From Forklift to Philosophy: Why Safety Needs Respect, Not Policing with Desai Link | Episode 21

What if safer work doesn’t start with more rules, but with better questions? We sit down with a former lawyer turned forklift driver and head of safety to unpack why people, not paperwork, are the engine of reliable performance. From high-vis yards to high-stakes courtrooms, we explore how respect, curiosity, and clear thinking outperform punishment and performative compliance.

We talk through the everyday tension between systems and human judgment: when to rely on engineering controls, how to account for inevitable error, and why persuasion often beats command-and-control. You’ll hear how humble inquiry builds trust on site, how self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness) maps onto real safety conversations, and why celebrating what goes right reveals the mechanisms that keep teams safe under pressure. We also examine the “work as imagined vs work as done” gap—and the hidden third layer, “work as documented”—that creates both operational drift and legal exposure.

A candid case shows just culture gone rigid, where a matrix labelled misjudgment as “reckless” and cost a driver his job a week before Christmas. We challenge that mindset, arguing for discretion that evolves like common law: principles applied to facts, not facts crushed into charts. You’ll get practical ideas for real-time reporting that triggers action, smarter investigations that prioritise learning over blame, and ways to share insights while respecting legal professional privilege. Plus, we introduce “Beyond the Incident,” a field-ready guide to ethical, effective investigations across construction, transport, oil and gas, and hospitality.

If you want safety that actually works—less box-ticking, more truth-seeking—this conversation is your map. Listen, learn, and try one change this week: ask a worker to teach you their job, then fix one friction they name. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more teams can find it.

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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Unlikely Path: Law To Forklifts
• 3:02 Blue-Collar Respect And Work Ethic
• 5:10 Rethinking Safety: Influence Over Punishment
• 8:35 Systems, Human Error, And Persuasion
• 11:20 Beyond Blame: Learning From People
• 14:15 Celebrate What Goes Right
• 16:30 Self‑Determination Theory In Safety
• 20:04 Humble Inquiry Beats Safety Policing
• 24:00 When Just Culture Turns Rigid
• 28:05 Discretion, Law, And Evolving Policy
• 31:12 Paperwork Traps And Legal Risk
• 34:06 First Principles And Real-Time Feedback
• 36:58 Work Imagined Vs Work Done
• 39:08 Beyond The Incident: The Book
• 42:05 Learning Amid Stakeholders And Pressure
• 46:00 Honesty, Accountability, And Learning

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Good morning, everyone. It's James here from The Recognition Factor. And we have here this morning Desai Link. And Desai, welcome. I'd love to have your bio by way of introduction. I give us the pub version of uh of your background. Thanks, James.

SPEAKER_02: 0:16

Pleasure to be here. So um a bit of bit about me. I studied law and in 2010 was admitted to the bar. And I'd um driven forklifts to get me through law school, but found that legal practice wasn't for me, and then turned my attention to health and safety and really found my feet there. And you know, the the product of moving from one industry to another really highlighted to me some gaps in the way things were done in health and safety, which has kind of led to the conversation we're having today.

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

It's interesting. You're saying about law and forklift driving, there's a guy called Eric Hoffer. I don't know if you've ever read any of his work, but um he wrote a book called The True Believer, and he was an interesting kid. This is a gonna be a side story, but it's I I think it should be interesting. He was born in San Francisco. When he was seven years old, his mother was carrying him down the stairs and she fell over. And so she subsequently died. She was an invalid for a year or so and died. So he he didn't have a mother. His father was hard work. I don't know if he was an alcoholic, but he was hard work. This kid went blind. And so he at seven years old, he'd just started learning to read and he goes blind. His father is bringing him up. He's like I said, his father's hard work, you're calling him an idiot the whole all the time because he's blind, right? So he's not really getting a lot of love from his father. So he's gre he's a bit of an odd kid. He turns 15, and one morning he wakes up and all of a sudden he can see again. And so he walks down the road into into San Francisco and he sees this bookstore, secondhand bookstore, and he looks across all the books and he's like marveling at all the work, because that was the last thing he learned to do before he lost his sight. So he sees all these works and then he sees Dostoevsky's the idiot. And so he pulls it out and he reads it back, you know, front to back, and then he goes through, he doesn't have any friends at school because he's an odd kid, and he just ends up reading all of the bookstore. He just he's an you know absolute voracious reader. And so he but he was a misfit in school. So he didn't like school, but he loved reading. So he was reading, reading, like we're talking, you know, that he'd get sort of five or six or seven books a week sort of thing, and just go through them. And then he leaves school and he becomes a Steve Door, and then he becomes a lumberjack. So he has all these manual jobs by day, and he's got this really cerebral existence by night. And so I I have this theory that the combination of those two things are very powerful, very strong. So this is segueing, it's a very long segue back into you being a forklift driver by day and uh and a law student by night. How was that experience?

