From Reactive to Responsive: Revolutionize Safety Culture with Andrew Barrett – Episode 4 | ConTech

01:22
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be talking with you today. I think the word reformed that you mentioned in my intro is something that kind of gets people’s attention. There’s no twelve step programme like Alcoholics Anonymous that you go through to become a reformed health and safety person. But I’ve been doing this work for 20 odd years and spent the first part of my career trying to figure out how to do the ideas that we talk about in health and safety, in practice. 

01:48
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And then after figuring out all of their problems and challenges and friction and ineffectiveness and issues with that, I have then spent the back half of my career trying to figure out how to undo that and how to redo this thing that we talk about as health and safety in ways that are a bit more effective, a little less abrasive, a little more close to our mission of helping people go home safe and healthy every day. So that’s what I mean by reformed. 

02:14
Erin Khan
Gotcha. So tell us a little bit, how did you get into the industry to begin with and, like, why specifically health and safety? 

02:22
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Well, it was money, to be honest, which was not my idea. My dad was an executive working in government and as a senior leader, he said to me 25 years ago, or whatever it was, he said this health and safety thing, you should take a look at it because it’s only going to get bigger and bigger. Wasn’t wrong. And so I managed to find a degree at university that was specifically in health and safety, which was pretty rare at the time, and I’ve loved it ever since. I think it brings together for me things that I’m interested in, skills that I’ve obviously been able to use effectively, which is kind of the combination of the understanding of the world in a scientific sense, and the understanding of people in the sense of individuals and the way that they work together. 

03:15
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Having done a minor in psychology and then that idea about actually doing work, that’s meaningful. So that’s how I got into it. He said it was all about the money, but really it just worked out that there was work and it was good and I was okay at it. 

03:29
Erin Khan
Yeah, absolutely. Best of both worlds, fulfilling and I guess a rewarding career there. 

03:37
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
That’s the idea, yeah. 

03:39
Erin Khan
Yeah. So I’m curious to know, how exactly did safety on tap come about? Like, what is the specific mission, the vision, and how does it connect to your personal purpose with health and safety? 

03:53
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Well, I spent, like I said, my process of reformation is an ongoing one as a professional. And I realised that I needed more and more rope to be let out for me as a professional, as opposed to being kind of tightly constrained or controlled in a job. And I’ve had some amazing leaders and worked with some amazing teams in my time. And in my last role, I realised that I needed so much rope that effectively I had made a decision that I was going to be leaving that job and starting this business a year from a year out. And so I said to my boss at the time, I’m going to deliver you the results in this job that we’ve agreed on, which were pretty significant. I said, I need a year to do it and then I’ll hand it over to you. 

04:40
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And what I realised is that I kind of needed to say to him, just let me go for a year. I don’t need you to get in my way, I don’t need you to tell me what to do. And so I was able to do some amazing work in safety and design in the national Broadband network, which is one of Australia’s largest infrastructure projects. And so I achieved what I needed to achieve in that year. And it reaffirmed my decision that if I really believed in doing things differently and needing lots of space and flexibility to try new things, be prepared to fail. Having a job and a boss and being inside an organisation that most organisations don’t like failure, even though they talk about innovation, which necessitates failure. I realised that I needed to do that on my own. 

05:23
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And the best way to test whether that was worth it or worthwhile is whether people were prepared to pay me for it, not in a job, because most people aren’t accountable for results in their jobs, for their paycheck. But really, could I be accountable for it? And so that’s how I started. 

05:39
Erin Khan
Wow. Tell us a little bit about, I’m curious to know about some of the results or the outcomes and things that you kind of achieved through that whole process. 

05:50
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Well, probably the best way to begin answering that is to think about when we work in health and safety, what’s the most significant impact that we can claim that we can confidently claim that we can point to and say our impact or our work or our fingerprints were on that thing. And it took me until that last year of my career working in a real job to answer that question. And so the national Broadband network is a telecommunications network. So they dig holes and put pipes and cables in the ground and hang them off power poles and things like that. We put satellites into orbit and antennas on roofs and things like that. So plenty of high risk work. 

