The Recognition Factor: Transforming Workplace Culture | A Scratchie Podcast
Discover how instant recognition and rewards are revolutionizing workplace culture across industries. Each week, join us for insights from leaders who are transforming their organizations through innovative approaches to employee recognition - from safety excellence in construction to exceptional service in quick-service restaurants.
What happens when you recognize good work the moment it happens? How do you build a culture where everyone feels valued? Through conversations with industry pioneers, behavioral scientists, and organizational leaders, we explore how immediate recognition drives lasting change.
Learn how companies like McDonald's are using Scratchie to reward excellence on the spot, how construction leaders are revolutionizing safety culture, and how organizations across all sectors are using instant recognition to boost engagement, productivity, and innovation.
What You'll Learn
- How to implement effective recognition programs
- The science behind instant rewards and behavior change
- Real success stories from diverse industries
- Practical strategies for cultural transformation
- Latest trends in workplace engagement
- Industry-specific implementation insights
Who Should Listen
- Operations and district managers
- HR and culture transformation leaders
- Safety and compliance professionals
- Performance management specialists
- Team leaders and supervisors
- Anyone interested in building better workplaces
New episodes release weekly. Join us to discover how recognition is reshaping the future of work.
Visit scratchie.com to learn more about transforming your workplace culture through instant recognition.
The Recognition Factor: Transforming Workplace Culture | A Scratchie Podcast
Audits, Culture, and the Reality of Workplace Safety | A Conversation with Ben Hutchinson
What if your sense of security at work is just smoke and mirrors? Find out as we chat with Ben Hutchinson, a safety professional and PhD candidate, who takes us on his journey from human factors to exploring the depths of organizational safety. We challenge the notion of false safety systems and their symbolic nature, dissecting real-world examples like the Pike River mine disaster to illuminate the chasm between perceived and actual safety. Ben's insights push us to rethink how we approach safety management and ensure that our systems do more than just check boxes.
Explore the fascinating world of motivation and incentives in workplace safety as we contrast Skinner's behaviorism with Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory. We critically assess the impact of rewarding lag indicators such as lost-time injuries and examine innovative solutions like the "ConvoCard" that aim to revolutionize safety communication. Greg Smith's critiques on the burden of excessive safety documentation are also on the table, as we delve into the challenges faced by supervisors and the quest for genuine safety conversations.
Lastly, we tackle the complex interplay of incentives, audits, and organizational culture. Unpack the role of audits in safety improvement and their tendency to focus on compliance rather than learning. Ben shares his insights on crafting safe, high-performing projects, emphasizing the importance of aligning motivations and the significant impact of design. Join us as we explore how craftsmanship, incentives, and systems collaborate to foster a safer, more productive workplace.
Ready to take the next step? Visit https://www.scratchie.com/book-a-demo to see how Scratchie can help you recognise and reward safe behaviour on your projects. The future of construction safety starts here.
Welcome, ben. Thanks for coming here. Thanks For those. I'm going to give a bit of a background of your bio in the notes. Oh, please don't yeah, that's right, but do you want to? So you're doing your PhD studies in. Well, I'd like for you to sort of tell a bit of background and to talk a bit about your PhD, just as a way in really to the convo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, ben, I like long walks on the beach. So actually the PhD is a part-time hobby, it's sort of my day job is a safety person and I've always been really fascinated and driven by the science, I guess, of what we do and why we do it. So I guess in sort of the organizational sense, I started in human factors and fatigue, did a lot of consulting pipelines and oil and gas and then, probably like a lot of safety people, fell into safety and then when I was in safety for a few years, that's when I decided to go down the PhD sort of route. Even before I worked in organisations I was a sports scientist and still heavily focused on safety research and science and evidence-based practice. So if I wasn't in safety I probably still would have been doing a PhD in something else, right, yeah, because I've come across.
Speaker 1:I'm sure many have. That's where I found you in LinkedIn and you're really good at circulating. Here's a paper I just read and here's my thoughts on it and I really appreciate it because I get a sort of an insight into how you think and that sort of thing and that's been happening over quite some time, right.
Speaker 2:I don't know when I started, but it's probably been since 2014. It's definitely not been as systematised, though. It was probably more ad hoc back then, and then, just over the years, when I read more, I just happen to write more and then just post it on LinkedIn. But yeah, it's been going for a while.
Speaker 1:It's a really good way to do it, isn't it? Because PhDs involve so much research and so much reading. To be able to share that as you go must be kind of motivating as well.
Speaker 2:So the stuff that I summarise isn't connected to my PhD, so I've been really intentional to separate the two. All right.
Speaker 2:So very little of what I summarise is related to my research. Maybe after I finish maybe I might start covering more of the stuff that's motivated me, but originally the motivation was just besides it's hey, this is interesting. And really cool was my frustration with journal paywalls. Like a lot of the really cool, interesting stuff is locked behind paywalls, so I was like I have access to it, I'll just give you some findings from it, and then sort of it grew from there and then you're talking about how it's sort of it's useful for my own learning now because I don't have a photographic mind, so if I remember something that interests me I can easily just go back and find my reflections for it. And this was all before sort of the machine learning and LLMs really took off, so I would say back in the dark ages a few years ago, like it just wasn't as easy to retrieve sort of your own consolidated thoughts.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so what is your PhD on?
Speaker 2:I'm looking at false safety and sort of symbolism in safety, so the way that our safety management approaches and systems can sometimes work against us and create risk rather than help us navigate risk. It's kind of a niche area, but it's been really interesting.
Speaker 1:What's I mean? Can you sort of can we double click down on that? And sort of.
Speaker 2:So a really useful example I found is the Pike River mine disaster in New Zealand.
Speaker 2:Useful example I found is the Pike River mine disaster in New Zealand and in the Royal Commission they spoke about the ventilation management system and like sorry, the ventilation management plan.
Speaker 2:And now the plan's core goal was to help manage ventilation. I mean, it's a coal mine, wet coal mine, gas is a big issue, and they had a plan that was purportedly sort of based on best international standards and for New Zealand that was Queensland and New South Wales, australia. So the plans like on the surface seemed to address ventilation, like it sort of made the right claims and had sort of the right, sensibly right controls, but in practice it just couldn't achieve what it was meant to achieve, even though it sort of allayed fears, like if you're a manager at the mine, um, you may be less concerned about gas because you've got a apparently systematic plan that's apparently covers all that Um. So that's why I'm looking at is how it turned out in the Pike river. You know they had the blowout there, the explosion that killed lots of people. Their perceptions of how safe they were wasn't actually calibrated to reality and in a sense their own system, sort of built up, that false sense of safety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. The metaphor that comes to mind, ironically, is sort of like carbon monoxide, is that your body thinks it's breathing carbon dioxide? Well, it's. It's involved with carbon dioxide and oxygen and nitrogen and stuff, but the carbon dioxide has none of those things and kills you. Um, it's the same sort of thing, I guess, with a safety system you think that the system is good and keeping you safe, but meanwhile you're not. Um, and I I'm reminded of being in construction and I went to one of our sites and, um, we had a look.
