PAPod 497 - What Do We Do Next? A Conversation about Change

So people ask this question all the time. I bet they ask it of you too, so it's not going to be a foreign question. All this stuff's great. I mean, it resonates with me. I get it. It makes sense. It's smart. But what do we do to make it happen? Music.

Hey everybody todd conklin pre-accident investigation safety moment how are you how's it going is it great i think so i mean because you know everything i complain about all year long kind of goes away in spring summer and fall so i'm happy as as can be and i'm getting quite a bit of bike riding done. I'm impressed. I've kept the same bike. Now that's just a freak. I'm one banana peel away from getting stolen.

I know that because it's the story of my life. But I will tell you this new giant lock I have, which is, I'm sure it's not grinder proof. Although you'd have to really be patient to grind through this. It's definitely bolt cutter proof. No way a bolt cutter could cut it. I think it's working better. So, you know, I'm learning. I'm a learning organization. I'm becoming smarter as the days grow longer. But, you know, it's happening. But it's kind of fun to go out and think about stuff.

And Santa Fe is, you know, a pretty gorgeous place to hang out. If you've not been here, let me just formally invite you. Come for any reason you can think of. Stay for as long as you want. Eat a burrito. Those are my three requirements. I should tell you, I don't think I have this on my little list to talk about. But we do have a workshop scheduled in Santa Fe at the Drury Inn the week of September 11th. I think it's like the 12th is when it starts.

You can get more details, easy McPeasy, and we're glad to give them to you. But the workshop, I'm really excited about it because it's the normal kind of introductory workshop. I always think of these workshops. So I'll just be really honest with you guys. This is not something I would purposely do because it's kind of a lot of work. There's a lot of logistics.

But because people ask for it all the time, and I completely understand why they ask for it because it's a way to –. Dip your toe into this new thinking and kind of get a exposure to what's going to happen before you actually buy the cow. He says mixing his metaphors like crazy, but it really is a chance to come and see, bring a couple of people with you and see what they think before you actually come in and actually start the intervention of maybe doing it at your organization.

I know that it's good for that. I know it's a great way for people who are curious about what this all is about to come and get a quick exposure. And that's kind of the goal for the workshop is that idea of exposure to the human performance ideas and these ideas of kind of a different way to view safety.

And the way it works out is the first day generally is a foundations day of the first principles of human performance, basically the five principles of human performance with a background around blame and sort of understanding and introducing the idea of failing safely.

And then the second day, this workshop is really kind of promising because Mark Yeston is going to do his pre-job worker involvement, worker participation, worker empowerment and engagement section, which is completely, if you don't know Mark Yeston, he's been on the pot a bunch of times, but he's definitely someone just to hear him tell a story is worth And then I think Martha is going to talk about leadership because that's an area that she's gotten deeply involved with, which is great.

Jennifer Long is going to do her accountability work. Discussion, which is completely valuable. And that's kind of the notion where Jennifer comes at the accountability thing, not through safety, but through sort of leadership, through organizational management. And she sees accountability as an act of clarity. And that's a very, very interesting way. Her discussion is worthwhile. And then it's going going to end up with Bob and

pretty much a whole day on organizational learning and application. So it's three days long. It's in the Drury Inn. It's catered. There'll be little things of water. It's a normal meeting, comfortable seating, projectors, sound system, all the stuff that you want at a workshop. But it is just kind of a workshop. It is a great workshop to bring leaders to if you want to, that would be great.

Or if you've never really been exposed to any of these people or any of these ideas, and you're curious, it's really a good opportunity to do that. Plus, it's Santa Fe in September. I mean, that's a super good time to be there. And I think I can safely promise, if you want to, we'll arrange a bike ride. So there you go. That'll be happening. And that could be fun as well.

I mean, that could definitely be a good time. If you're interested, and again, I didn't really intend on going down this path, but since I invited you to Santa Fe, I think we should go down this path. If you're interested, you can definitely contact officetoddconklin, all one word, at gmail.com. And that'll get the ball started. It's probably also on the Hop Hub. I haven't checked that. I honestly don't know the details of where it's advertised.

But I know Office Todd Conklin will get you in the right place.

And there's still availability, although there's kind of a lot of people, I think, that got in early because they were on some kind of waiting list, which I also don't understand that. And I do think there's going to be quite a little aviation crowd because, you know, that's a group of people that are suddenly interested in thinking about these ideas a little differently. And that's good. Everyone's welcome.