06:33
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
The volume of work was across the country and the timeframes were pretty ambitious because there was a pretty significant political commitment around how much money they were spending and the need to roll out this network. And I worked in operations up until that point in time, and operations was the place where, and I don’t know whether I’m allowed to swear, but the shit rolled downhill. And so in an infrastructure project, there’s really only three key parts, which is design and engineering, then there’s the construction and then there’s the operation, and that’s the three steps of the life cycle. 

07:09
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So I lived in operations and there were so many things coming downstream from both construction in terms of quality and engineering and design in terms of selection of equipment and how it fit together and whether there was or wasn’t information or controls in place, that I just became really noisy on behalf of my operations stakeholders who had no ability to actually eliminate or minimise those risks because the opportunity was gone in the lifecycle. So in a restructure, they created a role, because there wasn’t a role for safety and design. There was no strategy for safety and design at the national Broadband network for many years. And they said, right, well, you can go and fix it. And I said, great, excellent. Tell me about the resources and the team. And they said, no, no, it’s just you. 

07:53
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And so I had to ask myself that question. How much impact can I have with the very limited resources that I had? And so it came down to a really simple concept, which is, if we’re going to put hundreds of thousands of big boxes on the side of the road, which means that the people who work in those boxes, when they open the doors, they may or may not get hit by a cardinal. Then what control measures can we put in place for the design and location of those things so that they don’t get hit by a car or they don’t get electrocuted or, you know, whatever those key risks were. Yeah. 

08:25
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So there were only five or six key things that I influenced based on a risk assessment, which sounds really boring but important, and we got to multiply that impact hundreds of thousands of times. And that’s the biggest impact I’ve ever had in my career. 

08:39
Erin Khan
Got it. Wow. And you do have to start from somewhere, so, yeah. Nandan, looks like you have a thought there. 

08:47
Nandan Thakar
I do, yeah. Well, I want to build on that, so I guess that’s really good to know how a certain organisation that was doing a large sort of nation building infrastructure project was happening. And then at shoreworks, we focus on those sorts of projects ourselves. However, it looks like your safety on tap mission is broader than that, because you have every organisation have their own safety policy plan, but at your end you almost sort of cross pollinate, given your work, that you have opportunity to observe and, I suppose, influence, you know, at 50,000ft level and then help people down on the ground. So I’ve been part of a lot of organisations myself where they all have a safety plan. However, you know, at the risk of being too sure of themselves or not evolving with the challenges of the labour movement, etcetera. Yeah. 

09:57
Nandan Thakar
I’m very keen to explore how, you know, the learnings of cross pollination, your observations across the industry, and how everyone benefits as safety on tap sort of grows across the spectrum. 

10:10
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, absolutely. You remind me of a quote by Eric Holnagel, and he said, the gap between work as we imagine it and work as done is bigger than we can imagine it. And I think that’s the space that I realised I had an opportunity to help when I left my job. The number one word that people said to me, because you only get this feedback once you leave or you die. So I was in the first category, which was that they trust. They trusted me to make change so trust and change were kind of two key bits there. And so I asked myself, well, where have I struggled in my career and where have the teams that I’ve worked with struggled? And it’s in that gap between the plan and the reality, the intention and the execution, the commitment and the. 

10:58
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
The reality on the ground. And so that’s the hard bit, the change bit. And so I started to listen really carefully to the safety professionals who I wanted to help, because they’re my audience, if you like. They’re the group of people who I want to serve. And so I started to listen to them really carefully because I knew that my experience told me certain things, but if I could tap into hundreds and thousands of people’s insights, I would be able to better work out how I can help them. And that’s led to the work at safety on tap. So, for instance, when I talk about the work that I do with health and safety leaders, there’s three key changes that I hold myself and them accountable for, which is how do you become more relevant to your organisation and its operations? 

11:48
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Because often when we’re considered to be peripheral, sidelined, irrelevant afterthoughts, those kinds of things. So relevance is one. The second one is how do you become more valued by your stakeholders? Because often, you know, it’s the old barbecue conversation. The reason why people don’t like telling people at a barbecue they work in health and safety is because most of the time that creates a negative response. You’re not the kind of person who you people want to hang out with. Now, that’s not a criticism, that’s the reality. So we have to get really curious about why that’s the case. And so how do we become more valuable or valued by our stakeholders? That’s the second one. And then the third one is, as you mentioned, Erin, is how do we get closer to shaping the actual health and safety of work? 