SPEAKER_02: 3:04

Uh well, it was confronting at first when I left law and got back into forklifts because I went from wearing a suit walking down high street to to the courtroom back to uh wearing high vis and and safety boots on the back of a forklift getting yelled at. So um it's it's a pretty stark contrast there. But one thing I found about the transport industry was it was a different kind of industry. It didn't matter who your dad was or who your uncle was or anything, whether you'd had a family member that had done law or whether your family was known. It really just came down to you either did the work or you didn't, and you were willing to put in the hours or you weren't. And if if you're one of those people that were willing to do that, then you got ahead and you were respected, and it was a good place to work in that sense. And law wasn't so much like that? It was more connections and that sort of thing, or yeah, I definitely felt on the outside, and and maybe that's a bit of imposter syndrome sneaking in and you know making you doubt yourself, but yeah, I did feel like I was on on the outside there, didn't really fit in.

SPEAKER_01: 4:06

And so how did that uh uh change your approach to safety? Because you you you would have seen the legal side of safety and you're experiencing it um as a practitioner, so to speak, as a worker. How did that what did you see? You you had a kind of a fairly unique position, a la Eric Hoffer with life. He ended up writing this amazing book, by the way, I recommend called uh the true believer. Still relevant today. It was written in 1950 or something. Yeah, right. Yeah. So how how how did that so the foot in both camps, so to speak, how did that inform? What could you notice when you're driving forklift or or when you're in the law either side that made you kind of go, what's going on here?

SPEAKER_02: 4:47

Yeah, definitely like getting into health and safety from a sort of professional practitioner point of view, there there's very much a mindset that you're there to direct and and correct people in the way that they do things. And one thing that Driving Fork has really taught me is that the people that are that are doing those labour jobs, you know, the hardworking types, they're actually extremely intelligent. I've got a huge amount of respect for their skill and work ethic. And I've tried to carry that through into my safety practice as well. A lot of people don't, and I think that's where they clash a lot with how they try and implement things from a safety perspective, probably with the best of intentions. But there's this underlying gap in respect and acknowledgement of the people that you're talking to who are actually quite talented, very intelligent, and and worthy of that respect and mutual respect.

SPEAKER_01: 5:37

And so how does that manifest itself when you've got to create a system and you know there's engineering controls and and there's a bit of human behavior? There's kind of like it's both that get involved when things go wrong. It's either something breaks or someone made an error. I don't know what else is there. So how can you if you're you can still respect the driver, but you can still understand that that driver is human and is going to make an error. So how do you create a um system that does both, that sort of respects their sense of volition, but also understands that they make mistakes, like anyone? Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_02: 6:21

I mean, that's to answer that's kind of the million-dollar question in safety is is how do you set up a system that that answers to all of those competing concerns? And different people respond to different things. So in some instances, it's it's enough for people to be on board if you say, look, the law requires us to do this. That's why I'm we're having this conversation, that's why we're implementing this thing. That's enough for some people. For others, it's not. They need a more compelling reason or they need something a bit more meaningful and direct to them. And you've got to try and identify that in the other person and and relate to them in that way. It's it's very much a game of influence and persuasion and and trying what you can in order to get get the main message across the table.

SPEAKER_01: 6:59

And what about so safety in the last sort of 30 years has been one of there's kind of been one tool really, you know, to to oversimplify it. There's it's a case of look for the problem and punish when people do that. Is that is that the way you you see it, you know, and and that sort of is good and bad, is that how you see it, or or is it all good or all bad, or it's it is a mixed bag, and I think you're right in the way that you've you've um sort of made that point about there's there's a system, and if people don't follow it, that's when things go wrong.

SPEAKER_02: 7:33

So we're about finding fault. There is sometimes merit in that approach, but it's not the only approach. I don't want to paint everyone with the same brush. There are people who take a different approach. And mine is very much one of, you know, if someone has made a mistake, whether it's an honest mistake or maligned thing that they've done, I want to understand why they did that. You know, like did did we set them up to fail? Did we set them up for success? Was there something else going on? You know, humans are complex and you need to sit down and be able to have a conversation with someone and understand what's going on. And to better understand the person is to kind of lost where I'm gonna take this, but it's it's probably the best form of information you're gonna get in that context. And and I'm very interested in incident investigations. And that oral evidence, that aspect of just talking to people and understanding as much as you can about their mindset at the time and their mindset leading up to things and and what they experience, that's where the key lies. It's not in the system, it's not in a document.

SPEAKER_01: 8:36

Totally, totally. And I think um this is in our pre-podcast conversation, I think we both shared that is that there are so many instances where the paperwork is in great condition, and meanwhile, the actual safety side of things or safety, whether whether it's attitudes or whatever it might be, is is in the gutter. And you know, so it's it's a crazy irony of the current system, isn't it? So we also got talking about the the kind of the flipping the script and the the inversion and observing good when it appears and encouraging that. Do you have any anything to say to that? Um you know, is that in line with how you're thinking on safety? How does that fit?