There's not an industry that wouldn't feel welcome there. So come on in and have a good time. And I think you'll enjoy it. I mean, it's definitely a worthwhile venture. That's for certain. And I think that's a part of it as well. Well, for me, man, I just can't say enough about how much fun it is seeing everybody. And it's kind of nice to get back together collectively with a group of people.

I'm sure excited about the upcoming summer and all the activities that are going up there with the community of human and organizational learning getting together for their 30th anniversary. That'll be very fun. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff planned as well. So a good time can be had pretty much by everybody.

In fact, if you're not having a good time, you're probably doing it wrong, which is maybe it's time to take a big mirror and look at the mirror and see what you see because that I think is a worthwhile endeavor to be certain. Other than that, let's see. I'm trying to think if there's any other big, exciting things coming up.

I do think we're going to do a workshop around investigation, not methods, because there are lots of really good resources for investigation methods, but kind of investigatory philosophy, how to think about doing an investigation. Investigation and it's kind of cool because a bunch of people have expressed an interest in being a part of sort of having that sharing session and I promised we'd do that so I've got to do it and I'm kind of excited about it.

It's one of my favorite workshops traditionally to do. It was always one of my favorite ones to do when Roger used to do them at Los Alamos is It was the Accident Investigation Theory. We called it that because, I don't know, that's as good a name as any. But that was always a really fun workshop because it was so thoughtful. And you could really see people kind of going through this iterative process and their wheels were turning in their brain and smoke was coming out.

It was kind of a cool thing to do. So that's coming up as well, but I don't have any details on that. I'll get them to you. No worries. I promise that's going to happen as well. all. Other than that, man, it's just one exciting day after another. As all of us are kind of taken to say, we're living the dream. And if you want to keep employed, work in safety because there seems to be relatively good job security. That's all I'm going to say to that.

Today, however, I want to talk to you about a little project I'm working on. It's not Project X, although Project Project X is happening, much to my chagrin, but it is happening. But it's actually a project that I think probably has some pretty good legs to it. And I wanted to just have kind of an initial discussion with you on why I think that makes a huge difference. It's worthwhile talking about.

So as you heard me say when we kicked this podcast off, the big question that everybody asks is, this stuff's really interesting. This stuff's really good. But what do I do with it? How do I take it to that next step? And that's a very fair question. The application question is always a powerful question. It's a little bit two-sided because what I think people really want you to do is give them the answer.

And the one thing we can agree on, at least for this discussion today, is there kind of is no answer. I don't have an answer. I wish I had an answer. That would be great. An answer would be wonderful. But there's not one. And the reason there's not an answer is because every organization is different. Every situation is different. Every culture is different. They're just different. And so different things need to happen in different ways for different people.

And really, when we talk about what's next, we're really probably talking more about how do I start to facilitate this philosophical change in an organization that has held on dearly to the old views that we've carried and taken us to where we are now. And, you know, that's a pretty good question. And traditionally, I always kind of give the same answer. You've probably heard me say it before, but there are really three things that you need to think about.

One is you have to redefine safety. Safety is not the absence of accidents. Safety is the presence of capacity. And so that new definition, which is actually kind of a big deal because that represents a philosophical shift from sort of a prevention bias. We should stop everything. Zero is attainable. To much more of an assurance bias. Safety should make it easier and better to do work in our organization.

The second thing I talk about, which is really vital, is that you must change the way you do investigations. And when I say that, I'm really talking about change the way you learn and change the way you do operational learning. Recognize that the worker is not the problem. The worker is the solution. And so instead of targeting investigations at changing workers, let's actually use the workers to help us understand how work actually gets done.

And if you talk to Eric Holnegel or Sidney Decker or Rob Fisher, there's a ton of great people out there. They'll all tell you, you've got to sort of look at normal work. I mean, if you're not looking at normal work, then you're waiting for an accident to learn about your process. And that's the worst way to learn about your process. Not the least of which is because something bad happened, but also that's kind of an extreme view of your process. That's how your process failed.

And then the third thing is really pretty rich, and that is how leaders respond makes a difference. And so one of the very first things, and I say this all the time, you've heard me say it before, is that one of the first places we want to invest in actually getting a new philosophy is at the leadership level. Because I promise you, if the leaders don't shift their thinking, then nothing will change in the organization.

