In my first ever internal safety role, I was shocked to discover in my performance review that my results were tied to the injury statistics of the business units I was supporting. In 2020, the way I enable people like you to implement learning teams, comes with a 100% money back guarantee. The fine print is where we should be held accountable for change. But you know what else happens in the fine print….
There are conversations I bring you on the podcast which have a specific focus, topic or slant. There are others, which are simply conversations that I want to have, and I thought I would invite you in to listen. I love exploring my own curiosity about people, their stories and experiences and insights. This is one of those conversations, which is why this episode is called, Thinking Out Loud, with Adam Johns.
I've shared with you before some of the most impactful lessons I've learned in my life, which have come from my parents. That's from episode 119, called The #1 Question. My dad's was, 'measure twice, cut once'. An old carpenters mantra, my dad, not being a carpenter, seemed to be a great teacher because he himself was a kind of novice with tools and physical stuff.
Fellow nerds (or maybe just fellow spreadsheet aficionados), did you recognise what each of the keyboard shortcuts are in the title of this episode? Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+Alt+V+E? These seemingly innocuous actions might make the all the difference between wasted effort and effective work for you.
There is an elephant in my office. Its been there for ages, thought its only in the past few years that I've actually seen it. You have one, maybe more, where you work too. It's time to talk about it.
Regular listeners will know me for passionately spruiking and putting into practice a few key concepts. Today you'll hear my conversation with Peter. Peter works in a pretty large organisation which have a very diverse risk profile, and some pretty high risk aspects.
AmThere is lots of talk about AI. As in, artificial intelligence. Tech is all the rage, and we are interfacing more and more directly with artificial intelligence - just think about the predictive text on your phone. But a much older kind of AI hold huge promise for health and safety practice, if only more people knew about it. Appreciate Inquiry is the topic of discussion today, and I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda Clements on what it is, and how it has enabled both of us to be be...
This is a short episode on a big P - a principle to help you improve. It's a journey, a tension, between trying to know the world, and constructing the unknowable. It will make sense, stick with me.
My guest today is the inimitable and supremely articulate Traci Carse. Traci is the Occupational Psychologist at Fire and Rescue NSW, one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services. Traci has significant experience in applying psychology in the workplace through the design and delivery of mental health, resilience & wellbeing assessments and interventions across a range of work settings. Traci is an Adjunct Fellow of Macquarie University, a Board Approved Supervisor, a Certified G...
One of the worst things to do whilst you are crossing the street in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, amongst the cars and mostly motorbikes and tuk-tuks screaming past in all directions, is to stop, to stand still. Crossing the street in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. That's the analogy I used to explain what happens immediately before disruption, in my opening keynote address to the New Zealand Safeguard Conference in 2019. So the metaphorical opposite of this is to be in motion ourselves. Not stuck, sto...
Today's guest is Kathryn McEwan an organisational psychologist, executive coach and mediator with more than 30 years consulting experience across all industry sectors. Her contribution to the profession has been recognised through the award of ‘Fellow’ by the Australian Psychological Society and the College of Organisational Psychologists. She has a special interest in workplace resilience and has authored three books on resilience at work as well as led development of the R@W Toolkit. She lectu...
This anchor concept is really important to understand and utilise when improving learning is your goal. Change isn't just about engines, it’s about what holds us still or steady, for better and for worse. These anchors, in the forms of assumptions and beliefs, when recognised and challenged reveal deep learning that mere knowledge can't. We can change anchors too, swapping less helpful points of reference with new ones which enhance the learning potential we are trying to tap into. Anchoring as ...
Today's guest recently shared a photo of her lying in the middle of one of the busiest commercial airport runways in Australia. Whilst no planes were flying given Covid-19 disruption, it was an apt visual metaphor for the scope and scale of the operations at Brisbane Airport Corporation. Kersty Christensen is the Head of Health and Safety at Brisbane Airport Corporation and has led this transformation of her function into service to her organisation.
Redundancy is a word quite familiar to health and safety people, we use it in good times, and we fear it in bad times. And I think we always have the wrong end of the stick, for all the wrong reasons. Today I want to talk about the way we talk about redundancy, to reflect on the irony which is emerging about redundancy, and to suggest a more constructive way for us to talk about our place in the world.
Today I'm chatting with Dr. Tristan Casey. He has an interest in teamwork, leadership, and organizational culture. Tristan teaches into the Graduate Certificate of Safety Leadership and Bachelor of Social Science at Griffith University. Recently, he completed his second doctorate, this time in safety leadership. Tristan is currently working on research around the management of safety amid COVID19, psychological safety, and safety climate.
I was asked to be a judge of these awards. I declined. Later on was asked to help present the Young Safety Professional of the Year award, by way of a video interview since the awards were virtually presented, which I did do, which is kind of peripheral to this episode, but if you stick around after the music at the end I share a few reflections on why I said yes to that very intentionally. I wanted to share with you my intent about these decisions, which is less about me and this story and more...