SPEAKER_02: 9:20

Yeah, it's I I don't think you're uh if you're in a in the safety role, you're not doing your job unless you're equally able to reflect on the good and the bad um at any given time. So um you need to understand where things go wrong. You've in certain in many cases you have a le legal obligation to do so. Um but you need to understand what makes things go right as well. Um and again, the the source of that information is the same place, it's it's talking to people and it's and you don't get to have that conversation unless you've got that mutual respect.

SPEAKER_01: 9:49

Yeah, it's um it's funny, it's not it's not called the unsafe manager, and yet um a lack of safety is tends tends to be what they see their job as. It's find the lack of safety and comment on that. Um, but it's not the unsafe manager, is it? It's a safety manager. Find the safety, you know, encourage more safety. Okay. So with that, I don't know how much we got, I forget how much we got into this before, but the whole concept of self-determination theory, which is our sort of bedrock psychological sort of theory, being the three things we need is autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And so you know, you you mentioned having conversations with people, finding out what drives them. I mean, that alone is is pushing the relatedness piece right up there, and that leaves autonomy and competence. You know, do you like that model in terms of do or do you think do you have a favored model or um you know, or or do you just uh wing it and and talk to people? Um, you know, there's another guy that I know in in the safety industry who's a bit of a maverick, who when he um stood up in front of some oil and gas people to do a safety talk, they were all programmed to go, okay, let's just sit through this for the next half an hour. And he said, I'm not gonna talk to you about safety. And all of a sudden they pricked up and he said, No, I'm gonna talk to you about getting on with each other. Uh, because if we can do that, like you're all smart guys. And so he had what he was doing was freestyling relatedness, you know. That's cool. And he had a huge effect. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 11:31

Yeah, totally. And I I love that approach because when it boils down to things, no one really wants to talk about safety. It's kind of one of those topics where you just kind of switch off and and you want to zone out. Switch off. I do like that that tri-split of um three-way split of accountability, sorry, autonomy. Autonomy, competence, yeah, competence relatedness. I mean, relationship that really speaks to my view on safety quite a bit because having autonomy is a combination of having responsibility and authority and discretion to exercise that competently is is fairly straightforward. And it's not necessarily have you had the training or the formal qualification, or conversely, have you had the experience? Because neither of those are a full package. You actually just need to be competent, and you can be competent with no formal education, and you can also be competent with a minimal amount of experience.

SPEAKER_01: 12:21

But we're looking for for a and likewise, possibly you could be incompetent with all the all the education, right?

SPEAKER_02: 12:29

Totally, yeah. Um so it's it's it's something else again, but that's so much of it rests on your ability to relate to people and to form those relationships. And yeah, off more often than not, the best way to do that is to not talk about safety at all. Ironically engage with people and it's full of irony, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Totally, yeah. I like to I didn't coin the term, but I quite like the term humble inquiry. You just show you're just genuinely interested in the other person. And invariably people want to talk about that. They want to talk about their work, they're proud of it. They enjoy what they're doing. Or if they don't enjoy what they're doing, they're probably going to be even more vocal.

SPEAKER_01: 13:05

But you know, people are. So obviously there's relatedness because you're genuinely interested in what they're saying. So that's high that's improving relatedness. Competence, you're recognizing their competence because you're asking them about something. And autonomy, well, they are deciding to to share what they what they do, and they're sort of telling you. So the humble inquiry sort of uh tool, so to speak, is is beautiful in that in the sense of improving all three of those things. And it's so different to a lot of modern safety, isn't it? The safety policeman style. Yeah. Where it's just like put all the posters on the walls that talk about safety first, but all the workers know that that there if there's any misalignment between the workers' interests and the company's interests, then the company's interests is what they're talking about, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 14:10

Yeah, and it's it's a well-founded fear as well, because it's happened. It's happened for decades.

SPEAKER_01: 14:15

That's right. That's completely understandable. In fact, is is it worth do you have any sort of stories or case studies on that that you could talk to on in that piece? Either either good or bad, you know. If we're in oil and gas, that this is easy because there's some really major incidents that have really shaped their industry. But you know, do you have any that you can talk to? Not to put you on the spot. If you don't, we can kick it.

SPEAKER_02: 14:38

No, one definitely jumps to mind. And it's not it's not one that was well known by any stretch. It's it's it was a fairly mundane incident. Not a major incident. It was a it was a bus pulling out of an intersection and he took out this railing, the metal fence protective barrier. And you know, there was there was a car coming in towards him as he turned, he had to take the corner a bit tighter, which caused him to hit the barrier. And when we were talking to him, we you know sort of established that he did see the other car. He misjudged his timing pulling out and turned a bit too tight and hit the barrier. Now that was our finding from the investigation. Unfortunately, the safety processes in place at the time required us to apply what's called um the just culture model. And for any listeners that have come across that, it's a it's a chart of culpability. You work through a series of questions to determine, you know, did this person make an honest mistake? Was it a judgment error error? Was it reckless or was it intentional? And you work through this cascading list of questions to arrive at a point, and the point that we arrived at was recklessness, which meant that the person was sent home not to return. Um and that was a week before Christmas. And that that really stung and uh stung me and and stuck with me because it didn't sit comfortably with me, it still doesn't. But that was the rigid application of this set of rules, which just didn't account for the individual circumstances of that situation, which yes it was reckless, but it wasn't reckless in the way that that term's normally used, and but we were forced down this path because of process, because of system. And it just really didn't account for that human element. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:26

Yeah, so what would what would you have preferred to do in that instance?