12:31
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Because we do plenty of things in the name of health and safety that have no impact whatsoever on safety in reality. So that’s the work as imagined workers done gap. And that’s wasteful at best, and it’s dangerous at worst because it actually takes resources away from really important stuff that might actually save lives and, you know, keep people healthy. So they’re kind of three key levers that I help people with, which is around, you know, being relevant, being valued and being more effective. Does that make sense? 

13:00
Nandan Thakar
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And in terms of, you know, you being able to really help the health and safety leaders in different contexts and backgrounds, what are the challenges you see in terms of them being open to new ideas? Because everyone’s got a plan, but, you know, do they iterate enough for the modern challenges? And I dare say a lot of people jolt into action after they have had an incident. So they have a plan, then they have an incident, unfortunately, and then they call in the experts to revamp what has been stagnant for ages. So, yeah, quite keen to understand the challenges that you see in sort of diverse organisations out there. 

13:49
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, sure. So there’s a lot of nuance in this space. So the first thing that came to mind when you were reflecting on that is the difference between reacting and responding. And people often would use those words interchangeably, but they’re not interchangeable. So we react when we’re surprised and we react without much preparation. And that is actually the characteristic of almost all responses to incidents where there is an overdose reaction. You know, that’s the word that people say. And there’s a flurry of resources and attention and effort that goes into a risk that existed yesterday, the day before the incident happened. So that’s different from responding, which is how do we pay attention to the cadence, the flow, the changes, the adjustments that are happening in our operations and how do we respond to that? 

14:37
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So the analogy is a little bit more like driving when the weather changes. So as it gets dark, we turn our lights on and we might leave a little bit more distance, and as it rains, we turn our windscreen wipers on and we pay more attention to what’s happening around us. So being able to respond to operations and do that in a proactive way, being mindful of risk and anticipating what could go wrong, that’s a very different way of operating. So that’s a really good contrast of what I call modes of operating that characterise health and safety teams and how they teach their operations how to behave. So that’s kind of two examples. There’s a couple more. You also mentioned about change, that we are really good generally at the technical skills, which I call the what questions. 

15:27
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
We’re really bad at the why questions and the how questions. So we do things like write a document, create a new process and we communicate it to people and we assume that things are going to change, it’s not going to happen. That’s not how it works in reality. And I still have conversations with people who can’t understand why that doesn’t work. And so I spend a lot of time with people, helping them to understand the realities of change on the basis of like what contemporary science tells us about that, what the complexity theory tells us about that there’s lots of change theories that are out there that and lots of them that are pretty average to be honest, in terms of misunderstanding how change really happens. You used the word iterate before. 

16:10
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
That’s a really good example of where we can take small minimum viable steps in a direction that gives us feedback and then the feedback is the thing that helps us respond and adjust what we’re doing. That’s very different from ‘write a strategy’ and then come up with a twelve month, two year, three year, five year plan and then implement the plan and then we’re surprised when that doesn’t actually match reality. I don’t think we should be so surprised. 

16:38
Erin Khan
Yeah, yeah. A couple questions to follow up on that. So you said complexity theory and for my own sake and maybe some of the listeners out there, could you summarise very briefly Baz, what that is? 

16:53
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
You realise the irony in your question, Erin, to very simply and briefly summarise Complexity. So this is the challenge, right, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. I just showed, I’ll tell you a little bit about how I’ve learned about it. So I realised that one of the ways for us in health and safety to get better is to look outside of health and safety because we’ve kind of got our lane sorted out. It needs to change, but we know, at least we know what’s in our lane. So when we look outside of that we go oh, what does other domains teach us about the world and the way we might be able to make change and be more effective. So a good example of that comes from Dave Snowden’s work in a model. 