As professionals, as subject matter experts, we think we are in the business of knowing. This is one of the greatest traps we can fall into, and it blinds us to arguably an equally if not more important idea - what we don't know. And actually, we aren't at all in the business of knowing. How often do you say, 'I don't know', or some variation of that? Questions need immediate, complete, and correct answers right? We've been trained from school and TV shows that are successful, right? Win a prize...
I talk a lot about learning because it's the key to performance improvement for all of us. Today, the previous guest Ron Gantt and I compare and contrast how each of us has been putting social and experiential learning into practice for hoards of people like you amidst the Coronavirus disruption. Through this, we created something called the Dialogue Manifesto, which I talk a little about in the conversation today, but you can read it for yourself over at safetyontap.com/manifesto . I encourage ...
The past few months have been hard, for everyone. Like it or not, we leaders who are working on improving health and safety, are inevitably closer to current challenges in business than many other professionals. I don't work on the frontlines of health and safety. My work and my impact happen a little further back, away from the spotlight, supporting people like you to be more effective, to grow, to overcome your challenges. I help leaders like you, and the amazing people in your organisations t...
Many of us would have heard a saying like "health and safety professionals have a little hand a big S". If this is true for you as it is for me, then you might have also found the H has felt smaller than ever as the world is gripped by the Covid-19 public health crisis. Similar but different, the public health perspective reveals some interesting insights beyond what an OHS perspective brings, to make us more effective. You've heard today's guest, Steffan on the podcast before, in episode 104. S...
What if we spent more time improving work, would health and safety also improve as a result? What if we did that using many of the principles built into safety thinking, but not calling it safety? What if people have been doing exactly that for almost half a decade, with great results? They have, and that's what we're chatting about today. My guest today is Ian Borges. Ian is one of the founders and senior leaders at the Semco Style Institute, a collaboration inspired by the almost half a centur...
I went out three weeks into the real craziness of the coronavirus. I have collected hundreds and hundreds of data points from people like you giving me an insight into what you are facing right now. And the opportunities that adversity brings two things are emerging, which are the focus of today's conversation with Dr. David Provan, the tension between feeling safe versus being safe. And the need for us to intentionally build resilience into the way we work in our organizations, which it turns o...
I am planning to still bring you regular podcasts. But we can't ignore what's going on in these coronavirus times. To distinguish these podcasts from the regular ones, I thought I would number them C1, C2, but then I realised, coronavirus is not defining who I am and my response right now. What is defining me, is togetherness. So this is episode is not C1, its T1, T for Togetherness. The first of these hopefully short series of podcasts focused on how together we can tackle and adapt through cor...
Today's guest brings so much learning to you today. A safety concierge, a career with laser-focused intent, not fitting into a box, and understanding where the real value lies in customer interaction. You're in for a treat. Cameron is a career health and safety professional, with health and safety experience across many sectors with roles from the frontline into senior leadership in high-risk industries. It is his work outside of safety which really cranks up my curiosity. He is currently a Solu...
I usually try to make episodes that are as timeless as possible, in as much as you might listen the day it comes out, or a year or two later. Today's episode is both very timely today, because it is the 17th of March 2020, amidst the exponential growth of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, or SARS-COV-2, NCOV, or any other name people give it. But even if you are listening to this in a years time when I hope things are drastically better, keep going, because whilst what you are about to hear is sharp...
Five times in the past week, I have had business card ceremonies. You know those moments, not very long, a second or two, the cultural practice repeated millions of times every day across the business world, the moment in time for the passing of a little piece of card from one person to another. I don't want your business card, and I don’t think anyone else wants yours or mine either. And I'll tell you why.
Many of you will know Professor Erik Hollnagel. Erik said he doesn’t like long introductions, so I'll do it in the intro here before the actual interview. Erik is Senior Professor of Patient Safety at the University of Jönköping, Sweden. You may have heard of Erik from his prolific writing, with well knows books including Safety I and Safety II, the Past and Future of Safety Management, and Resilience Engineering, Concepts and Precepts. He is here not because I am a believer, but as Erik so simp...
In this episode we're continuing our recent theme of looking at the future. Previous guest and friend of the show Kobi Simmat, CEO at Best Practice, shares a couple of big business trends he is seeing, which are relevant to all of us, we dig into some of the key business skills which might help you become the next CEO, and hear about an awesome live event he is putting on with a phenomenal line up of speakers to help businesses create their own better future.
It's great to bring you another listener question. These kinds of podcasts are designed to help you bridge the gap between hearing and knowing something, and putting it into practice in real life. I can tell you all the stories under the sun, but there is something special, and simply enlightening about a specific person with a specific goal and you hearing it in the first-person. This is from Clinton Horn, writing to me in response to episode 90, How to prepare for a conference presentation:...
Being future-ready and future-relevant means that we need different skills than what got us here. Not only that, today's guest today sees tensions businesses experience between competing goals, tensions we need to see and wrestle with to be future-ready and future-relevant. My guest today is Sheri Greenwell, a health and safety leader and what I would call a neogeneralist. Sheri is passionately engaged in health and safety which makes an impact, yet doesn't fit the usual mold for a health and sa...