SPEAKER_02: 16:33

I I would have liked to have gone further and understood what exactly was was going on with you know why why the urgency to pull out, why not wait for the car and just understand what's going on in his mind? Because maybe there was something else happening before that we can address. Maybe there's nothing we can address. Maybe we just need to understand the circumstances a bit better and and understand that these things sometimes happen. But maybe there's there's something more to discover there, more to learn about that incident, rather than just how culpable is this person.

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

What strikes me in that what you just said there is that story, and it's not mine, and it's it's kind of old, I think, of the I don't know if you know this story of the the acrobat, um, the pilot, you know, the acrobatic pilot, and he had a guy fuel his plane. Do you know this story? And not that. Okay, good. He had a new guy fuel his plane. He used the wrong fuel. So he's in the middle of one of his acrobatic manoeuvres where he stalls the plane and then it needs to restart, doesn't restart. And so he has a crash landing, totals the plane, doesn't die, gets injured, and it's found that clearly the wrong fuel was used. That was what happened. And so the um the he he recovered, gets another plane. As it turns out, same guy's there at the at the fuel depot, and he says to the pilot, like, I don't know what to say, obviously you don't want me to be fueling your plane, and he said, No, I want only you to be fueling my plane. You know, and it's uh it's a whether it's a parable or it's a true story, it doesn't really matter. The point is that when we do when we have these screw-ups, oftentimes we are the most qualified person to not do that again. We are so careful in that regard. So, you know, it's it's interesting that following protocol without understanding the situation can lead to throwing the baby out with a bath water. The lesson has already been learned, and now that guy's going. You know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:43

And and we talk about, you know, that autonomy, and I use the word discretion. You know, there was no discretion for the person investigating the person responding to that incident to use their judgment and and determine, you know, that this person probably, despite what the process says, this person probably wasn't reckless, we probably don't need to go down that path. There's maybe there's something else going on here.

SPEAKER_01: 19:05

And so is there room in that instance, would there be room for some kind of appeal where the investigator says, Look, I know that there's this thing, but I want to take it to the judgment of two or three people so we can talk about it? Or is that just more red tape? Or how would you like I can see there being I can see sort of there being a good reason to have some set of criteria, perhaps? I mean, I don't know. You can understand why they would want to do it, because they want to bring objectivity to uh things. So they're like, okay, let's let's we can't account for you know Desi's um take on this is going to be different to James's take. So every assessor is gonna have their own personal view. Well, we've got to run an organization, so we need some objectivity here, let's have a set of criteria. I can understand why they would have done it. And yet it I don't know, is it just flawed because it's too rigid or too reductionist? You know, that they've reduced uh a complex incidents down to a set of half a dozen questions and make a decision on that. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02: 20:15

Yeah, I I think that there's too much emphasis on formalizing process and not allowing discretion. And what I mean by that is in in Australia and New Zealand and the UK, we've got a common law legal system, which is a set of principles that over time get applied to novel situations and they get sort of massaged and and reinterpreted in different ways, and they constantly evolve. And I think that's that's an amazing strength that that legal system has is its ability to evolve. You know, as as society's values change, so too can the law. It's a little bit slow, but that's that's also a good thing. But you don't get that within organizations, and so the idea of a policy being laid down, 15 years later, that policy might still be in place, but the company's values have shifted. The application hasn't evolved with all these new situations that crop up. So you end up being sort of bounded by this policy that you know, maybe the person that implemented it has long since left the company, and the rationale for it is is long since gone and left with them. So you're just tied up in all of this formality and structure and system that you don't necessarily need. And I think with if if people take a step back and just say, well, what let's let's exercise our good judgment here and our discretion, and let's see if there's a better way to go about this.

SPEAKER_01: 21:34

Yeah. That's interesting. I think Elon is known for many things, but one of them is when someone has a requirement, you've got to put your name against it. Not a not a department, not a it's got to be someone's individual name. Because he says, always question the requirements. He he's like, never trust the requirements. Because of that, there's this vestigial nature of requirements, isn't there? There's like, we need to do this. It's like, why? It's like, I don't know, but if I don't know. So that's why he needs a name. So I will call Joe and ask him why. And Joe's like, oh no, I put that in for this reason. It's got nothing to do with what's needed now. You know, so like you say, these processes and systems kind of get um get long past the use by date, they're still there, right?

SPEAKER_02: 22:19

Totally. And they can legally they can become a bit of a bit of a double-edged sword, you know, they can serve the organization while they're relevant, but they can also be a uh quite cutting when it comes to a prosecution. Um I'm thinking very much in the safety context here, but often companies are prosecuted on the basis of their own policies and procedures, not necessarily their you know, their intentions or their values. And we see this all the time, you know, that they say, oh, you know, we'll do ten inspections and we'll make sure everyone's inducted. Well, as soon as you get one person that's not inducted or you miss one inspection, that's it. You know, when you when you're expected to take all reasonably practicable steps, yeah, that's that's your prosecution done.

