S14Ep11: Safety DNA

What separates the world's safest organizations from the rest? In this riveting conversation with our closing keynote speaker for the 2025 SafeStart Forum, Larry Pearlman, we'll take a deep dive into the practices that truly elite companies employ to achieve exceptional safety performance.

Host: Danny Smith
Guest: Larry Pearlman

Transcript

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Danny Smith Host

00:07

Hello and welcome once again to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm your host, Danny Smith. I'm very excited about today's episode as we're featuring our closing keynote speaker for the 2025 SafeStart Forum. This year, we'll be meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 28th and 29th, and if you're not familiar with the forum, let's talk about that first. It's an annual event featuring a curated agenda offering sessions that you just can't get anywhere else. The focus is on how we manage human factors and how managing those factors can help to drive injuries down, engagement up, and culture forward. It's really designed to be interactive, provocative, and relevant to people in all stages of their human factors journey. For more information about registration, the agendas, and other exciting news about the forum, go to safestartforum.com or, if you're a SafeStart client, you can contact your client manager. 

01:05

Our closing keynote this year will be our very own Larry Perlman, and if you haven't heard Larry speak before, folks, you're in for a real treat. I suppose you're in for a real treat even if you have heard him before, I guess as well. I don't want to just think about it. It only has to be new folks, right? So, Larry, welcome to the podcast. First of all, I know you've been on several before, but why don't you start just by telling the folks a bit about your background? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

01:30

Yeah, thanks, Danny. So, I started my career too long ago in the energy space.

01:36

I was working for a couple of oil companies, and I did some stints in consumer products as well, and about 20 years ago I got into safety by accident. I was working post BP Texas City when they blew up a refinery and we lost 15 people that day and that started my journey into really being a safety expert by exploring and trying to understand the cultural and leadership contributions to that fatal day. And since that I just picked up a little bit more here and a project there and a project here, and pretty soon I've really deepened my expertise in the areas of manufacturing, transportation and energy. Along the way, I've had the absolute pleasure to work with some of the safest companies on the planet, not necessarily because they had problems but because they wanted to make sure they didn't have problems, and that's been a wonderful experience in helping me work with other clients take a good to great journey, which is really the most rewarding type of journey that a company can go on. 

Danny Smith Host

02:46

You know that feeds right into what we want to talk about today, which is your keynote. The title of your keynote is what the Best of the Best Do, which I think it really just highlights some of those commonalities that you've observed through the years of some of those highly successful organizations. Now, obviously, we're not going to take the time on the podcast today go through your entire presentation, but let's talk about a couple of key things today. First of all, when we first started talking about this as a possible subject, one of the first things we touched on was how much safety is just a key component of the overall business strategies of these highly successful organizations. And I think you put it safety is just in their DNA. So, if you would tell the folks a little bit about what you mean there, yeah, absolutely. 

Larry Pearlman Guest

03:40

And a little more background too. Danny is in working some of the world's safest companies. They're actually some of the world's highest risk companies, so they're airlines, they're chemical companies, they're utilities, they're railroads, they're metal manufacturers, very high hazard industries and yet they have some of the world's safest performance. And it really is exactly what you said they've, they've put of  CEO Chevron Phillips chemicals, a guy by the name of Pete Chela, and if you've ever had the pleasure of working with Pete, everything he does starts around safety and it's ingrained in him, it's ingrained in his board and it's ingrained in his leadership. And I know we say safety starts at the leadership level. It really does start at the leadership level. And Chevron Phillips their TRIR has consistently been around 0.02, which is just amazing, and I attribute a lot of it to Pete, but it's what he's done, not as just a leader, but as a sustainable leader. How do you get those results in overall? And you know, thinking about this sort of a question, I wrote down a couple of things, and one is it's a recognition that safety is in balance with other performance metrics of the organization. It's productivity, it's quality, it's customer service, but it's also safety. So when you think about it, it's not that safety is the only thing, because then the company would be out of business, but it's the first balancing component that that organization thinks about. And when you start thinking about how that organization works, it's got its own little ecosystem or orbit of influence. So they're partners, they're contractors. They're not called contractors, they're actually called partners in safety. One of the things that you learn from being in high-risk industries is you really can't transfer the risk out of your organization. But your contractors tend to do some of the highest risk work and you have to believe that that impacts your organization and their organization. So everyone needs to get aligned to what are the risk controls we're going to take and how are we going to be aligned on what we do for safety. So I really like the partners and safety component. 