Speaker 1:It was my job as a ceo, I was. I always said, let's have, let's check the safety. It was like, yeah, let's start there. And, um, they showed me that proudly, showed me their all their folders and they had all their paperwork underway, everything else. And I was like, okay, nice, I guess that's good. Like I was never that comfortable with all this heavily folder-based approach to safety, but I couldn't articulate it at the time. And I then I looked outside and the sharp edge of the of the deck, the formwork, had no handrail, no, it was just completely open. And I was like, what about that? And they were like, oh yeah, whoops, you know it's like, you know they had all their paperwork there, they felt good, but they were ignoring the very thing that was going to cause someone to fall. And what's the you know, leading cause of death you of death, or at least major injury, or it's one of them at least is falling right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it aligns with that right.
Speaker 2:So at the most extreme level. That example. There's a sociologist that was. His work was sort of the, I guess the impetus for my own topic and he called those really highly symbolic. This is Lee Clark called those really highly symbolic plans, fantasy plants, fantasy documents, he said. Some plants just have almost no functional utility, they're just so symbolic.
Speaker 2:Now he used really wild sort of massive examples of large-scale oil spills and nuclear plants. But when you trace it down to the sort of micro level of work and routines in organisations, it's the same thing and I guess the point of it is unless something really bad happens, it sort of just becomes invisible. Successful work tends to be invisible because it's doing what we expect it to do. But those same triggers that you find in, like your Pike Rivers and your SO Longford disasters in Texas City, they're almost the same things, always there every day, years preceding disasters, and they'll still be there after the disaster in some semblance. So my PhD was really unpacking. What do they look like?
Speaker 2:and I was focusing on audits. How do audits sort of contribute to this false sense of safety? What does they look like? And I was focusing on audits. But how do audits sort of contribute to this false sense of safety? What does it look like? How would you even know that an audit's working Like it seems like? To me it started a pretty simple question, but then, when you dig down into it, what does it actually mean that an audit's successful?
Speaker 1:Totally. And it's like has anyone ever done any research on Catherine the Great and those Potemkin villages and that sort of stuff like audits? Of course? It's like those of us who've worked in construction know that you're going to dress everything up right for the auditor to come out. It's just how it happens, you know.
Speaker 2:In my latest paper. It's actually interesting this was from auditors themselves. They spoke at length about those gaming behaviours. It's almost like a theatre for the day. Totally D dressed up and made to look really pretty and they say, look, I have to sometimes accept that, yes, you've technically got what I was looking for but, they know deep down that it's not quite right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's like visiting a Soviet model town or something like that, like how can you ever actually see, you know? And yeah, so that actually you asked about earlier I'm going to segue it to Scratchy, because you did ask and I was like, because we came at this podcast cold, didn't we really? So, which is kind of unusual. Normally I sort of have a call the day before and have a little chat, but you asked about Scratchy so I might introduce that if you like. So what it was, the basis of it was that we noticed all these things and safety just didn't seem. There was something wrong with safety and there was this huge kind of concentration and focus on the regulations and everything else. It was taking up a lot of time, but it was very compliance-based and something in my gut was saying it's not right.
Speaker 1:So this sub foreman puts his hand up to be safety manager. When I was looking for a new safety manager, he gets trained up. He comes from safety from a completely different perspective. He's a sub foreman, a tree surgeon, a professional bass guitarist and now he's my co-founder in Scratchy bass guitarist and now he's my co-founder in Scratchy right. But back in the day he started out and then he said what is it with all this focus on punishment, with safety, like it's, the only thing you can do is punish? And we were trying to win the Apple store. So we agreed that let's invert that and, rather than focus on punishing a lack of safety, let's encourage the presence of safety.
Speaker 1:And so that's where you know, if you read Decky and Ryan, they talk about the three things that are necessary autonomy, relatedness and competence, and how, if you can reward people for a certain activity, then you will see more of it and you'll see an increase in motivation and eventually it will become habitual for some people. Like you can never. It's all bell curves, everything's bell curves, right. So, and that's what Scratchy is. It's an immediate, categorized reward for doing the right thing. So you asked about scratchy. That's what it is. I'd love to hear your um, your kind of thoughts. I know you're going to give me candid thoughts um on um on that, because there's uh, it's contentious um in some areas, and especially the old guard of safety uh, have a big problem with um any kind of encouragement. Frankly, um. But yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean contemporary progressive safety. I think behaviour has become sort of the dirty word. It's always been there and even if you come from human factors, a cognitive systems, resilience, engineering, any adaptive philosophy, behaviour has always been there. Maybe we have a different terminology for that unit of analysis. Yeah, but it's always been there. Maybe we have a different terminology for that unit of analysis, but it's always been there. It always has a role it should have a role, um.
Speaker 2:Why I look at it is safety is largely a social, intersubjective activity. It tends to be something that we do collectively or between people, um, but it's always going to have some level of agency to it and there's always going to be some level of, to a varying degree, some level of collectivity about it.
Speaker 2:I just I'm almost I'd like to say I'm sort of middle of the row, but I'm kind of not. I'm probably more towards the system view of it. So you're talking about motivation for people. You articulate it much better than I can, but like when you hear that, my candid thought is absolutely agree. But you kind of have to set up the conditions for someone to really succeed and flourish. Also and I know you weren't excluding that, but kind of that's my default where I go to first is are the conditions right? And you know, it's like that analogy about the plant. You know if the plant doesn't grow you don't blame the plant. You look at the conditions that it's planted in. You know the water, the soil et cetera, and you sort of exhaust as much as you can get to of that one. And then you look it's not like it's linear. You don't just do all that first and then do behaviour after.
Speaker 2:But I think as organisations, we probably don't spend enough time, because we just don't have enough time often to really put in the right situational contextual factors for people to flourish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, can we pause on the behaviour piece, because this is something that catches a lot of people, because when you're thinking of psychology and you go behaviour, you immediately go to Skinner Like it's very short order, yeah, or conditional, right, and so Skinner believed that there's no, really, I don't think Skinner thought much about autonomy actually, because behaviour it was just a conditioned thing. Give the seal a fish, the seal will do the job. Give the seal another fish. Don't give the seal a fish, the seal will do the job. Give the seal another fish. Don't give the seal a fish, the seal won't do the job. So people conflate behaviorists with rewarding people on the job because they think it's the same as giving a seal a fish and, to be honest with you, it's a metaphor I use. So I'm probably as guilty as charged in that sense.
Speaker 1:But where Dickey and Ryan differ from Skinner is that, dickey and Ryan, autonomy is one of the three main psychological needs that we have. That needs to be met and it's interesting you give the plant analogy because it's like that we, psychologically, we need to be nourished and there are, according to Deccan Ryan and SCT, the self-determination theory, there are three nourishments the feeling I need to be feeling like I'm making my own decisions. Autonomy I need to feel like I'm good at what I do. Competence and I need to feel like I'm getting on with others.
Speaker 1:Relatedness If I can meet those three psychological needs, then two thumbs up. You're going to see the best of James, right and same with the best of Ben, if he has all those three things. So, and what we, and that's and that's it looks really similar, just like fool's gold and gold look very similar At the surface. It looks so similar to what Skinner was saying, but it is so different. It's a completely different element. Right, and? And yeah, that's where it gets. It gets misconstrued a lot of the time. When you're sort of going abiding by the Deci and Ryan principle, people can easily see it for skin of behaviorist which ignores the self. Essentially, it ignores the concept of autonomy of autonomy.