SPEAKER_01: 23:06

That's like the whole take five or pre-start. Like Gary, my co-founder in in Scratchy, is is in this long in the safety domain. He's been safety for a long time. I haven't, so I'm kind of learning this secondhand. So I ask all the dumb questions. So when it comes to pre-starts and take fives and all that sort of thing, I was like, what's the purpose of that? And Gary said, Oh, it's it's it's a good intention. It's so people can take a step back and have a little think before they start work. It's equivalent of in the 70s the boss saying, just have a cigarette and have a before you start work. I've never smoked, but I I get the concept. Or if in England it would be have a cup of tea, you know, and uh just chill before you start work and have a little think and have a talk. So that that idea is good, but he said what it's the execution of is super flawed because what's happened is that these p these companies have these sort of pre-printed pads, and um they have to sort of tick off it's it's all become bureaucratic in a sense. So they've got to tick off uh that they've checked these things and any anything that's out of line they can note, and then they put it in some box that nobody reads. So if uh and this is uh there's a is it Greg Smith, there's some sort of really brilliant safety lawyer. I don't know. Yep, Greg Smith. I've heard Greg Smith, okay.

SPEAKER_02: 24:29

From WAK.

SPEAKER_01: 24:30

Um yeah, that's the one. I think he's um he's written a book about this, but basically they create a rod for their own back, all of a sudden there's these workers that are saying what's going on, and it's finding its way into a box, and then it's not being um dealt with uh on the on the spot. And so someone does fall off the scaffold uh through the hole, and the lawyers come and they say, Well, let's open this box and find out. And so there's a treasure trove of um of all these workers saying there's a hole on the scaffold on the third floor. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so that's with ConvoCard, what we did is um I don't know if it's just been released, so you probably wouldn't know about it, but um the worker, it's more kind of Instagram-y. The work because of, as you know, builders live on their phones, and so this was primarily to to um to solve a building-related problem. But what we found is that it it goes to other sectors very easily. So its use case sort of morphs. But the original use case was for builders to say, there's an issue, I'm gonna take a photo. Is it safe to work? Is the next question, and it's like, no, it's not safe to work. Um, then you you talk, you comment in and we transcribe it, and then you press send and it goes straight to your boss's phone who dings, and your boss is like, okay, there's a hole in this scaffold on the third floor. Hey, you know, it gets on the radio, it goes, Jason, can you look on the third floor? There's a hole in the scaffold, problem solved. Right? So it's this immediate feedback loop that can actually, it's easy to put the information in. It's very easy to receive the information, then it's dealt with, and we've gamified it. So the worker gets all the points and the worker can be rewarded for that. Con we call it combo card, the con conversation card. So that's um our reimagining of that. So and and one of the questions with that was but where's the checklist? You know, where's the and it's like, no, it doesn't need a checklist. It's like, don't worry, you know, there's this obsession with with having to give the or that autonomy that the manager can experience is to take that away from the manager to turn it into a checklist so that the manager has to answer a checklist. So we were like, no, no, no. People are paid a lot in the construction industry. They can make decisions, you know. So give it to them.

SPEAKER_02: 26:52

Totally. Because if you don't trust them enough to make a competent decision, then maybe they shouldn't be a manager in the first place. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 26:59

Exactly. Yeah, they're paid a lot. And they were and they worked long hours, and that's granted, you know, but uh they're still paid a lot.

SPEAKER_02: 27:07

I like that concept though, because you know, when if we talk about those five by five or step back cards or whatever they're called, you've got to think about the first principles, you know, wh why is it that we're doing this in the first place? And I know of that from Elon Musk, but I don't think that he's the one that coined the term. But if you drill down to what is it we're actually trying to achieve with this function, as soon as it doesn't achieve that, then you need to seriously reconsider it. But if you haven't ever considered that and you're just doing it as a part of the process, or you know, we've it's we've always done it, or some other competitor does it, so we have to do it, that's when you start to run into problems.

SPEAKER_01: 27:44

Yep. Yep. That's right. You're and he said the worst thing is when engineers, when you haven't questioned the requirements, as an engineer, you just go and your engineering brain is all about finding solutions to something that wait, it didn't need to be solved, you know. So they've just yeah, it's complexity on complexity, and yeah, so we've got a lot to learn from that guy, right? I mean in so many ways. Cool. So tell me what you're doing uh right now and uh in terms of work and um Yeah, I'd love to hear how you're kind of bringing your sort of approach and your attitude and what you've learned in safety to to your current life.