06:11

The other thing and I've written a little bit about it, Danny is Capex and Opx and how we think about projects and most engineers, when they're prepared to go and get that final authorization for capital expenditure, they typically are thinking how can I cut the project back? Because that'll be the first question how can we get this lower cost? Companies that are really the best of the best. Their leaders say if I gave you 10% more Capex on this project, how could you make it safer? And that permeates the organization, because the engineers know that's going to be a question that's going to be asked and now they need to think about hmm, how can I get more barriers in place? How can I de-risk the operation? How can I reduce the number of human interfaces? How can I reduce the opportunity for human factors influence? How can I reduce the opportunity for human factors influence? So, I think that's a really important component and I think they fundamentally think about risks differently. That's one of their primary motives is how do they reduce risk? 

07:21

And that goes from a visitor entering a parking lot that has a speed limit sign of 13 miles an hour and you go. Why would it be 13? Because you look at it and you go. That's a ridiculous number. And all of a sudden the human reaction is oh, now I'm thinking about safety and speed limits. So, it goes from that visitor entering a corporate office and seeing a 13 mile an hour sign to how do we think about risk? How do we think about barrier management. How do we make sure we have the things in place to make sure, if there's an incident or an accident, the barriers are going to catch it, either on a preemptive basis or, if something happens, that the barriers are strong enough not to let that impact people, property or environment or reputation? 

Danny Smith Host

08:10

You know that's really interesting to think of it in that way. 

08:15

You know it's one of those. 

08:16

We know you can't engineer out everything, but you certainly try to engineer out as many of the hazards as you can, but you still have to account for the human factors involved, right? And so much of that, I think, comes back as well to something that you mentioned as well that I think is very complementary to some of the other things that we do, particularly with the coaching that we provide with supervisors in our SafeLead process, supervisors in our SafeLead process and that was that, in order to help manage those human factors, it's really critical that leadership be visible and felt, and to me, I think that's two interesting terms, because I think they're two different things. We've all probably had leaders that you rarely saw in the trenches, which is never good, but I'm sure that you know I know where you're going with the felt leadership as well but tell us a little bit about that. What do you mean when you're talking about visible and felt leadership and how that impacts, you know, the organization as a whole, particularly in the area of human factors? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

09:22

Yeah, thanks, Danny, and that's really an important concept, and particularly at the frontline leader, because they're the pointy end of the spear there, that they're the ones who are influencing the frontline employees, who are making the day-to-day decisions that affect risk and safety all the time. 

09:39

And I think if I substituted words visible for presence and felt for caring, we probably wouldn't have too much of a different interpretation of it. So, I think if you look at what the day-to-day jobs of those frontline supervisors what it is, they need to be out in the field, they need to understand the jobs, they need to understand the jobs, they need to understand the roles. And I remember working on BP and working with the United Steelworkers union representative and he always said don't tell me how to work the machine, tell me how the machine works. And it's a play on words. Works and it's a play on words. But if you think about an operator in a complex system, they could see it as I'm turning valves and pressing buttons and making adjustments, or they could see their role as, hey, I'm controlling a process here and I understand what I do will affect something downstream and I understand where the risks are. And I think that's where the presence of the frontline supervisor and being felt in terms of coaching their employees, their teams, to understand how the machine works, their role and some of the human factors that can affect the outputs of that. 

11:03

What I typically find, Danny, is that most leaders will say I'm a great supervisor and most leaders will say I'm a great safety leader and what they really mean is I know my people, I talk to them every day, I ask them about the weekend and I ask them if they're working safe, and to me that just doesn't cut it. It's really understanding what does good look like when it comes to frontline supervision or any sort of supervision. And it starts with what does it mean to be visible and felt? And I've come up with a little acronym and surprisingly, it's CARE. It's about caring for your employees, but it's about communicating the expectations, the safety expectations. It's about communicating the expectations, the safety expectations. 

11:47

It's about assessing risk with their team all the time. It's about reinforcing the positive behaviors that they're seeing and it's about setting safety expectations for the team and their people. And I think what great, visible and felt leaders do is they integrate those concepts with their teams and with the work that's going around them. So, it may not be their team, but it may be a contractor coming in to do some work. Well, they're aware of what that work is, and they brief their team, and we understand what the risks are and we've coordinate the work in area A with the work in area B, so that's really visible and felt. They're out there, they understand, they genuinely care about their people, and they translate that care into meaningful safety conversations that are usually based on open-ended questions, which allows them to understand what's going on, allows them to see risk differently and then allows them to take action. 