Even as hard as you try at the grassroots level to turn that ship around, leaders still have sort of the ultimate ability to bring it back to the old view, bring it back to the old way it used to be, bring it back to where we're comfortable. We may not be happy, but we're comfortable. And then the last thing, and this one is probably always worth talking about, is we vitally have to keep the discussion of risk alive.

Because if we lose that discussion of risk, then we lose the ability to talk about control. And if we lose the ability to talk about control, what happens is our operations, no matter what you do, will have places where there's great amounts of danger and very little recoverability. Lots of risk without control. And those answers, I think, are great answers. But they're still probably relatively philosophical.

I mean, if you really pushed me and says, okay, what do I, give me five things I can do tomorrow. And those are things, I mean, there are things in there that you can do tomorrow, but none of those actually really involve action, you know, changing action. And that's where this This new project I'm working on kind of takes off because I notice as scholars in safety, as thinkers in safety, age and mature, they tend to get much more philosophical in their approach.

If you look at really anybody you want to look at, they kind of just get more and more philosophical. And that's fine. And I understand that that's probably a naturally occurring phenomena for somebody who's been thinking about these problems for a long time. But I thought to myself, why don't we try to become more applied? Why don't we think of new ideas for old problems?

And so I started thinking about that, and I thought, you know, the go-do parts of this have much more to actually include, the philosophical shift that we're not really changing safety per se. What we need to go do is change the way we think about safety. And so that actually opens up a really interesting discussion.

Because now what we're looking at is how can we help diffuse these new philosophies, this new idea of doing safety differently throughout the organization successfully and in a way that it's sustainable. And what actions do we need? Observable actions, applied things, go do. What actions do we need to do to ensure that that change happens? And man, when you start looking at that.

All of a sudden, all the work we do kind of makes sense for one reason, because a lot of this stuff we're doing every day, sometimes quite accidentally, sometimes super fortunately, but we're making things change all the time. But what we're really doing is going in there and building a new operational philosophy.

And the danger is, is that the old philosophy is so strong and so ingrained in our organizations that that challenge is really the big one, is how do we take what we've done, honor it, don't throw it away, honor it, and move beyond that. And if you look at sort of your safety performance in your organization, you'll find that you've dramatically improved, whether you know it or not, you have, and that you've sort of leveled out.

The only thing that scares us now are those weird blips where we have some kind of catastrophic failure that was sort of beyond our ability to predict and therefore beyond our ability to control. So if you start thinking, well, okay, this change has more to do with shifting the way the organization thinks about doing this work than it actually has in doing the work, that becomes an entirely new recipe for things to do. And so one of the things we look for desperately are measurements.

How could we find different things to measure? How can we measure what we want versus the traditional measurements, which were what we didn't want? And the answer is, man, that one's tough because measurements are always going to give us that backwards looking value and understanding of how the process has performed, but they're kind of difficult to use in a complex organization in a predictive way. So then we kind of talk about the word, well, so we should monitor processes.

And monitoring actually probably has some advantage over measuring because monitoring allows us to sort of understand where we are now. But what's been most interesting, and if you talk For instance, Sidney Decker is a good one to talk about. If you talk to Sidney Decker about this idea of managing the future, what should I do to make a difference, he uses a lot of discussions around the notion of building capacity. And so we think, well, how do we build capacity?

And there are many ways, depending on what you do, to have that discussion. You can always build margin into a system. You can build the ability to fail safely. You can build recoverability. I mean, these are all things that are really a big part of capacity. And yet, as I say that, one of the biggest challenges is getting the organization to understand what we mean when we say build capacity, build capacity to fail.

And what's funny is to us, and this is really where I'm struggling, which is probably why I'm talking about it with you guys today, is that whole building capacity thing makes perfect sense. The challenge is, is it doesn't translate well if the organization is still relatively strongly framed in the old paradigm. Because the old paradigm says you don't need capacity to fail because you shouldn't fail.

If zero truly is your goal, you don't need capacity to recover because if you really achieve your goal, nothing will happen. That's the problem. And that's where I think we ought to be looking at understanding how to help our organizations develop and grow and change.