17:35
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Sorry it’s not a model, it’s a framework called Cynefin, C-Y-N-E-F-I-N, which is a Welsh word, and in that it talks about different contexts which guide our, the way that we respond to the world. And so in simple contexts it’s pretty straightforward to diagnose a problem. There’s probably an answer that fits that problem and then it should be pretty predictable in terms of what happens. And in a situation like that you can use best practise, there’s no question about that. And often people talk about best practices in the health and safety industry. Best practise, best practise standards. Our management team set a goal of best practice, but it only works when things are really simple. And I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t know many organisations that exist in a really simple context. 

18:19
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
There might be parts of it that are simple, but there’s lots of things that are. That is complex in that context. So then you look at a situation which is a little bit more complicated, where it’s difficult to work out cause and effect, in which case you need to have a look at good practice, because there’s different ways of doing things according to the results that you get. And then you move into, and I won’t go into it in great detail, then you move into a complex and then a chaotic sphere, in which case good practice and best practice go out the window. And what you need to do is to shift entirely into a hypothesis driven, sense making approach where you know that you don’t know what’s going to work. 

18:58
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And the only way to navigate through that is to test and try and iterate, like you said. Nandan, does it, does that help? Erin? 

19:05
Erin Khan
Yeah. Yeah, it does. Sounds like there’s a lot more to learn there. I’m also curious. So I know, Nandan, you brought up, or at least it came up earlier. Baz, you said the difference between reacting and responding. And with a lot of the technological advancements today and our ability to use data, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on data gathering and interpretation to help shift some of our safety practises to more of that responding side. Instead of the, oh, crap, we’re now scrambling and reacting and trying to figure something out on the fly. 

19:46
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the contributions to the reactive problem is the increase, the sheer increase in the amount of data that we have the capacity to collect. And when I say we have the capacity to collect, it comes down to two things, storage and bandwidth. So we can store a lot of it and we can communicate a lot of it. And, you know, that’s basic technology, like servers and the Internet. Now, the interesting thing is that we have started collecting lots and lots of data without actually doing it within, which means that we’re getting it, but we don’t actually know what we’re going to do with it. Now that in and of itself isn’t a problem, but often what happens is that we. We get trapped into a thing called Maslow’s hammer’s problem. Have you heard of Maslow’s hammer? 

20:35
Erin Khan
I haven’t heard of Maslow’s Hammer. I’ve heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

20:39
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
But yeah, different. Different from that. 

20:41
Erin Khan
Not the hammer. 

20:42
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Maslow’s Hammer. Maslow’s Hammer is just that. If all you have in your hand is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. 

20:50
Erin Khan
Oh, yes, yes, yes. 

20:52
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
You’ve heard that. I know you’ve heard that before, but. 

20:53
Erin Khan
Not by the name of Maslow, which I guess shame on me for not checking the source. 

20:58
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
No, that’s okay. I did a podcast episode on the Safety on Tap podcast. The point being is that we have to think about what other tools we need in order to respond to the context that changes around us. So nails aren’t very useless if you’re building a structure made of steel. So if you said to a builder who was building a structure out of steel, you know, where are your nails? What type of nails do you use? They would look at you like you’re strange. And they very rarely use hammers. 

21:27
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So that’s kind of a good analogy, I think, for when we have lots of data, then we have to ask ourselves different questions about why are we collecting the data, what is the data for, how are we going to analyse it, and how we’re going to then present it back to people. Now, the thing is that we can no longer use data in a simple way. And we still try to do it in the sense of taking huge data sets and reducing them down to a simple indicator, like the much criticised lost time, injury frequency rate, or total recordable frequency rate, or things like that. So if that’s the case, we then have to get a lot cleverer about how we use all this data. And so what that means is that we have to ask different kinds of questions. 

22:07
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So if you talk to a data analyst, a person who professionally analyses data, the first question they will ask you, or one of the first questions they’ll ask you, is, what questions do you have? What hypotheses do you want to test with the data that we’ve got? And so. But we never ask ourselves that question, health and safety. We just say, well, let’s look at the data and then we’ll just decide somehow, like it’s a total enigma. Yeah, but we figure it out using hammers, and so it all looks like a nail, as opposed to taking other ways to look at it. So, for example, there’s some companies, including a company based in Perth, Western Australia, who realise that a really rich source of data is the conversations that people have on the front line in operations to plan their work. 