Danny Smith Host

12:42

Going along with that. You talked a lot there about the role of the frontline leader there. What about for upper management and upper middle level management either? What do you see as the role there in being visible and felt? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

13:00

Yeah, I think it's really the same. It's a broader piece of the organization that they're working with. But I love the concept of go to Gemba. The leaders go out in the field, they grab a supervisor, they grab an employee, and they say let's walk the line, let's do a safety audit, let's understand how the job could be safer, let's understand the near misses that have happened. It's encouraging the near miss reporting and saying, yeah, I want more of them, not less of them. I think that's a really important component. And there's a big component about recognizing and understanding the risk. 

13:41

If I look at a company like Dow and some of its spin spinoffs, like Corteva, for example, if you're going to lead a unit in that chemical plant or you're going to lead that particular plant, you have to do a draw and describe with a board, an internal board, and that draw and describe is what's the process of the plant? How does it work? Where are all the points where something bad can happen? Where are the risks? Where are the controls? How do they work? And I think it's a wonderful message that you have to be competent in the running of that plant. You have to be competent in safety-critical processes, safety-critical controls, and if you're competent in those areas, you could pass it through and have really deep conversations with your team to make sure they understand their role as well. So, I think it's the frontline supervisor on steroids, but now they have to take a different lens and look at broader risk and the broader organization and the interface. And now they're managing the contractors. And a simple thing, Danny, as you're bringing a contractor, you would think that at various points in that contractor's job, someone's saying how are you doing on controlling risk? How is your safety performance? Are you all reporting near misses? Are you have the controls in place that are going to be effective in keeping our people safe and your people safe? So, it's saying I'm going to ask for a review and that'll be my role as a manager or as a leader. 

Danny Smith Host

15:11

Sure, yeah, I've often said that if you are a senior leader in an organization and you walk through your plant floor or through your warehouse or what have you, and someone says, who is that? Yeah, that's an issue that maybe you need to get out there more often, right? You need to be out there where people know you and know what the expectations you have are of employees and supervisors and contractors. I think that's a great point, right? And with those leaders too, I think they can help a lot with setting expectations in terms of what are we trying to move the needle on? I know that's one of the things we talk about a lot as we're kicking off our different processes, and you and I have talked a lot in the past about leading and lagging indicators, and that kind of leads me to my next question. You found a lot of these best of the best companies, if you will also utilize some predictive and strategic metrics as well. So, let's talk about that a little. 

16:15

I've always found that, as you were saying a minute ago, human factors affect so many areas of a business, not just safety. I mean traditional safety metrics like TRIR so much of that's lagging, but there's lots and lots of ways to be proactive with metrics. I found that a lot of the companies well, they've already got some metrics in place that are indicative of how much human factors are affecting them in areas like quality, and so if you can improve your management of human factors in a certain area, it's going to. You know it's the rising tide floats all boats kind of thing. What do you see as some of the ways these best of the best companies are integrating KPIs from other areas into their safety performance, and how does that help them then to be predictive and strategic? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

17:05

Yeah, Danny, I think I'm going to answer this from a couple of perspectives and hopefully we'll get a coherent message here. One of the things that I like to start with is does the leadership team know what the major risks are at their facility? And I'm going to go down to a facility level here, and I think for most manufacturing plants there's about 10, 11, 12 things that are pretty common that could result in a fatality or a chemical release or an environmental impact. And if you got down and you talk to people about it, they would tell you what they are. It's not rocket science, but they haven't actually gone through it and said these are the 10, 11, 12 risks I'm really worried about and I'm very confident or not that those risks are controlled. And, by the way, who should own that risk? So, let's take a real common one early departure of a trailer. So, you're loading a trailer, you got a lift truck moving in and out of it, the driver decides they're ready and there's a miscommunication and the driver pulls away while a lift truck is there. That could be a very easy fatality for that organization. Who in the organization is accountable for it and how do they get that accountability reviewed on a regular basis. And that's where I love the whole concept of a risk register, which comes from the insurance sector which a side note the insurance and safety people very rarely talk to one another and yet there's so much in common and they affect each other all the time. So have a risk register, have that accountability defined for each of those top risks of the organization and, once or twice a year, review it and say am I satisfied that the barriers are in place to keep my people safe? And that's a concept that the best of the best companies have in place and haven't had in place for a while. 