And what's interesting is if we look for things to do there, we're probably not going to find them specifically in the safety arena, but we are going to find them in places like the diffusion of how innovation moves or how software moves or how people have inventions or how paradigms shift as the world changes. And that is something we can talk about.

And that's kind of been the big project is I've been thinking about this a lot and I've actually thought about it in a way that I've kind of come up with a list of things to help our organization understand that process of diffusing these ideas in a long-term and sustainable way into our organizations. And what's amazing is that this list really is benefiting from the scholars and practitioners who have gone before who understand how ideas diffuse into the world.

And how some parts of the organization will accept the ideas earlier and other parts of the organization will work diligently to not accept the ideas until everybody else has and then they kind of come along for the ride. And those notions of diffusing that information out actually are really interesting. And they do have some things that we can directly do. We can manage this idea of shifting our definition of safety by first understanding some really basic ideas.

And just some of those ideas, because I'm still working on this a lot, is that change happens differently in different levels of your organization. Organization and that one size probably does not fit all, nor should it fit all. And that some parts of your organization are really primed and ready for this change. And other parts of the organization really have lots to lose if this change happens. And so you have to become relatively strategically effective.

Effective, in fact, sort of strategically primed. I'm trying to think of the exact word so that you bring the news to the groups when the news makes the most sense to them. But this idea that one size fits all, there's a grand rollout. Tomorrow, there's a new JSA. Tomorrow, there's a new policy. Those are great, but they don't take into account the different nuances that the organization has.

Ultimately, and I do think ultimately, this is one place where we haven't spent a lot of time, is that in order for us to actually move our organizations to a new space, a space that's more resilient and robust, a space that offers recoverability, a space that offers the ability for organizations to improve, and quite honestly, between you and I, to stop up killing people, we first must have to help the organization get ready for that move.

And that is an important part of how we think about, talk about, and manage this information. It's really worthwhile. And the list that I'm coming up with, which I'll share with you at some point, because there's no need to keep it a secret, man, that's been exciting. Because you start to see we really have, in many ways, taken this idea that you should just come along on this journey for granted. And that lots of people really do have lots of vested interest in continuing to do the same thing.

And so if we don't help them understand what this change looks like and how this change is going to happen and help them talk about this change in different ways for different parts of the organization, we won't get there. But the funny thing is, is that it always comes back around no matter what you look at around the fusing ideas. It always is going to come back around to the important role that leadership plays in both helping this idea succeed and in maintaining this new idea operationally.

So I'll say it again because it's worth saying. man, if we're not spending the majority of our time talking with our leaders about this, then we're probably putting it in the wrong place. Leaders really benefit from having the opportunity to be a part of this diffusion of new ideas in a way that allows them to learn and grow and develop just like we do.

And that hoping we can flip a switch and everything will be different, man that doesn't exist that's the problem with what should i do is there is no flip switch or switch to flip doesn't i wish it existed but it doesn't and so how we do this means how we think about diffusing these ideas out into the organization and how we seed the ground and and tend the soil so that when the seeds land, they have the potential ability to blossom and grow.

Music. So I'm pretty excited about this change and this discussion. I'm really excited about the idea of new ideas for old problems. I think that's really where we are. And I think that's part of the discussion we can have with our organization is that we still have the same old problems. We have the same old problems. The challenge is, is can we think of new solutions for those old problems? Can we think of new ideas that we can share to help us tackle these old problems?

And then can we prototype them? Can we try them out? Can we test them and see if they work and then collect that data and actually improve? That is pretty cool. And that's kind of where this project I've been working on the last five or six months is kind of taken off. It's moving in that direction. And I'll talk to you more about it as we progress.

But I kind of want to invite you to think about it as well, because what we're really looking at is a change management strategy to help diffuse new ideas throughout an organization that's pretty, pretty vested, pretty well invested in the old ideas. And how do we make that shift so it's successful, it's palatable, it's smart, it's challenging, and it makes a difference. That is where we want to go in this discussion. And that's pretty much the pod for today.

I mean, that's what we wanted to cover. I hope you enjoyed it because I did as well. I'm always open to your feedback. Thanks for listening. Tell your friends. The numbers are getting bigger. It's just weird, but it's good because it's a little way for us to talk to each other. So I really appreciate the opportunity and never take for granted the ability to spend time with you. Learn something new every single day. Have as much fun as you possibly can.

Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. and for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe. Music.