Speaker 2:I've covered a lot of research on behaviour too, and that's why I flat out refuse to sort of buy into these. Just this myopic black and white behaviour is behaviouralism, and that's even like we shouldn't even suggest that behaviouralism in itself is a problem also yeah.
Speaker 2:And look at the history of behaviour, like with CBT the cognitive behaviour therapy like it legitimately works, based on large-scale systematic reviews and meta-analyses, I think that maybe we've swung. So there was this argument that the sort of systems, adaptive people have swung. Actually, james Reason said that the pendulum swung too far towards systems and away from agency. Yep.
Speaker 2:And I think I tend to agree. I don't think it's unique to us to safety, people. I think everyone does it. We have our own forms of motivated reasoning, but I think we have these very unuseful narratives about what behaviour is in this field and to your point, like there's a really rich body of literature and practice and art and science around behavioral interventions it's not just abc, it's not just skin as conditions totally.
Speaker 1:It's much more.
Speaker 2:It's multi-layered and even motivation, like there's a whole yeah and even intrinsic and extrinsic.
Speaker 1:it's like um, those two things like they it. There might be a beautiful looking spectrum of um intrinsic at one end end and extrinsic at the other. It wouldn't even be that it goes through to your A motivation. But you know, intrinsic here and extrinsic somewhere in the middle. And even that linear portrayal of motivation is way too simplistic for what goes on.
Speaker 1:Because what we've found is that, let's say, I'm a plasterboarder and I come up to you, my boss, and says hey, ben, there's a hole in the scaffold, I just wanted to let you know on floor two. And you go, mate James well done, here's a scratchy and I go cool and I go to my mates in this lunch shed and I say I just want 20 bucks. And I go home and I just got an award today. You know things like that. And so that gives everyone.
Speaker 1:When I say it in the lunch shed, that gives everyone that not only is Ben happy to hear of safety issues or something, but he's going to give you a reward for it. So everyone goes cool. I know what good looks like. Now I'm going to do more of that, and that creates this willingness. They have to make the decision. They have to have practice autonomy to go. I'm going to do something, so there's the autonomy. Competence is obvious, I'm getting rewarded and relatedness is a really good reconnection of safety between manager and worker. Because in the days of zero harm and posters on the wall that cost 20 cents a poster saying safety first and everything else.
Speaker 2:Well, you're looking at the person responsible for safety, the mirror in the bathroom, that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Cringe right and it's sloganistic. It's cringeworthy and it disconnects manager for workers, because workers sit in their third induction of the month and they go. I know I'm not sitting in this for me, I'm sitting in this to satisfy, to cover your ass. They know it. And so this reward for safety kind of reconnects, you know so this reward for safety kind of reconnects.
Speaker 2:You know there is an interesting stream of research around rewards and it's kind of the counterintuitive one, but there's also a stream that suggests it can lead to gaming behaviours and really increase organisations' risk to major disasters like Texas City, where you're incentivising particular targets yes and reward like CEOs and're incentivising particular targets yes and reward like CEOs and executives. Reward types of behaviour yes.
Speaker 1:It's well worth considering, because you've got to be careful. Rewards are so potent it's like what Charlie Munger said. Every time I have guessed how potent a reward is going to be or an incentive is going to be, I've always underestimated. So incentives are so potent that you've got to be careful what you're incentivizing and if you incentivize LTIs, if I say to you, ben, if you have zero LTIs in this project, I'm pretty sure that you're going to have zero LTIs. Now there might be guys breaking legs going out the side gate and you might be having three-hour meetings, whether a cut finger is actually an LTI or not, but you probably have zero LTIs.
Speaker 1:So gaming, massive gaming and what we've found. So you cannot reward lag indicators. You got to reward the activity as it happens. So it's that same. Ben, going LTI is not so important. We're going to watch them. We're not going to reward you for them, but you got to tell us about the near misses you got to tell us about your LTI is not so important. We're going to watch them. We're not going to reward you for them, but you've got to tell us about the near misses. You've got to tell us about your LTIs. Let's just be straight with each other. Not going to punish you, not going to reward you. That's just a number. But if you not even a but, and what I am going to reward you for is if your workers display these sorts of behaviors, then here's a budget to reward them immediately and you can tell then that sort of behaviour is going to improve.
Speaker 2:You absolutely need to fit in leadership role modelling too, into this whole sort of discussion too. I mean they effectively set the tone, and others like Shine said something like the leaders set the cultures by what they pay attention to or what they systematically pay attention to or ignore.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So if they systematically don't pay attention to something, or they do pay attention to something, like that does set the tone and the climate for the organisation which then can permeate down into you know norms and values, and maybe values are a bit strong, but definitely norms and practices and beliefs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and that's what we've found is that, if you know, the supervisor only has so much time in the day and they always say safety, but safety is not a P&L item, right? So it's just like and so how can the workers tell that the supervisor is paying attention? So we've had to make the one-click award right. So, and the next release is, we're presenting using AI, we're going to mine what's going on on the site and present suggestions to the supervisor to reward. So supervisor can say we'll say you know, do you want to award Joe for this and Renee for that? And they'll say yes, yes, and it'll send them a text and then they'll get you've just been nominated for a scratchy click here to find out if you've won or not. You know? And it's gamification as opposed to gaming, and so gamification and dopamine, essentially Like that's. You know, if you wanted to distill what we do down into one word, it's dopamine you know, and that encourages everything.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know if you've got a Fitbit, you've got one of those watches.
Speaker 2:I have two watches yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, and so we all know how effective gamification is and that sort of stuff. So you know, that's what this is, and it's all about dopamine, you know, you complete your ring and everything you get a little oh cool, you know, and it's all about dopamine.
Speaker 2:Bit of a tangent. It's interesting when you mentioned supervisors. I have a huge amount of respect and empathy for what supervisors kind of have to deal with day to day, especially when things start to go wrong. Oh, yeah. And I don't know if I feel sorry for them. Yeah, and I don't know if I feel sorry for them. You look at any swim. Quite often maybe not all the time, but quite often you'll see the supervisor's name against almost everything in a swim.
Speaker 2:A swim could be 20 pages, like some ridiculous paperweight. How on earth do we expect a supervisor to be over and across all of these things and then have to do all the paperwork? We just don't give them enough time to actually supervise and do their core job of solving problems and helping work succeed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And how much of that swim is actually useful, you know.
Speaker 2:It's an ass-covering exercise, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and yeah.
Speaker 2:I've covered quite a lot of work. Greg Smith's call out awesome work in his books Proving Safety and Paper Safe. But he covers this quite a lot, lot of work for a. Greg Smith call out um awesome work in his books proving safety and paper safe. But, um, he covers this quite a lot, but if I've covered quite a lot of coronial reports, um, and also quite a lot of major action reports and, but the courts and the coroners are absolutely scathing around our paper systems.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, so we can't just say it's for the court, it's for legal, it's to cover our backs if it goes to court, because they are absolutely scathing of these things that we build. We've created our own blue tape. Most of this isn't the law asking us to do this. We do it because we think we should be doing it.
Speaker 1:It's crazy, isn't it?