22:55
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So sometimes that’s called a pre-start or a take five or something like that. It’s the conversation at the beginning of the work that’s meant to help the people plan to succeed. And so they said, well, most of the data that people collect is the sheet of paper that is like a physical record, the number that have been done, how many were compliant or not compliant, like variations on that. It’s really a hammer. And instead they said, well, hang on, what if we listened to the conversations? Because when you ask people, what is a good take five or a good pre start? They say it sounds like, and then they describe what it sounds like. So they said, well, what if we actually collected what it sounds like? 

23:33
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And so their pre-start is a phone, press a button, it records it, and then they can do all sorts of really cool analysis on things like, were all the voices in the group heard? Was the youngest person able to speak? Or was it just the senior person? Were there language barriers? Like, was there hesitation or a lack of understanding? Were there emotions that came out in the group? So are people frustrated or angry or upset or under pressure? You can do all that kind of analysis with large language models right now, which have been around for a very long time before everyone realised what GPT stood for. So that’s kind of an example. And that’s only one example of where they said data is conversations. 

24:16
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And so we use the technology that’s available to capture conversations and do different kinds of sense making with it. So I think that’s a really good contrast of our ability to rethink what data means and then what the data is for. 

24:31
Erin Khan
Yeah. The intentionality means a lot. 

24:36
Nandan Thakar
Yeah, yeah. Look, from. From my perspective, that’s an excellent example, Andrew, in terms of sort of looking at patterns within data that can make you more proactive. So obviously, Shoreworks has a very strong health and safety module, among other things. And what we find is that based on a company’s culture, they put more emphasis on sort of incident versus hazard versus stake, five versus journey planner. But even a simple thing like a fatigue calculator, as simple as what example you were mentioning. How are you feeling? What time did you wake up? Have you had enough sleep? Clock in, clock out? That has been quite powerful in just looking at a trend of a certain individual or a group of how much load they are feeling through the task that they do. 

25:35
Nandan Thakar
A lot of our projects and the companies that use our product are in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Pilbara. So all that is you can get subtle trends and then the data can help influence what you need to recalibrate to. 

25:52
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, and it’s funny, I remember a project I did as a consultant along, working for a big consultancy a long time ago, and we were doing a project that required noise monitoring. It was really straightforward. Go into the noisy area, monitor the noise. Does it require control measures? Which was at that time mostly personal protective equipment? And I said there are ways to subjectively assess that. And so there were barriers to cost and how quickly they could do these assessments on the basis of how many of these very expensive noise monitors they could get in various parts of the country. And so I said to them, why don’t we experiment with a subjective assessment? 

26:30
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And then what you can do is take your subjective results and then eventually, when you go around and do the objective measurement, compare them and just see how valid they were. So this idea of saying, take this, take that, and then see how they compare again from a data analysis point of view is really interesting. So when you talk about fatigue calculators, that’s a good example of where that’s one way to do it. And then, and yet most people have a consumer device on their wrist. I don’t, I’m not wearing one. So obviously that’s not me that can give you. There you go, Aaron. There you go, Ned. That, that, you know, potentially gives you that data. So then you can say, well, let’s have a look at the validity and the accuracy and the predictability of our process. 

27:11
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So it’s not about what’s right or wrong, because people like Drew Dawson are the experts in fatigue. So that stuff is kind of the book’s been written already, but what we can do is use the technology and the way we collect and analyse data to say, well, how good are we at this and can we do better? And that for me is really interesting because none of those solutions come out of a single box, single solution, a single management system or process or piece of software. It’s one of the reasons why APIs, the ability for having a common language for software systems to be able to talk to each other, is one of the most powerful tools that was ever created because the individual pieces of software aren’t nearly as powerful as our ability to connect them together. 

27:51
Erin Khan
I think one of the things we don’t APR, or I guess kind of forget is like the industry is. So I guess relying on collaboration to a massive extent to get these projects done and our technology on the backend has to be just as adept and collaborative as the projects are, to be able to serve its needs effectively. So yeah, I love that point about the APIs for sure. 