SPEAKER_02: 28:26

Well, I've I've been lucky enough to work across a range of industries. So I mentioned transport, I've also worked in oil and gas, hospitality, and now construction. And I've been in a head safety role in construction for eight and a half years now. And I've I've seen in each instance, in each industry, the same consistent approach to safety, being very process-driven, procedures, everything's documented and written, but seldom followed. So when you actually go out and look on site or look in the workplace, there's something different happening and there's a disconnect. And that's that's becoming within safety academic circles, what's known as work as imagined and work as done, and the disconnect between the two, and there's been a lot of focus now on bridging that gap. And maybe work is done is never going to be exactly the same as work as imagined, but at least you can bring them closer together. And to borrow from Greg Smith again, who you mentioned before, who has two fantastic books, Paper Safe and Proving Safety. He also indicates there could be a third thing, which is work is documented. So you're imagining one thing, what's actually happening is is another thing, but what's written down is is a third thing. And that misalignment actually creates a lot of legal risk. And so a lot of my approach to health and safety has been not only dealing with the health and safety risk, but also the legal risk. You know, what sort of system are we setting up that's going to create problems for the organization legally as well as from a health and safety perspective? Right. Yes. And that actually led me to to put my thoughts down in a book. Yeah, it's published in June.

SPEAKER_01: 30:02

Great. Name of the book, what it covers.

SPEAKER_02: 30:05

Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so the book is called Beyond the Incident. And it covers um, it's written from a very practical perspective about health and safety investigations that the average sort of health and safety practitioner would be undertaking as part of their normal role, whether they're internal or external. It's a set of tools that they can use to aid their investigations, make them more effective, more efficient. Um it covers a variety of topics. I talk about ethics, bias, legal professional privilege, all things that I think are gaps in how health and safety investigations are taught and practiced now. And gaps that were really evident to me coming from law into health and safety.

SPEAKER_01: 30:45

And you so your perspective would be quite unique as an author of that sort of book, having worked, you know, on a forklift, um, having studied the law, having seen kind of both ends of that spectrum, uh, and then looking in various sectors too, working in different, you know, uh working transport, oil and gas, construction. Yeah, so you you've probably got plenty of case studies from those sorts of industries, right?

SPEAKER_02: 31:14

Yeah, totally. And and it's uh it's interesting because a lot of the stuff that we learn about incident investigations usually come from big disasters. You know, we're talking about Piper Alpha in New Zealand, it's about Pike River. And there's all these they're high media profile, they're involving the regulator, there's prosecutions, there's probably the police, all sorts of stuff happening. Most investigations that are done from day to day are nowhere near that. And what you're trying to do is just with very, very limited resources, try and understand what happened, try and learn something, and try and and do whatever you can to fix it and prevent it from happening again. If indeed you can fix it, sometimes you can't. And you're also doing that within an environment where you've got lots of competing stakeholders and wanting things done faster, done in a different way, a different terminology used. And it's a it's a difficult road to navigate. And if we talk about ethics, you know, there's there's challenges with do you cut your investigation short in order to meet the expectations of a stakeholder that wants the investigation finalized within three or four weeks? If you cut it short, are you compromising the meaningful findings that might arise? Even though you haven't found those things yet? How do you how do you navigate that that environment?

SPEAKER_01: 32:33

And also, how do you disseminate the lessons learned honestly when the company that was involved has a real interest to not tie itself up legally? Is that that must be one of the key key problems with incident investigation, is it? You've got someone who's clammed up almost almost literally, uh they they're sort of closed up shop to say legally we've got to protect ourselves, but meanwhile, the the little well, the pearl of a lesson is inside, and it's really hard to access. And if other people knew all of the if that lesson could be shared, that would be valuable to a much larger group. Is that how do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_02: 33:18

Yes, it's a very common criticism of processes that follow, especially a high-profile incident. And my mind immediately turns to Dreamworld and the tragic accident they had a number of years ago with the person drowned on the waterslide ride that they had. And without going into details of the incident, which I probably can't recall anyway, but there was about three or four years worth of court cases and prosecutions and and all sorts of stuff happening. And then at the end of that, you get a little media statement that says, Oh, yeah, you know, such and such has been fined and prosecuted and found guilty, and and you might get a little couple of sentences about what actually happened, but unless you go digging, you're not going to find that out. And yet there's industries around the world that would be very interested in that information. You know, if I was a theme park owner in Florida with similar water slides, I'd really want to know what what the hell happened. You know, are we vulnerable in the same way? Exactly. But you miss all that. You miss, you know, people claim up, like you said. They've got they've they're entitled to. Legal professional privilege is a fundamental right of our legal system, and and I wouldn't want to compromise that in any way. But you're right, there's a conflict there, and you've got to try and address that. And I think there is a way through. There is a way to carefully navigate maintaining legal professional privilege and also getting some sort of meaningful learnings from an incident and sharing those as soon as possible. I think it's possible to do both.