Speaker 2:And all these layers of things don't help us when we get to court and so the coroners, absolutely give us spraying over this stuff, right? And the coroners actually give us spraying over this stuff Right? A training package that doesn't actually cover the core hazards of the work they're doing, paperwork that no one ever read. If they just signed it it was just a cursory like tick and flick. Yeah. They give us a spray over that stuff.
Speaker 1:It's amazing because start cards is one thing, right. So we've got a few Tier 1 clients and um, and so they said one of them actually came and said, can you actually put start card into what you do? And I was like, what's the start card? Cause I didn't. I come from tier two, you know. And so we were shown this thing and it's like it's like being in the 1980s, it's like a pre-printed little tiny notepad and you tick and it's definition of tick and flick, because it's like I want to get started with my job tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and then post it in this post box. And you go, what happens to it now? And they go, it goes into the post box, yeah, but then what? It's like I don't know. Someone and the likes of Greg Smith have field day if something goes wrong because they say actually, let's have a look at this thing, we'll look at the risks that they've identified here, and no one ever checked it. So, to your point, creating a roger number.
Speaker 2:I've got to do a call out here again to Jop Havinga and Drew Ray's paper. They actually explored sort of the use and function of take fives in a large utility company. Awesome paper, check it out if you listen to this. But look, I can't do it justice. But some of the things they found were the most like the things that we all relate with. The take fives were often pre-filled. Like they would do it at the start of the week and pre-populate it for the week.
Speaker 2:There would be. It didn't really directly impact or change decisions, change actions. They were kind of done retrospectively. They used to justify what kind of they're already going to do anyway. Now you might be absolutely fall on the sword and love the idea of them, and I love the idea of it. I'm just probably similar to you. I'm just concerned that we've added an extra layer that takes time away from good, effective planning of work.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That possibly doesn't have the intended benefit. 100% added an extra layer that takes time away from good, effective planning of work. That possibly doesn't have the intended benefit 100% and the conversation around it.
Speaker 1:So can I put to you an idea, because this is in our development pipeline, right? So what we liked about the take five was the fact that people you and I are about to start a job we go let's just, like you say, take five, let's just have a little think about what we're about to do, see if it's safe to start work or not, just to and have a little combo, if we can have those things and as a bonus, if our boss, if something's risky, if our boss can find out that, then that's a bonus, right. So kind of like, three things really have an assessment, have a conversation, let the boss know of the dangerous things. The current start card really doesn't. It's a nice idea, like you say, very nice idea. The execution's terrible.
Speaker 1:So what we've got? We've created this thing called ConvoCard. Convocard you're about to start work, take a photo, you narrate. So we've got a language model that takes what you're narrating and turns it into something meaningful the text. And then, if it's safe, is it safe to start work or not you say yes or no. If you say no, then it pings the safety manager on the site and it says okay, go and find the safety manager, just in case that safety manager has gone on holiday or something like that. So it's sort of like two ways to find the safety manager and then it collects all of that data.
Speaker 1:So we're going to be releasing that in February and I'm super excited about it because I think it's going to be the first time in the industry that something actually approaching the initial objective of the take five or the whatever you start card or whatever it might be, is actually done. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. I know I'm, of course, passionate about it and one-eyed on it, but I'd love to hear your for's and against's for that sort of thing. I'd love to hear your for's and against's for that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So I've used a narrated it's called risk analysis. Risk assessment last minute take five sort of system before I actually like the idea of them. I piloted one quite a lot in another company. One of the other probably competitors, maybe I'm not sure it was a bit clunky, and I'm sure those guys are probably listening. Sorry, it is a bit clunky. I'm sure those guys are probably listening. Sorry, it is a bit clunky, but anyway.
Speaker 1:Did it turn the take five onto an app? Because I've seen the, the alternatives I've seen. I've never seen anything like what we're doing.
Speaker 2:It's an app.
Speaker 1:It is an app, but it has essentially the take five, um sort of um tick boxes in the app. So you go through and you go yes, yes, no, no, yes, this.
Speaker 2:It was an open sort of template. You can design whatever you want. Okay, it could be a purely freeform rap battle where it's just verbal. It could be something hybrid. I actually liked this platform better than your conventional filling out a take five, Kind of what I like. It's not really about that platform, but actually I thought of other stuff that I wanted to use it for. Like, whether it's this platform or another, what I liked about it is because it's raw audio.
Speaker 2:You can sort of extract salience and sentiment from it, or valence and sentiment you can get a feel for, like was there cynicism around the topic?
Speaker 1:How was it discussed.
Speaker 2:You can use that for coaching, for build up. But I'm not against the idea of the take five and certainly we know from high-performing teams like wildland firefighting the use of premortems or any of the high-reliability industries or highly reliable organising organisations sort of the pre-briefing premortems are a common practice around those high-performing teams. So if that's what's happening, if you're getting people together to talk through the work, what do we know about it? What's changed? The variability, all that sort of stuff. If the take five in principle or written take five was aiding, that I wouldn't have any issues. My concern is and others have already argued this to simply transcribing something automatically have some benefit If they're already talking about it. That's where I'm not really convinced that at least the writing conventional one adds value. I'm more convinced around I haven't seen good data because I don't think there is any. I'm more convinced that the verbal system, like an app, is probably. I don't know if it's going to be beneficial overall. I think it's going to be less negative than the conventional paper one Right.
Speaker 2:I'd like to think there's benefits, but I just haven't seen data and I'm very heavily evidence-based. Yeah. I'd like to think there's benefits, but I just haven't seen data and I'm very heavily evidence-based. Yeah, but we have done pilots and I was pretty happy with sort of the preliminary findings from that. Yeah right we found some feedback was okay. Yeah, we couldn't present it as we had to kind of present it as you're going to have to do something.
Speaker 1:That's what the company wants, not my decision.
Speaker 2:They want you to do something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So this is sort of the lesser of the evils, this talk went through, so our experience was people tended to prefer it. Yes. But they would have preferred to do none of it. Yes, and their point was when do you guys do it? You're the ones making the decisions about the business that ultimately set us up to succeed. Whether we have the right resources staffing the workload, work intensification, the counter I wouldn't say this, but the counter is yeah, they're the ones actually directly interfacing with the hazards.
Speaker 1:It's a really good question, and that's why I think the occasional rewarding of these sorts of things is necessary, because the question they're asking is what is in it? For me, we don't do anything without a payoff of some sort, and so they're saying why don't you got? Why what's stopping you guys from doing it? Oh, we don't need to do it, we're too senior. It's like why is your job not important, you know? So that's really valid questions, whereas I think when they get rewarded for it, then that question doesn't get asked.
Speaker 1:We see, when people win $10, $20, or $50 on the spot for doing certain things and that goes back to the lunch shed then dogma is out the window. It doesn't matter about Vision Zero or about Safety First, it matters that if you do the right thing on this particular job, you can win 10, 20 or 50 bucks. And the lack of isms, the lack of dogma, is probably the most potent part of this instant categorized reward platform, I think, and it's been too scary up until now to deal with because incentives are so powerful, but it's working.