19:02

I think one of the neat things that's coming out of University of Denver and Hallowell has done a lot of research through the Energy Institute is the concept of HECA, which is the high energy control assessment. So, I'm going to do a job. I'm a utility lineman and I've got some lines I've got to fix over an active roadway and over an active railway. What are the controls that, when I go up in my bucket truck, have to be working to keep me safe? And again, there's probably 12 of them. Count those controls, look to see if they're controlled adequately. If they're not, don't start the job until they are and have confidence that those controls are working, and I really like that idea, and you can use that as a metric. You have 12 control, 12 risk points. Only nine of them are controlled. Guess what? You're only at 75 percent on your HECA and you want to be at 100%. So, some simple calculations and thinking differently about risk and thinking differently about metrics. 

20:07

You mentioned in the question maintenance over dues or, I'm sorry, metrics from other areas, and I want to point to maintenance over dues because what we know, to maintenance overdues, because what we know and this isn't blue sky pixie dust being floated as a metric if your maintenance program is not being done on time, so you don't have any overdues, you're going to be safe. If you have overdues, you've got things that are not working the way they should be, and we know it's those abnormal conditions and non-routine work that causes a lot of the incidents we have. So, get your maintenance overdues in line. Make sure you're in the eighties, nineties, a hundred on maintenance overdue, so you don't have any and you'll be safer. The other thing we I did some work in an in a past life about what's the role of the frontline leader and the employee in metrics and safety, and one of the things that we found not surprisingly is, if you've been trained in safety in the last 90 days, you're more likely to have fewer accidents. 

21:19

Okay, that one makes sense, but let's put some numbers to it and let's measure it. Let's think about the last time you had a real risk-based, safety-based conversation with an employee that's open-ended. We know that affects safety and we also actually know this is a little bit of a surprising one. If you know your safety performance, you're more likely to be safety in the next 90 days. If you knew the last 90 days safety performance and I think on that one, it's not that that does anything to you. What it does is it raises your awareness about it, and the best of the best companies say think about what you did in the last 90 days to keep you safe, now think about how we go forward in the next 90 days. And that's the conversation that needs to happen versus don't screw up the record. So, I think those are some learnings from other organizations and other parts of the business that aren't quote pure safety metrics. 

Danny Smith Host

22:20

Yeah, an interesting thought that occurred to me as you're going through that. You know, talking about the metrics is one thing, but you can also measure the fact that you're having those conversations. I mean, yes, you have to document when you're having them, when you do that, obviously, but that is a measurement in and of itself, right, and yeah, that's a little bit time consuming to document when your supervisor are having those conversations, but I think that is certainly something that is one of those things we don't often consider right, but it's certainly something we could be talking about Absolutely. Another interesting thought that you had that you're going to talk about in your keynote. I found this term just fascinating chronic unease. Tell us what you mean about chronic unease and how does that really manifest itself in some of these high performing organizations? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

23:12

Well, Dan, I've got a little anxiety. So, I went to my doctor, and he said Hey, Larry, you've got this problem called chronic unease. Seriously, the way I think about chronic unease is there's a lot of organizations that their mindset is our numbers are good, let's be doing well and that'll keep us getting having no injuries. And I think chronic unease is actually we've been doing well. But what's the risk around the corner that we can’t, see? And it's a mindset shift. And in the two examples, those are extremes, and most companies are somewhere between that place. But I think being able to see around the corner or consciously say I'm not satisfied that our risks are in control, I want to be able to peer at the risks that might be coming. And probably most importantly is finishing the sentence with not only are our risks in control, but we can show it. And I'm a big believer in Swiss cheese model and barrier thinking. 

24:24

And I think about some of the high-risk industries that are out there. They won't operate unless there are two active barriers in place. So, what does that mean? Well, if you're flying an aircraft and you're a pilot, you've got a checklist of things that absolutely have to be working before you fly absolutely have to be working before you fly. Some of those things that absolutely have to work before you fly are redundant operations. I was listening to a podcast by a former astronaut who was talking about the Boeing Starliner incident, and he was talking about independent barriers. So sometimes you have a barrier that's dependent because there's an electronic connection or there's a hydraulic connection between the two barriers. That's not an independent barrier. Chronic Unease says I want two independent barriers in place. And to go back to the Boeing Starliner, they scrubbed that mission the return of the two astronauts because they actually had all five of their independent barriers. Their control systems fail and that's why those astronauts didn't come home. It's a fascinating case that's interesting. 

Danny Smith Host

25:51

I think about the idea of chronic unease, and you know we talk with SafeStart, specifically about complacency at an individual level, but we certainly see organizational complacency is at times, and I can kind of see that being, chronic unease can be a bit of the solution to organizational complacency, I guess. In other words, if you're constantly trying to look around that corner like you're talking about, that can help to stave off some of that organizational complacency. Does that make sense? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

26:18

You know I love the connection, Danny, and until this moment I hadn't made it, so thank you for that, but I do. I can think about that really quickly. The difficulty with complacency is it's 20-20 in hindsight, it's not necessarily 20-20 in foresight, and what chronic unease tries to do is say let's think about those areas where complacency can set in and let's prove that it doesn't exist, because the safety systems are working, and we can show it. 