28:18
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And I’ve never seen it. So if you think about the opportunity for doing great work, like big scale stuff, like I mentioned with NBN, big infrastructure projects are the place to be, megaprojects and Giga projects where you’re spending billions, multiple billions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars. And I’ve never, now this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, but I’ve never seen, I’ve never spoken to anyone who has worked on an infrastructure project that has solved the simple problem of the principal, or the principal contractor having a certain system and their subcontractors having other systems and how do we get that data? Like that’s such a simple problem and yet it’s really complex to kind of solve. And I know I’m talking to the experts here, but that fascinates me. 

29:02
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And so again, my work is to help people to figure out what’s the mindset and the conceptual thinking that we need and the change process that we can engage in order to explore those really juicy questions. 

29:17
Nandan Thakar
Yeah, I’ll take that one. That was why we created shoreworks, to solve that big complex problem of how we can have a tool, a process that runs end to end among a pyramid of contractors and have that consistent uptake through codifying that logic across boundaries. But yeah, that’s an interesting problem to solve. It’s not easy, but the value is much higher in trying to help this sort of chain of contractors that go from a head contractor to right down to people doing job on the ground, including the challenge of handover, because you can do a great project, but once the infrastructure is built, you still got to look after it for decades to come. The richness of data and the handover that you can do to the asset owner, how can you have a lot of those good behaviours continue through the asset lifecycle? 

30:29
Nandan Thakar
Management as well is something that we are focused on. I do want to explore just changing tactical in terms of takeaways for our viewers, for health and safety leaders who might be listening to this podcast. Yeah, in terms of, I don’t know if you like this term, but I would, I really love your title of chief connector or in my world I would say almost like a safety whisperer. You like that? Well, so, you know, how can a safety leader, health and safety leader really entrench this culture of innovation, culture of continuous learning? If you can have some pointers for them, because to me that is key. Right? Like, you cannot be stagnant, you have to keep moving. 

31:31
Nandan Thakar
I’ll give you one example that I observed being an IT leader within a large construction company, Covid came through obviously with notice and with incredible impact. And this domain of sort of almost psychosocial hazard, which I think you’ve covered in one of your podcasts as well. Yeah, that’s a domain that was less explored before, and now it is sort of front and centre of how people are feeling with hybrid work, with, you know, travel, all that. So, yeah, how to create a culture of continuous learning with sort of new concepts coming through as things become more complex. 

32:12
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is that in order for us to be effective, we have to, and this is an evolutionary concept, we have to be fit to our environment. So when Charles Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands, one of the main things that he learned about his evolution, sorry, his theory of evolution was that he said when times were tough and the Galapagos islands are very rocky and there’s not much soil, and so if there was any seeds, then the seeds would fall into the crevices of the rocks. And so the birds that had the longest beaks were the ones that survived over that period of time until it became more plentiful and there were more seeds around that were on the surface rather than just falling in the rocks. 

32:57
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So one of the things that’s going to help us be fit to our environment is to understand what the purpose and the operation of our organisation is. So the other day I had a conversation with someone who works in the. They manufacture a food product, let’s just say that, right? Let’s just call it hot dogs. They don’t make hot dogs, but let’s just call them hot dogs. And so I said to them, they were talking about strategy and getting resources for certain things and that being challenging, and I said, what’s the currency? What’s the thing that makes sense to talk about in an organisation like yours? And he was talking about money, and then I said, but it also seems that you should be talking about hot dogs. And he goes, what do you mean? 

33:40
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And I’m like, well, let’s talk about a workers compensation claim. So the cost of a workers compensation claim is x amount of dollars, and we failed to manage risk for that particular person. And there’s a human being who needs care and there’s a long tail, potentially, of liability associated with that. So if people aren’t paying attention to your numbers. Start talking about hot dogs. So how many hot dogs do we need to make in order for us to recover the costs that we lost associated with that claim? And so that’s kind of an example, kind of a slightly funny one, about how, if we understand and use the language of and the goals of our organisation, then our work is going to get a whole lot better. 

34:22
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
One of the macro shifts that health and safety professionals need to wrap their heads around is that if you can’t work out how you fit within the ESG frame in your organisation, you’re going to become extinct, you are not going to survive. And that might mean that you might not have a job in that organisation for a couple of years and you might rotate through jobs. But if you really want to be effective, we’ve got to figure out how we make sense in the context of ESG, because that ain’t going away. So that’s kind of an example, I think in the first instance. The second one that comes to mind for me is that we often wax lyrical about psychology. 