Speaker 2:Deal with because incentives are so powerful, but it's working. My devil's advocate side is I've covered quite a lot of the research in the safety field and this isn't passing any judgment on your platform or approach, but incentives from the research tend to be short-lived. So at least from the safety field, we don't have a lot of good evidence that it leads to long-term changes or structural changes. Yep, so that's kind of like my view of it is. I go back to the evidence. There's probably things that have better substantiated evidence that I think an organisation does really need to focus on first.
Speaker 1:Can I give a few counters to Scratchy? So right at the start and we hear this less and less, but right at the start we heard before we were known in the industry it was a case of why should we be giving them something extra for what the job they should be doing anyway?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. So our, our question back to them is how's it going? And they said, well, well, they're not doing it. It's like, okay, well, what are you going to do then? Are you going to keep slapping them Cause apparently that's not working? What are you going to? And and they so they should be getting, shouldn't be getting a rewarded for something they should be doing anyway, right. And so then it's like shouldn't be cash. It's like, okay, so you don't like, if I was to not pay you your salary, you'd still happily come to work every day. So you're kind of working for an extrinsic reward as well, right. So we all work.
Speaker 1:There's this curious thing that we humans do when we have a very hard time wearing someone else's shoes, and so when it comes to rewarding people, we, the managers, say don't use cash rewards. No, they should do it because of love or out of some other higher force. They should buy into the force. And then you go are you happy to be rewarded? Yeah, you can reward me cash, but other people and I'm being I'm kind of like giving an absurd, extreme example, but it certainly happens and we all um succumb to it. It's all something that wearing other people's shoes is very difficult for us. Uh, and as soon as you and you know where is the best service and restaurants in the world, generally speaking, if you were to go to a country, then where would you get the best service in restaurants in the world?
Speaker 2:This is a question for me is it. Yeah, I have no idea. I'd guess like Singapore or like Japan or something.
Speaker 1:Right, you wouldn't guess the US. I'd guess like Singapore or like Japan or something Right, you wouldn't guess the US?
Speaker 1:No, Okay, Because if you, at least in the poll that I've taken, it would be the US, and they operate on tipping culture and it's like if you don't tip, then the service level goes down and they keep tipping, Because that's what that's. The other question people ask is that what about when we remove the reward? Then they'll go worse than before or they'll go the same as before. You say, well, don't remove it, it's easy. It's like just don't remove it and then you have a higher level and then you consistently. So there's this thing about but if I reward and then I take it away, it's going to be bad. It's like, just don't take it away, Like if it's working, just do more of it. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Oh, I have to admit I don't know the research on restaurant service quality. I would still hazard a guess and happy to be wrong. I would still hazard a guess. The best performing is where it's embedded in cultures and norms. And I would still hazard a guess the best performing is where it's embedded in cultures and norms. And I would still put money on countries like Singapore or tight cultures that have embedded it within cultural norms more than extrinsic reward. But, I could be absolutely wrong on this. But, I'll put it out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So it's a really good debate and I want to find we're going to find some papers after this, because the other thing is, with this signing up to you know, paying people to do certain tasks, basically, and people saying that's extrinsic, that's cheap, they should buy into the overall mission. And you say, well, that's fine for the senior people and it's fine for some of the line people. But a lot of these people wearing hard hats and hairnets they're like yeah, you can have your mission. I'm here because I like my mates. I'm here because I like this sort of work. I'm here for different reasons than the senior managers and so I'm on different drivers. And that's why senior managers say buy into this mission.
Speaker 1:And it's like, how about not? I'm like, I'm really good at what I do, but I'm not wanting to buy into your mission. I'm an autonomous thinker, I'm an independent person. And it's like, how about you don't buy into the mission, but if you do these things you get rewarded? It's like, okay, fine, I'll do that. So it's like um, it gets back to what we're talking about before and and I love how you you bring out these um papers to illustrate your point because, um, you know most of what I've got um is um in the field and anecdotal and that sort of stuff um, which is helpful to a degree, but it's good to test it, you know I should interject that I'm I'm absolutely not against incentives, even money.
Speaker 2:Like I've covered quite a lot of research on it and usually they're pretty support, like usually they do find that incentives do. Actually it can work really well. Very few of them has it against doing it so straight up like I definitely see a role with it. I guess my natural bias is towards the systems elements first, like making sure that we set up the right environment and contextual factors, and then the incentives absolutely can go alongside in harmony with that.
Speaker 1:But why should they be? You sort of mentioned that as though, and I've heard this before and I asked the question why is it one or the other?
Speaker 2:So systems actually are everything Exactly.
Speaker 1:So that's why, when I say incentives, people go, yeah, but systems, and it's like, what about but systems? Like I don't understand. So systems are inclusive, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But absolutely you can focus on one at the expense of others. Like systems theory is that there's impacts, interdependent impacts, across the system that you didn't intend for it.
Speaker 2:So, we spoke about gaming, so with incentives can also have the by-product of people gaming. And so there's this other there's actually pretty good research for this one too that people don't necessarily need a whole lot of external or extrinsic motivation. This ties into the old intrinsic. But there's this idea about craftsmanship, or craftspeopleship, I should say. People naturally go to work. They don't want to die Most people they don't go to work to die and they take pride in their work. And as an organisation, if we want to bring the best out of people, we need to ensure that we've done everything we reasonably can to let them flourish. And you're talking about autonomy and having that purpose with the work that they do, impactful. That directly talks to the craftsmanship. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And incentives can actually have a place. My point is, it's not one at the expense of the other, but you really. I think you need to get the conditions right where people work in.
Speaker 1:At the same time 100%.
Speaker 2:But if you don't get that right, the incentives. I don't think incentives are going to be successful long term. That's where the research shows that they tend to have a very short-term impact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I actually don't. I can't look at one without the other. So if you're going to be an organisation that incentivises your workers, I can't see how you would have all these safety issues all over the site in the system, so to speak, and yet reward your workers for being safe. Just for me, it strikes me as being like how could that even happen?
Speaker 2:You know, because Look at every construction company that rewards injury. Measures like that is essentially.
Speaker 1:Rewarding LTIs low LTIs.
Speaker 2:Could be LTIs, could be MTIs, right.
Speaker 1:But lag indicators. So construction companies rewarding lag indicators?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's like the textbook example of rewarding one when you expect on the folly of rewarding one behavior when you expect another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right and it's rewarding the wrong thing. So, like we said before, if you're rewarding lag indicators, you don't get it Because you're going to see. It's going to reward lying or pretty much lying, because nobody sees zero or it's very hard to see.
Speaker 2:zero Lying is a strong word, but, yes, people are very motivated.
Speaker 1:Doctoring. I can use other words, but right.
Speaker 2:Massaging. It's motivated practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is a strong word, no, that's yeah. Well, tell me more about you know, your research and how it? Yeah, just tangentially, how it hits incentives and motives.
Speaker 2:So my research was really it came out of Lee Clark's work on fantasy documents where I really took a departure. So what sort of you know my work with help of my supervisors. It's really particularly around I guess we call it the micro-routines. Lee Clark was looking at very high, big profile disasters, big plans. Mine really got down into the weeds and I'm looking at audits, not because I was particularly interested in audits, but I had a really bad experience with an external auditor. I think a lot of people have these experiences and this person was from one of the big audit firms, not safety and they're only there for a few hours and within just a few hours. They're only speaking to less than a handful of people. They used the C word culture there's issues of culture.