SPEAKER_01: 34:42

Is there does the law support you know how they've that they've introduced the Good Samaritan Act in various guises? So if someone tries to help someone who's in trouble, they they can't get sued for it very easily because they did their best, even if they screwed up a bit, you know. So it's a beautiful take on the law to protect that. Is there something equivalent to encourage so so in that instance, a first data has made an ethical decision. I'm going to go out on a limb and help this person, and the law says, if you did that, well done on that ethical decision to put yourself out there, we're not going to go hard on you if you screw up. Is there and so when it might be Which book is it? I'm thinking of one of those what was his name? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book, one of his interesting books, where these planes kept falling out of the sky. And one of the I think the Air Korea or Korean Air for some reason, I think it was a cultural thing actually. So there was a this wasn't Air Korea, it was Japanese planes, similar things that were. Right. And the Japanese pilot said my screw up. So basically Harukiri. He was like, My screw up, what do you want to do? I screwed up, I fucked up. What do you want to do? And I remember reading that going, that is the most courageous, heroic, honest, bold. I loved everything about that. And it really informed me and the way I live my life as well. If I and so I wonder if there's an ability for if someone fesses up and says, like, I screwed up, if I can share this lesson, then other companies will learn it. This mistake might not happen again and it might save someone's life, or something like that. If the courts can give some kind of, I don't know, I don't know if they already do, if it's built into the legal system, to sort of say, thanks for your honesty. This has helped the industry. We're going to go a bit easier on you, or if if I'm just in dreamland.

SPEAKER_02: 36:52

You make a really good point, and there's a lot of talk in the industry about doing that within organizations. Nippin Anand is a safety commentator on that, and he's written a book called Are We Learning from Accidents?

SPEAKER_00: 37:04

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02: 37:05

And he talks about that in the context of the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship disaster that happened off the coast of Italy. Just very interesting. Don't employ gorgeous dancers. That's the uh is that the lesson? Well, there were some there were some really interesting insights that he that he was able to dig up. He's actually spoke to the captain of the ship who was behind bars at the time, I believe. And yeah, you've got to you've got to question when there's incidents like that, especially high-profile ones, people are looking for someone to blame. And you've got that sort of public interest argument working against the fact that you've also got a law that says that someone needs to be prosecuted, and you've got a regulator that's that's on the hunt looking for that. Those two things need to be managed before you can do any sort of good Samaritan equivalent in the health and safety space. Within organizations, it's a bit easier. But as soon as you're sort of stepping into those legal and incidents involving the police and media and high-profile prosecutions, it's a very different story.

SPEAKER_01: 38:03

I mean, I guess in Costa Concordia, because I I'm a sailor and in my book, it's that becomes very simple. Like, that's the captain saying, My fault, I'll suffer the consequences. Lifetime behind bars, I get it. Like, I screwed up. There's consequences. There's no leniency in that. I would you know, I as a captain, I wouldn't go into that expecting, can you give it be nice to me if I'm honest? It's like there's some things that you know kind of this you know, you you sort of uh the actions uh of that were way, way, way outside, you know. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 38:45

But it's interesting that competing interests of on one hand, we're talking about consequences and accountability and responsibility, in the other sense, we're talking about improving the way we do things and learning from them. And you know, the Costa Concordia incident is is a really good example of you know the captain's now behind bars for whatever sentence he's got. I'm not sure. Yeah, has that prevented the next cruise ship from crashing into a rock? Probably not. So there needs to be this other element, this other learning.

SPEAKER_01: 39:14

Yeah, it's true. And yet, if you're the captain, let's say you're the Japanese captain of the of the plane, he was you know, the Japanese tradition is like, I'll follow my sword. Like I'll take I'll take whatever consequence is there. I'm not trying to avoid consequence. You know, I need to just be very honest with myself and with the situation. Yeah, so that's the qu so does that well I think in at least according to Malcolm Gladwell's, it did help because it they were able to get to the bottom of the sit of the cultural problem in the cockpit of those planes where the the seniority was um there there wasn't this kind of like democracy in the cockpit. Well, not so much democracy, but there wasn't if you're a captain and I'm I'm a number two, you know, I can say to you, mate, we've got no fuel. And I think that's a Kiwi Aussie thing. It's like we've got to do something about it. Whereas the their culture was just like, no, no, no, you're the boss, I can't possibly question you. And yeah, so getting to the heart of that cultural problem solved it solved the issue, didn't it really? It um so that once they figured that out, so but it needed honesty, that's the thing. They could have they could have there could have been dishonesty. Well, there's a black box. I guess they can they can listen to the yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 40:34

Yeah anyway. I mean it's it's very you know, the the captain falling on his sword is a very honourable, noble gesture that he can do after an incident, but that hasn't been a little bit more than a lot of people why the plane crashed. Yeah. And that's what I'm interested in.