35:00
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And, I mean, I did a minor in psychology, I’m not a psychologist, so I know a little bit, enough to be dangerous and to be curious. It could go either way. And so one of the things that we talk about is, how do you make change with people? You know, is it that attitudes and beliefs lead to behaviour, or is it that we change behaviours and then attitudes and beliefs change? That’s a really common question. And so I have the view that in my practical experience, working with heads of health and safety and their teams as a coach, over long periods of time, seeing change that happens or doesn’t happen, that the best way to operate, to change culture is to not try and change culture, it’s to try and change behaviour. So can you say that one more. 

35:42
Erin Khan
Time, Baz, just for emphasis, say that one more time? 

35:45
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s super. So the best. The best way to change culture is not to try and change culture, it’s to change behaviour. So if you want to shift from blame and reacting to getting curious and anticipating and responding to operations, then what behaviours need to change for that? So you use the handover example before Nandan. At the end of a project, there are thousands of handovers between shifts and between disciplines and with gates of particular packages of work in a construction project. All of those handovers are actually critical points where we can learn about what’s happening. So if you want better continuity, if you want better quality, if you don’t want, as I said before, the shit to roll downhill, then pay attention to the behaviours that you want in handover. That’s kind of a simple example. You know, the. 

36:38
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
We used the take five example before. If you want better pre-start planning, then help people change their behaviours. And so if they’re focused on filling out the paperwork, get rid of the paperwork, teach them how to have better conversations, give them feedback about that and ask them for feedback. A common example that has come up and came to mind from a coaching conversation recently was, you know, we think culture ties with leadership and that’s true. And so we want leaders to walk around and show that they’re visible and be interested in operations and commit to fixing things. That’s, you know, leadership walk or leadership commitment kind of programme. 

37:14
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
And I said to this, in this coaching conversation, which was with a group, it wasn’t with an individual, I said the number one piece of data that I’m interested in about that approach, because I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, I’m not going to judge. It is. What does the person on the receiving end think and feel about that interaction? So the worker who’s been interrupted by the senior leader walking around in their shiny shoes and with a very new bright orange vest on, what does that worker feel about that interaction? Was it an interruption? Was it worthwhile? Were they treated as a valuable, reasonable human being? 

37:49
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Do you believe that senior manager who’s taken some action to fix something, which is usually just give you the tools and the resources you need to get your job done, do you believe that they’re going to actually take action? That’s the only data that matters. And guess how many organisations actually do that as a way of evaluating leadership walks? None. So I think that. That it’s so those behaviour changes are the things that I think give us an opportunity, like you said, Nandan before, to iterate, to try a very small change, like teaching people how to ask better questions is a good example. By pausing their response to things, by not calling them names. Like there’s a million examples that we can pick for any category of risk and the changes in behaviours. 

38:32
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
You don’t have to be right, you just have to test it and get some feedback. And if your sample is big enough, then you can say, hey, our whole division or our whole organisation should do this. 

38:41
Nandan Thakar
Excellent. So from my perspective, what would be really good is to leave people with some simple steps that they could start taking almost immediately and some practical things. Yeah, I would love for you to just call out if they do three things out of this podcast and obviously follow your work. But if they do three things, what would that be? 

39:11
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
The first one is get on the same page. If you want to go on a journey around the world in a sailing ship like Magellan did in the year 1500 or thereabouts, he had to convince people that the earth was round, not flat. And there were plenty of people in the year 1500 who thought the earth was flat. Now, if he wanted to convince people to get on a boat and go on a journey around the world that they thought was going to be a suicide mission, he wouldn’t have had many people going with him. 

39:36
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So I think that’s a really practical takeaway, which is that if you’re not on the same page as other people about what the world looks like or what is happening right now, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to go anywhere on a journey of change with them. So that’s a really practical one, which is seek to understand and get on the same page as the people you’re trying to work with, which is usually your operations. The second, one thing. The second thing is ask yourself what’s the worldview that you’ve got about things. So if you think that systems are the solution, then I would encourage you to really critically reflect on where that is true and where that’s not true. 