Speaker 1:So straightaway.
Speaker 2:I was triggered. I was furious, and mine was particularly from the very academic side. I was like do you even know what culture? Means Like which definition are you?
Speaker 1:using.
Speaker 2:If they said climate, if they used the word climate as a superficial expression of perceptions, I probably would have just gone on my merry way you know, the chocolate flow through rivers. Yeah. But they invoked culture. Yeah. And so I just had a really bad experience with this auditor and. I found it was really unprofessional. Culture is a property of groups. How can you say there's a cultural issue? I haven't even spoken to groups, observed groups.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, it was that bad experience with auditing that really got me motivated to look at auditing organizations, to audit, to do what we think they're doing. How do they work, how could they work? And focused on safety and it turns out for something so endemic across the world, especially safety. There isn't much evidence behind audits. There's really only a small number of health and safety research around audits but there is a really big developed body of research around audits in the financial and accounting world.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Very sophisticated, and I think, rightly so.
Speaker 1:They've been doing it for a long time with the audit committees and financial reports rightly so.
Speaker 2:They've been doing it for a long time with the audit committees and financial reports and everything. So I wanted to look at what role audit plays really the crux of it in creating a false sense of safety. How can it be that you've got often really experienced auditors who are out on site ostensibly viewing work routines, looking at processes, and then, after the fact, something really bad goes wrong? How can they be so decoupled? Yeah, and my second audit paper. Well, my first one was looking at internal audit reports from one organisation, a large, complex organisation. The second one was looking at how accident investigators spoke about the role of audits and I went through every CSB in the U, every CSB investigation. I went through thousands of reports across the world and very few of them actually talk about audits. Right.
Speaker 2:So, even in that, what can I conclude from that is I don't know whether audits didn't have much of a role in these thousands of investigations, because they didn't mention it or they just didn't think to include it Like there's no way I can know from that, so we can just infer based on. Out of I can't remember how many thousands I evaluated, there was only like 58 reports that actually directly used the word audit.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:And if they use something similar. I looked for that inspections and whatnot but they were ruled out, so it just doesn't get much airtime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so is it. Are they impotent? Are they like, are they unnecessary? What? What do you? What did you draw from this, then?
Speaker 2:um, what, what do you? What did you draw from this then? The first paper was probably I guess you would call it friendly fire towards auditing and auditors. That was my one, directly after that souring experience yes, why friendly fire? Well, it's probably because I ordered to, okay, but yes, probably from the fire but I was definitely firing above the kneecap got it um, yeah, my second and particularly my current paper I'm working on now, which is audit interviews.
Speaker 2:I've really grown to respect and better understand sort of the tensions and motivations. So I definitely think that there's a net benefit to audits, but the net benefits to audits aren't necessarily what we think they're doing. So there's a whole bunch of logics around audits, business logics so I think there's probably net benefit overall of some sort of levels of audits, multiple levels of audits. I think they're very good at looking for outputs of things.
Speaker 2:That's what our research showed was if you've got a plan, then they're very good at finding that plan. They're very good at looking to see if it was signed recently. But if you think that they're looking at or testing the effectiveness of critical systems, then that's an assumption that really needs to be tested in the organisation. I don't mean like a study, but you really do need to dive in and check. Right.
Speaker 2:And this is an exercise that I like to give people is at your next board meeting or the executive team. Just ask them what is it, do you think an audit's doing in this organisation? And if they say, oh look, I just think it's compliance to our documented system, that's fine, it's probably doing that and more. If they say it's doing that plus, I think it's testing the effectiveness of our systems, how they work. That's where you need to make sure that it's actually doing that.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so what is the scope of the audit? Because, like you say, financial audits are mature and we recently did our ISO 27001, which is an InfoSec audit, and we're a startup, we're three years old, but ISO 27001 was a big deal for us and we had this auditor and it was a great process. I never thought I would say that, but they said here's the list it's probably going to take you two months to do it. It took us three and it was comprehensive and it really raised our info security big time and caused a lot of important things to happen. So by the time certification came I could say like totally beneficial to do. Why doesn't that occur with safety audits? Like a lot of the time it's so contentious. Like you say, your first paper friendly fire. Second paper findingly Fire. Second paper finding the net benefit. But why, I wonder what it is with the construction industry that makes it less sort of clear what the net benefits are of auditing.
Speaker 2:So we've looked at some of those sort of elements. For one, I don't think this is just limited to audits. We just happen to be looking at audits because that's what I had a lot of data for and I was a bit jaded. It's almost certainly, and in fact there's research of summarised a study that found investigations. They're not just these neutral, impartial evaluations of the world. They're always through the lenses of people and their own worldviews and you know what you look for is what you find.
Speaker 2:If you go in there thinking you're going to find human error, you almost inevitably find it. So I think it's across the board. But with audits in particular they're used heavily for purposes more than just a functional purpose, like they're not just direct representations or directly coupled to work. They tend to be used for other purposes. So they're used by clients. So we call them enabling devices. In my work what that means is they enable work to progress past some sort of constraint.
Speaker 2:So, an example is construction. You can't commence work or mobilize a site until you've submitted an emergency response plan to the client. We would call that an enabling device. It enables work to progress once they receive that plan. When you think about it, you don't actually have to have gotten any better at managing emergencies by writing that plan and submitting it. You could do. It might help you get better at emergencies. You might have gone through a rigorous process where you identified scenarios.
Speaker 2:But not necessarily, but not necessarily, they're not necessarily coupled, and that's what we found is audits are used quite a lot for different purposes, so they're used often by audiences other than the organisation directly or sorry. The people who interact with the hazards and the risk exposures Almost never directly interface with the audits themselves. They're used by the company to an external party for assurance and other things, and they're also not very good for. Based on our sample. I can't go across the board. They also weren't very good for learning to help the organisation, identify and improve.
Speaker 2:Often the recommendations were very superficial and something I found really interesting others might not find this interesting, but I did. Even for audits that apparently were focused on critical controls and the major risk systems, they virtually never actually spoke about the direct sources of harm. So everything in the audits that we looked at was an indirect proxy of the source of harm. So let's say it was vehicle movements. The audit criteria was around collisions or people getting crushed. It almost never got the audit to unpack. What does work look like out there right now?
Speaker 2:how are people interacting with plants and machinery? It was always via something, so instead of talking about plant-pedestrian interactions, like out there right now. How are people interacting with plants and machinery? It was always via something so instead of talking about plant-pedestrian interactions, the audit focused on the vehicle management plan Right. Instead of fall from heights, it was, you know you're working at heights permit?
Speaker 1:Yes, and some auditors argue that that's really the only thing, so take the behaviour out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was focused on artefacts.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Now that isn't necessarily a bad thing If your intention of that audit is to purely unpack the artifacts and it's doing that. If the goal is to actually translate that into the routines and practices and everyday work, it's possibly not doing that.
Speaker 1:Can I posit a theory why? It's because behavior has a smell about it and the Skinner thing that we spoke of before systems is a lot less contentious Systems, let's just talk about engineering, the safety and that sort of thing. Let's not talk about the human side of things. It's too hard, it's too many arguments, it's too many debates.
