Until now.

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

Most people who go to the gym exercise more than people who exercise on their own because of the very fact that they are at a gym, and there are people around them are working out. And research suggests that you tend to exercise at the level of those people around you, whether they are high fitness or low fitness, you’ll tend to match them. 

Exercising at home is entirely possible for almost every person on the planet, and free.  

But when we invest in doing it with help and with the right kind of others, it almost always accelerates our results. 

Take that up a notch with a personal trainer, where you get more tailored help for your situation, you have built-in accountability and boosted motivation because of the design of the help/support you invest in (the PT). 

I mentioned there are three ways to improve performance, and only three. Everything you do in your life fits into one of these three categories. 

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep211

I don't agree.  And here's why.  We should hear this a lot more in health and safety practice.  The need to say these words, and the way it sounds when we say it, is more important to our effectiveness than you can imagine. 

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

In year one, my school report said that I participated with vigour in everything, creative and imaginative, but easily distracted.  In year two I was described as enthusiastic, with much to contribute, but restless and tended to distract other students.  In year three, Mrs Noonan lauded my vivid imagination, pleasing progress, but said straight out I was inconsiderate of others.  In year four I managed to earn the teachers label as polite, interested, capable, but lacking concentration and very easily distracted.  For the first time it seems, Miss Newcombe made the connection between my apparent weaknesses and my strengths, recognising my participation in group work and class discussions as extremely good.  And by year 6, poor Miss Rodgers who was one year out of teachers college didn't know what hit her.  Hard working, creative, and capable she said I was, and then came the shit sandwich of feedback - great participation in discussions, but the enthusiasm leads to rather thoughtless actions, which can be disruptive, and this does hinder Andrew producing work I was capable of. 

The biggest problem with communication is the assumption that it has happened.  And the #1 cause of conflict is when people fail to understand each other.  If I said to you that we don't have enough disagreement in health and safety, what would you say to me? Does that conjure up all the times that you've had to go up against a worker, supervisor, or manager on a hazard or inadequate risk control? Or when you've gone head to head with an auditor, client, or inspector? How many times have you had to defend a safety requirement, 'because, it's a requirement'? Or the system says? Or infamously, it's a legal requirement (said with such conviction that it's become automatic, even though deep down we know that most things labelled as legal requirements are not)?

Ok so we probably have enough disagreements. 

What if I tweaked my statement, and said to you that we don't have enough good quality disagreements in health and safety? What comes to mind? What does that mean?

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep209

I have some questions for you.  As you hear these, just nod your head or shake it if you agree or disagree.  Does it ever feel like you can't give a good clear definition of what health and safety is? That the work is never ending? That it's tricky to definitively describe what we are trying to do? That it's difficult to predict what will happen? That we can't make firm promises about our systems or controls or interventions? That what works in one context doesn't seem to in others so we are always creating things anew? That interpretation and multiple perspectives in health and safety are both frustrating but seemingly inevitable?

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. 

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way.  Welcome to you, you're in the right place.  If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

I wouldn't be bringing you this conversation today unless I was confident you'd be nodding to most of those questions I just asked.  The logical rational way to solve those problems might be to get a clearer definition of health and safety, to do more research on what works, to standardise, to invest better metrics to measure….the list of things people are putting huge time and resources into are significant. 

Well what if I suggested to you that a lot of it could be wasted effort? That maybe health and safety can't be adequately defined? That it is necessarily reinvented in each context? That we cannot ever know the answer or even the problem until we throw something against the wall?

The questions I asked you come from the definition of wicked problems, which means that if you were nodding along, it's more likely that you will come to see and understand health and safety as a wicked problem.

And if health and safety is a wicked problem, then trying to improve it using methods and mindsets, tools and techniques from other kinds of problems might be as useful as trying to mow your lawn with scissors, or to educate your kids using social media as the teacher. 

My guest today is Craig Ashurst.  Craig's a real T shaped person, with breadth of experience including risk and health and safety, and now significant depth in the area of wicked problems. 

If health and safety might be a wicked problem, then it might pay for us to understand wicked problems if we want to be more effective in our work. 

Here's Craig:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep209

We are in the business of change.  But we aren't always great at it.  This is a podcast about babies and blindness, carrots and elephants, and the necessary tension between where we want to go, and where we are right now. 

I don't think we will ever be able to rest on our laurels, even if we become the most influential and effective safety professionals in history.  Even if all the hazards are identified, all the controls are known and in place, I think two things will always be true.  The first truth is that the only thing that stays the same is change - change in operations, change in people, change in resourcing, change in the work environment or industry context.  The second truth, or maybe I should say what I believe to be true, comes from the High Reliability Organising research.  Even when everything seems great, our ongoing job is to create and maintain a sense of unease about things, which keeps us tuned into and anticipating change and what needs to change. 

I gave up the clever but trite phrase 'my job is to make myself redundant' many years ago for this reason. I will make the argument that not only is the job never finished, that we need to earn our place in our organisation using this very logic. 

And until that time, it can feel really, really frustrating.