40:17
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
If you think risk management is the solution, or if you think insert thing is the solution, the best way for you to be convincing for other people as a marketer, because we’re all marketers in the health and safety game, is to be able to explain why you believe that something is true. And most of the time in health and safety, when you ask someone to defend their logic or defend their kind of pitch of the idea, we’re not very good at it because we just inherited it. We just got told to do it because I got taught that at university or in a TAFE course, or my boss told that, told me that. Or the system says that it’s a requirement. That’s not good enough. So think. 

40:55
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Think really carefully about what you think is happening and how you can defend what you think is happening. Now, what will happen is you’ll get really uncomfortable really quickly, like I did, and I’d like to encourage people to say the discomfort, the area of discomfort, that’s the place where we learn and we get better. So there’s a couple of practical takeaways. I hope that makes sense. 

41:15
Nandan Thakar
Absolutely. 

41:16
Erin Khan
Yeah, I love those takeaways I’ve been taking some notes, as I do, and some of the key nuggets that I’ve captured as well is when we think about health and safety and kind of anything really, this is just good advice in general, is to make sure that we’re having relevance, value to our stakeholders and we’re being effective. So I picked that up from earlier in the conversation. Loved the Maslow’s hammer. So we have to be intentional about what we’re collecting. So everything doesn’t look like a nail, right? So not everything’s a nail. We have to be a little bit more, I guess, keyed into the why and the how. And then another note that I made at the end there, which I just. 

42:02
Erin Khan
I really like this one is shifting the behaviour is one of the best ways to shift culture, if you will, instead of just kind of hammering down on culture, culture. Well, let’s take a look at what are the actions that we’re actually doing. And we say it all the time, actions speak the loudest. And if we iterate on that and continuously improve, we start to slowly shift, maybe even faster than we thought. Shift that culture to a place where it having more productive outcomes and helping us be responding instead of reacting to things as they come up. 

42:38
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So can I add one more practical one? Is that okay? 

42:41
Erin Khan
Absolutely. 

42:43
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Okay, cool. So I think so again, this might sound like it’s fluffy, but it’s not. So we use lots of words like culture or risk or safety or system or process or control, and we use those words. And for people like us, we’re not along, like because they’re familiar words. But a lot of the time we’re not actually using the words in a way that what I mean when I use the word is the same as what you mean when you use the word. So there’s nothing wrong with culture or behaviourism or, you know, things that sometimes get criticised. But a practical takeaway is spend time with the people who you work with to talk about what the words mean. 

43:25
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
So if you talk about what compliance means, or you talk about what safe means, or you talk about what go no go in terms of a hold point means, if we can just get really clear on that language and what we all mean, again, it’s like the round earth, flat earth kind of thing. Get on the same page about the words that we use and I guarantee you will be flabbergasted by what you can learn and how good things can get without doing anything super complicated. 

43:53
Erin Khan
Yeah, there’s a good reason why we say people process technology. That people piece is kind of the big lever of the bigger picture. So. Absolutely. Thanks for sticking that in there. 

44:06
Nandan Thakar
I just want to thank Baz, and I want to give a shout out to his Safety On Tap Podcast, too. I’ve certainly binged my way through the weekend to be ready for this call, and I got a lot of value. 200 plus episodes. Baz, you’ve been at this for 20 years. Podcast for seven years. So there’s a lot of value there. So everyone, please check out his podcast. 

44:27
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Awesome. Thanks, guys. 

44:29
Erin Khan
Fantastic. Thanks, Baz. Take care. 

44:32
Andrew ‘Baz’ Barrett
Cheers. 

44:33
Nandan Thakar
Thank you. 

44:34
Erin Khan
Thank you, Baz and Nandan, for joining me on this episode of the SureWorx Podcast for our listeners. We’re excited to bring you to the leading edge of innovation in construction. Over the course of this show, we will be hosting leaders from the industry as they share their experience and insight. Finally, if you’re interested in being a guest on the SureWorx podcast, don’t be shy. Please send us an email at podcast@sureworx.io. That’s podcast@sureworx.io to connect with us. Thanks again, and be sure to tune in for our next episode. I’m Erin Kahn, and this is the SureWorx Podcast.