Speaker 2:It's interpersonal yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you, and I have spent the last hour debating this, which is amazing, but life's too short, excuse the pun. Let's just talk about engineering controls, and yet the elephant in the room is the motivation, I would argue, of the worker. Not everything like, definitely not everything, but a very important part of it. And so it's interesting what you say with these audits, that they say let's talk about engineering systems, let's fix that, let's not talk about personalities and and and motivations and people like you know.
Speaker 2:I would just extend that, I agree. I would extend that more than just sort of behavior, though, like routines aren't just behaviors.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Because they're also constructed in the environment and it's the environment that also helps shape people's Yep. So to your point, like the audits almost never unpack that and look, I've had auditors say, but that's not our goal, like that's not what we're here to do. Right. Isn't that what you do? Inspections and observations for. Mm. So look, if that's what the goal is, that's fine.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:They just had to make it very clear. That's right, right, okay, here's what we're auditing, here's what we're not looking at. But what we argued was can?
Speaker 1:you really test the?
Speaker 2:effectiveness of a system without diving into that side Right, and maybe, maybe some companies can, but I would guess that you probably can't really do an end to end.
Speaker 1:So so what is that? The human audit piece? If? If the conventional audit doesn't do that, well, what does? Is that the question?
Speaker 2:So if I had my time to get into research, I would have focused more on the so what now? Question I'm really having. I've got a couple more papers I need to finish after my thesis. I'm really focusing on more the what is it? And what does it look like?
Speaker 2:Um maybe in the future I'll write up a paper. There's actually quite a bit of research from the accounting side around war of effectiveness. They actually put it, um, really beautifully in some of the work in from accounting. Um, I can't do it quite as prosaically as they're wording, but it was essentially focus on what matters, stupid.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:If X matters to you, then focus on X instead of some proxy of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you can't always do that.
Speaker 2:You can't always focus on work at height. And, look, I actually got a huge appreciation for auditors. I do audits, but I'm not an auditor per se. But auditors are trapped in this sort of bureaucratic, pressure-laden world just like everyone else, just like leaders are. They get a hard sort of poke these days, but they're trapped within all these pressures too with by-products and orders, are too Like they feel powerless because they've only been given two days. They're not intimately familiar with the works. And then a big theme in my research is actually around gaming around the safety theatre.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. That's what they called it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's performative shows that the company puts on and they actively some more than others they actively select what the auditor will see on the day. Totally. Totally and some places literally. You'll go there and suddenly they're on a stand down for the day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just happened to be the day that you were there, like with the audit, oh yeah, my co-founder, Gary Mansfield, is deep in the safety domain and he has many stories in this regard of exactly that you know, of the games that get played with the safety audit across the industry. He's got a dozen of these stories that he's heard. It's very true.
Speaker 2:I thought it was really cool actually in the last study that I'm working on that, instead of just someone in the ivory tower passing judgment, it was actually the auditor's words. A huge appreciation, thanks to everyone who took part, but they were just as critical of auditing as anyone else which was really cool just to sort of get their reflections, like they feel trapped within this machine also at times.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, Okay. So you've got a client and the client's given unlimited budget to do a project that's safe. How would you set it up?
Speaker 2:Safe, not just audits.
Speaker 1:Let's say, I don't know. I'm trying to sort of figure out the size of the blank canvas and what sort of paint brushes I give you. But basically I'm trying to sort of say, blank canvas, how would you set up, if you had the magic wand, a project to perform to be safe, like those sorts of things? What elements are missing, um and um? What elements exist that shouldn't in the current system? Um, and I know I'm putting you on the spot here, you know um, but playing this game with me, if you would, um, is there? What sort of setup would make for a high-performing, safe, highly motivated kind of project?
Speaker 2:So I've covered quite a lot of research around this topic. I think there's absolutely literally dozens and dozens of factors that have found like critical success factors for projects. If I had to pull out a few threads that I think are probably not necessarily more important, but I think probably they're places that maybe don't get done well enough in safety. One is and I think it's very difficult to actually change this but the contractual tendering models that we use. We often don't really set our projects up to succeed as well as they need to. One is, and others have spoken about, you know, the problems with mega projects and cost blowouts to succeed as well as they need to. One is, and others have spoken about, you know, the problems with mega projects and cost blowouts, like it's virtually the norm that there's going to be blowouts for time, weather, but we often don't necessarily cover that really well. And if we do cover it really well, it often tends to be the up the contracting chain that recovers rather than down the contracting chain. So I think it's usually the smaller people that suffer the most, the smaller contractors, and there's some really good research in the Australian pipeline industry.
Speaker 2:So companies everywhere, especially in utilities, keep having their own learning teams and workshops around. Why do we keep hitting buried assets? We've got rules. You just do your dials and they go through the same factors. You know your performance-shaping factors. They look at dials, what information has been provided, but they often miss the most critical or amongst the most critical, and this is what this research by Jan Hayes, among others, found in Australia. The contracting models almost always are one of the key foundational factors. The example is if you pay a contractor by metres of pipeline in the ground, you don't pay them for investigations to actually do non-destructive testing to find the assets first. Then they're going to prioritise metres in the ground.
Speaker 1:Incentives.
Speaker 2:So you need to. Really, you'll keep going around Groundhog Day unless you actually somehow change the contraction model where you pay them to actually do the investigations also, and some get this better than others and then some contractors will automatically have their own standards around minimum potholes and things like that, and I think that really ties into how we tender. So this is not an easy one, and I don't know if we'll ever really solve this. I think it's a wicked problem because the money has to come from somewhere and whatever you spend on that comes from somewhere else.
Speaker 2:There's tradeoffs, but I think, ensuring that we've done everything reasonable to set up the right sort of resourcing and finance to begin with, and there's actually existing tools, and I actually think the project management field is leagues ahead of safety when it comes to and this isn't just like your Six Sigma and your Prince 2 and all that sort of stuff but, they just have really sophisticated project management tools and mental models, design engineering.
Speaker 2:I think that's well ahead and this is just my thoughts. I know the project management. People might disagree but I find it really fascinating when you compare the design teams and design elements versus the constructability elements. So the design is usually really sophisticated. They use a lot of really robust engineering tools and software and then the project people that have to translate them to constructability. I feel like it's like almost the dark ages at times. I just wonder is that not a really ripe area to really expand and get more of the design knowledge embedded into more of the constructability? I know people are probably cringing right now saying we do that right now.
Speaker 1:No no.
Speaker 2:I think that needs to be right.
Speaker 1:I come from carpentry right and I remember like and this is not taking a stab at the design side or the production side, so to speak out in the field, but I remember something looking so easy you know, and then when you actually have to make it work physically, it's so, there's always it's so difficult and I think, whether or not that's if someone it's so, there's always it's so difficult and I think, whether or not that's, uh, if someone's coding, there's bugs, you know, and so it's like it's just that, um, the actual end execution as opposed to the idea behind it that I don't know. I remember that being. I remember thinking this is so much harder than I thought it would be and it's not as simple for the constructability.
Speaker 2:Like they have to try and account for subcontractors doing the work who sometimes are involved in that constructability, but not always that as well that additional layer of complexity where you've got and subcontractors' motivations may or may not be aligned.
Speaker 1:Well, they may not be getting paid to be there also, Right?