Danny Smith Host

26:49

Right, exactly, yeah, yeah. Another thing we talk about a lot with our human factors framework is how all organizations are learning organizations, and one of the other items that you had down for the keynote was talking about how organizations that are really successful capitalize on those learnings, maybe even better than other organizations. Does that sound accurate, and what do you think we can learn from that? 

Larry Pearlman Guest

27:18

Yeah, I love that because the SafeStart learning loops and how we think about learning as an organization. And I'm going to go back to the first question, it's kind of imprinted on their DNA. So, they do active learning from incidents, they do active learning from near misses, and they do a regular review of the strength of their safety performance, their safety systems, their safety management systems. Are they working as intended? And I think it's one thing to recognize an issue. It's a whole other thing to recognize a sound account, assign accountability, act on it and then go back and show that it was actually acted on in an effective way, versus we just checked on it. The other thing I would add, Danny, is our organizations. I'm going to tie back metrics. 

28:10

Our organizations tend to say this metric is green, great, let's focus on the red. And I think the organizations who really understand human factors, they really understand this chronic unease concept, say you know, we know these are red already, we know, we've got plans on it. Let's look at the greens and check if they're really green or not. So, if you're thinking about a stand-up meeting in a unit and you've got 10 metrics, nine of them are green, one is red. The leaders don't spend any time on the red because everyone knows it's red. They spend more time challenging the greens to everyone knows it's red. They spend more time challenging the greens to make sure that they're not falling into a thinking trap. They're not into that complacency mindset that it's green and everything must be good, and that's imprinted on the DNA of these organizations as well. 

Danny Smith Host

29:01

With the green. How can we keep it green right? How do we prevent it from going green? Not only how you can keep it green Right. How do we prevent from going green? Not only how you can keep it green. 

Larry Pearlman Guest

29:08

Is it really green and why is it green? 

Danny Smith Host

29:11

Yes, yeah, yeah, and I think that's the other side. You know what are the successes of that? Why, why did it? How did we get it to green? How can we keep it there? Why is it there? And then the same thing with the red. You know we're already focusing on the red, but once we get it to green, how do we keep it there as well? And why? Why does it go to green? Right, so very good, yeah. 

Larry Pearlman Guest

29:32

Yeah, I like that, Danny. 

Danny Smith Host

29:32

Yeah, so, Larry, thanks so much for sitting down with us today and talking a little bit about the forum and the closing keynote. I love the conversation today and I'm really excited to dive into this subject and I think it's just going to be a great way to close out the forum. You know, I always go to conferences, and I've been doing this for years where I go and I say, hey, I want to come away with two, three, four really great ideas that I can implement. You know, if you come back with 15 or 20, you're probably not going to implement 15 or 20, but if you can get a handful and I think that's what you're going to kind of challenge folks with at the end of this is okay, these are what the best of the best do. Take some of this, take the learning that you have had for the two days during the forum, and let's find those two or three really key things that you can take and start applying. And I love that, and I think that's going to be really solid for everybody. 

Larry Pearlman Guest

30:32

Yeah, I certainly hope so, and I think the style of my speaking and the way we're going to engage people and give people some time to think through what did they actually learn and what they can apply will be very helpful. And the other thing is I'll be talking about what the best of the best are doing, but everyone's where they are, and you can't fault anyone for the place that they are. And this is about a journey. If you're in a beginning stage a crawl, we want to get you to walk. If you're walking, we want to get you to run. If you're running, we want to get you to sprinting. And it's about your own journey to get that improvement you need from your personal skills, your organization's skills and your organization's results. So, this is a good to great or as long as you're getting better. That's what's important here, and let's find one or two things that we can leverage to get you into that improvement zone. 

Danny Smith Host

31:30

Absolutely Love it, folks. For more information about the forum again, you can visit our website for the event. It's safestartforum.com, and we would love to see you in Cincinnati in October. Who knows, we may even see if turkeys can fly. If you don't know about that comment, you can Google the WKRP turkey drop of 1978 and Les Nesman right. Okay, maybe the turkey drop still isn't such a good idea, but attending the forum, well, that certainly is a great idea, and we hope that you'll be there with us again. Safestartforum.com for more information, Larry, thanks again, my friend, for SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm Danny Smith. Have a great day everyone.