SPEAKER_01: 40:50

No, there I mean, I don't know if you remember Vestas, the the ocean racing boat going hitting the reef in the Indian Ocean at twenty knots. And uh I was in the Caribbean at the time sailing and with a bunch of my skipper friends, and we were, of course, very interested in this, and it was an Aussie skipper, so we were like, okay, how's he gonna handle this? And r in in our book, in my book, there's really only one way to deal with it, and that is to say, my boat hit the reef, it's my boat, I'm the captain, so it's my fault. The end. And he said it's my boat, uh, I hit the reef, but as soon as he said but, any respect, like just gone, evaporated, disappeared, because he said, But I have this communication issue with my navigator, and all of a sudden he's just it's all just floppy, just lack of accountability kind of language to bring his navigator into it. And I I had no interest that it's that there was some communication issue with his navigator. That was still his fault. If he couldn't point, I mean his navigator didn't g go down to sufficient detail. And um so missed the rock in the middle of the ocean. Still the captain's fault. Doesn't matter, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 42:12

You know, totally, but but you know, when we're doing this type of inquiry, it's it's we're not trying to attribute fault to different people. Some investigations are, but I wouldn't recommend that in a safety context. Well, it's funny because you need to understand the story, you need to understand the butt. So if if he's saying but, that's that's when my ears perk up, and I just say I'm not asking any more questions, you just tell me your story.

SPEAKER_01: 42:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 42:37

Sometimes the best interview doesn't have any questions, you just say you just tell me. Tell me what happened.

SPEAKER_01: 42:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 42:42

Start from the time you had breakfast or whatever, but I want to hear it.

SPEAKER_01: 42:46

And it's interesting. You look at this case study from the perspective of the incident investigator, and so I fully applaud where you're coming from. I look at it from the captain of the boat. And so, um, how would I act? And that's what where we were judging him, fully judging him, without remorse. And it wasn't about incident investigation for us, it was about how captain behaves, how how so you know, we're we're looking at it through different lenses.

SPEAKER_02: 43:17

But that's interesting because that's the different perspectives that stakeholders have that you have to sort of meander your way through and and achieve the outcome that you need.

unknown: 43:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 43:26

Like in a typical day-to-day low profile, you know, there's a an injury. It's serious enough for the person, but it's not serious enough in the sense that it's involving, you know, high profile things. But you've got probably a client organization that's demanding a formal investigation and ahead of the next few weeks to be closed out and someone to be held accountable and all these actions to be done. And on the other hand, you've got a tight group of workmates who are involved in this, who are going through some trauma and trying to navigate the difficulty of returning to work under these circumstances, and maybe their mate's still in hospital. You've got the guy who's actually in hospital who's also trying to deal with stuff and also probably feeling like the finger's being pointed at him, and you're trying to solicit information from that person about what happened. And so you've got all these competing interests, and sometimes even just the words that you're using when you're talking to people can can send you down the right path or it can really upset them. It's a delicate balance.

SPEAKER_01: 44:23

Do you get a lot of not a lot, uh do you get people who do mere culpa the whole thing and say, let's keep this very simple. I was accountable, I was responsible, and I screwed up. Yeah, yeah, that happens. Absolutely. It doesn't help me though. That's not why I'm talking to them. But doesn't that get that honesty help get to the nub of what happened? So when they say, I did this, it had this consequence, doesn't that help you to say, okay, thank you. How can we stop that chain of events happening in future? Like engineering controls, training, attitude, you know?

SPEAKER_02: 45:04

Yeah, yeah. I mean it certainly does you're right in that sense that it frames the rest of the discussion as yep, great, we've got that out of the way. Now let's look at what we can learn and and understand about what happened. And you have that challenge with any interview that you might be undertaking, formal or informal, whatever form it takes. You need to have that person comfortable with speaking to you. And if that involves that admission and and to get that out of the way, then then so be it. Sometimes the person won't be so forthcoming, so you've got to put them at ease and say, look, I just want to have a chat. We just want to understand what happened. We're not interested in in culpability, that's not that's not what we're talking about today. Right. But tomorrow there's going to be someone in your circumstance. I don't want what happened to you to happen to them. So we're helping the next person. Let's let's have a chat about that.

SPEAKER_01: 45:54

Yeah, that's good. I'm glad you do the incident investigations, not me. Probably Well, Desai, I I really think we've kind of gone over time, but it's been really interesting.

SPEAKER_02: 46:08

It's been awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 46:09

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So uh would you have anything else you you wanted to share? Can can you do you have a copy of your book and and the name just in case? Because anyone involved in incidents Beyond the Incident, there we go. Yeah, so anyone involved in uh safety incident investigation, this is Desi's thinking on that and research on that, so it would be well worth looking at. What's it, Amazon? You got it there?

SPEAKER_02: 46:33

You can get it on Amazon. What I can do is share the link to Amazon. Perhaps there's some show notes that you can add it to.

SPEAKER_01: 46:39

But yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 46:40

It's the sort of book, it's designed to complement existing investigations. So if if you're if you're dedicated to using sort of a particular method of investigation in safety, this is designed to complement that. So it's the sort of book when you get the phone call and something's happened, it's the sort of book you want to reach for because you'll need it with you. Great. Great.

SPEAKER_01: 47:00

Cool, Desso. Well thank you. And uh yeah, we look forward to keeping in touch. It's um it was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_02: 47:07

Sure, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, James.

SPEAKER_01: 47:10

Pleasure. See you.