Speaker 2:They've got other motivations, so there's definitely conflicts of time.
Speaker 2:Design is another one. I'm really passionate about design. So there's really good research from the US, from Australia, around the number of fatalities, traumatic injuries, that are related to design. Right so machinery 37% fatalities. It's not like older data but it's correlated with design as a major factor. Construction has been up to 50 plus percent of fatalities. Uk research up to 80 percent of fatalities involved not just plant design but the workplace setup and design where you've got really tight. So again, this is not an easy one.
Speaker 2:This is a wicked problem, but ensuring that we somehow consider sites sort of set up space and that really ties in with the human factors and human-centred design principles yeah. Construction. It's not given much love across the board. Human factors is really just a post-hoc investigation thing, I think across the board, whereas other industries you know it is far more foundational. Human factors Sorry, I won't say design, human-centred design, because that probably beckons a lot of enemies with all my design friends but they absolutely do design things for humans. There's all standards and practices. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think as a really targeted focus sort of science and art and practice, it's well behind some industries that do it really well in comparison, like nuclear aviation, where there's huge consequences of getting it wrong.
Speaker 2:They can't afford to get it wrong. So I'm not suggesting construction could ever get to that stage, but I think there's far more role upstream. Design that trickles down and that goes back to that argument, because I think there already is a bias for so. All humans have that fundamental attribution. Heuristic. We tend to explain people's performance more by personality and individual factors rather than the context that we're in, and it's a really stable heuristic.
Speaker 1:They find?
Speaker 2:that everyone does it to a degree in every industry. So I see the design stuff as a way to really help provide a counterforce to that bias where we already overemphasise people.
Speaker 1:So it gets back to your system. Work on the system as opposed to… but to your point people absolutely are the system. Right. Work and the organisations are groups of people networked people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this idea of culture is so problematic. Even suggesting that there is a culture, organisational culture or safety culture it's not reflected in the research either.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:What we find is there tends to be whole groups of subcultures and actually engineers. So what they found in research is two civil engineers in different companies tend to share more cultural norms than that engineer does to their own company. Right, so they tend to have their own sort of subgroups and they align more strongly to those than they do to their own company, right. So they tend to have their own sort of subgroups and they align more strongly to those than they do to their own organisation.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So organisations are collections of subcultures.
Speaker 1:Yes, different belief systems. Yes.
Speaker 2:And this is why I go against the simple idea of behaviour. I'm not saying yours is the simple idea, but it's that very behaviouralist the skinner
Speaker 3:approach. Why just don't you do the right thing? Yeah Is because I don't even know where I was going with that.
Speaker 2:I've just completely forgotten.
Speaker 1:No, you were talking about subcultures and how culture is such a loaded word.
Speaker 2:I can't remember what I was going with the behaviour, but I think the behaviour just tends to oversimplify the environment that people are in.
Speaker 1:Right, it doesn't have to yeah.
Speaker 2:But then on the other side and I have this criticism now of sort of the hop and safety to and the adaptive principles, I think those communities at times have gone too far the other way to reasons an analogy. They've swung too far. I think, there's reasons why they have to counterforce the existing bias, but we shouldn't be afraid of behaviour Like it's absolutely.
Speaker 1:No, that's true.
Speaker 2:It absolutely should be part of what we do.
Speaker 1:Nor culture, to be honest, Absolutely. It's loaded and, like you say, it's like talking about God or love. It's like what's your definition? Like are we talking about the same thing? And that's the thing about culture is that your culture can be completely different to my definition of culture, and so, therefore, is it even useful talking about culture if we come from different points?
Speaker 2:And look, I'm not critical of culture per se and I think, if you go to anthropology, sociology, culture absolutely has a useful place. Like it has for a long time. We've both been to Japan recently. You'd be hard pressed to say that they don't have some really starkly different cultural norms to Australia.
Speaker 1:Amazing yeah.
Speaker 2:So they don't have some really starkly different cultural norms to. Australia, amazing. Yeah, so it absolutely is a thing. Yeah, I guess I'm more critical of using an idea of a culture as an explanation for accents and my this audit report that put me on my path to anger and dread cultural issues. Yes, that is a dangerous word to use for that sort of thing Right, right, right. It's not linked to anything tangible or useful.
Speaker 1:What do?
Speaker 2:you mean by culture?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that gets me with the safety too and the hop and everything. I found that as a nice idea. But what tools are you using? And I couldn't name any Like what's going to actually improve it. It's like kumbaya doesn't cut it. You know you can't get the guitar and it's fun to do that, but it's not gonna like it was toothless and that's why, you know, in my one-eyed opinion, I think rewarding for positivity is a tool that you can use in that environment. That finally gives it some potency so I'll I will politely disagree.
Speaker 2:I think we have a huge body of research, especially in the resilience engineering field. There are lots of tools, methods, frameworks, world views. There is a huge body of it. It's all out there, most of it's out there. I've covered quite a lot of it. I think there is a lot of stuff that is, in that field, very developed tools.
Speaker 1:Well, we haven't found anything because, on the spot categorised safety rewards has only been available since people have had devices in their pocket, really so since 2008,. There's been nothing before, because you didn't have the devices that we have now, and nothing after.
Speaker 2:But there's always been incentives. Eh yeah, incentivising the wrong thing.
Speaker 1:Sure, but incentivising the wrong thing, right. So incentivising LTIs or something like that, we're talking about incentivising, you know, certain behaviours, right, encouraging more of that.
Speaker 2:Oh sorry, this is where I was going with behaviour. It doesn't often reflect the craftsmanship, or sorry, I keep using man.
Speaker 1:Whatever they're correct, it's like craftsmanship, whatever we call it Just craftsman is fine Craftship. We trip over ourselves.
Speaker 2:But that is a huge source of motivation for people. They take pride in the work they do. Yeah, it's not a conflict at all with incentives, so I agree with you that it doesn't need to be one or the other. But I think when we come to investigations, understanding and trying to rationalise incidents and behaviour, and performance.
Speaker 2:I think we undervalue that sort of socially constructed value around, the pride that people take in work, the values and norms. I absolutely do agree that there's a place for I won't say these days or safety, because it happens everywhere, but we get so caught up in that motivated reasoning supporting our cause. I believe in this idea that Gerd Gigerenzer calls it the adaptive toolbox. He says that instead of just blindly falling on one sword and safety two, it could be whatever anything you're better off being able to draw on a whole range of different concepts and tools, as long as they have some face validity content validity.
Speaker 2:That's kind of how I see it, so I absolutely don't disagree with incentive. Just like I'd have no issue intrinsically with behaviour. I think all these things can have a place.
Speaker 1:They can, and there's no panacea right, there's no silver bullet.
Speaker 2:But some things are more trash than others, like some things have far worse evidence. Some things have almost no evidence at all, yeah, yeah. And that's why I think there isn't definitely a place too for evidence-based yeah.
Speaker 1:And incentivising the wrong thing is negative. It's worse than no incentives, right? So there's that as well, Mate. I think we've gone way over time. This is so interesting, we'll call it yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming and talking. I think that's good, yeah, yeah, and we'll have to have a catch up, because I don't think this debate's finished yet.
Speaker 2:Well, we went in this cold, that's right. I wasn't sure what to expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
