S15Ep6: Why Your Brain, Not Your Policy, Drives Safer Decisions

Habits, not policies or procedures, decide what happens in the split second before an incident. We sit down with Cristian, a safety leader and author from Sydney, to unpack why the brain’s automatic systems drive most on-the-job behavior and how to reshape those systems toward safer defaults. Instead of shaming “bad choices,” we trace how repetition wires neural pathways that turn yesterday’s lucky shortcuts into today’s risky routines.

Host: Tim Page-Bottorff

Guest: Cristian Sylvestre

Transcript

(Tim)

Welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm your host today, Tim Page-Bottorff I’m NOT the expert on neuroscience. That is why we have a special guest all the way from Sydney, Australia. He is a published author and CEO of the magazine. He has a master's in science and environmental science from the University of Sydney and a bachelor's in chemical engineering. He's the managing director of Habit Safe in Australia and the managing director for SafeStart in Australia. He's worked for companies like Heatcraft and Shell in his 20 plus years in environmental health and safety. He is extremely well-versed in human performance and safety. And also, while we're here today, the neuroscience behind safety. Cristian, welcome to the podcast.

(Cristian)

Thank you, Tim.

(Tim)

It's a pleasure to be here. How is it down in Australia today?

(Cristian)

Oh, it's pretty good.

(Tim)

The rules of the game today is to simply just to have some fun. And with this podcast specifically, we're going to try to have so much fun that we're going to make neuroscience like the coolest thing, even talking about neural pathways, like it's the best thing since Tim Tam cookies. Well, and you think that it isn’t. I got to say that uh I the last time I saw you, you gave me a package of Tim Tam cookies, and they I can't. It's hard for me to explain. I can't come up with the right adjectives to explain these types of cookies, but I can't bring them home. I just can't, I can't find myself to bring them home because I finish them before I actually get on an airplane to go back home. 

(Cristian)

Oh, that's not good. I just need to give you more. That's what you're saying, isn't it? 

(Tim)

No, no, no, no, no more, no more, no more. Anyways, thank you for being a Cristian. This is going to be a great podcast. So, let's go ahead and get started. So, here's question number one. Um, how long have you been affiliated with SafeStart and SafeStart of Australia?

(Cristian)

So, I um started working with 2008, so it's a few, a bit more than 10 years now. Um, and I really sort of brought it over to Australia and New Zealand in about 2008. That's when it all sort of started.

(Tim)

Is that so? I think that's where I met you. It was probably, I feel like it was in Toronto or Belleville, Ontario, and then uh it just took off from there. And I've seen you like at every conference since.

(Cristian)

Yeah, yeah. Look, I think it was in LA. That's the I sort of attended a three-day workshop just to get my head around what SafeStart was. And I think that's where we first met. You, Larry, Gary, and a few others.

(Tim)

My goodness, it was Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Public Workshop. It's just I'm glad you got a better brain than I do. That's why you're here to talk about neuroscience. Well, I've only been to a few workshops. You've been to a few more. Roughly 18 to 25 a year. I just, yeah, thank you for pointing that out.

(Cristian

All right. So, your brain is overloaded. That's the problem.

(Tim)

That's great. All right. So, your uh your LinkedIn profile is a great resource for our listeners, and you have as your number one interest, it's neuroscience. Can you do me a favor and break it down to five words or less so our listeners can understand what it is?

(Cristian)

So, neuroscience is really sort of understanding how the brain function is.

(Tim)

That's sorry, that's 20 words.

(Cristian)

I'm sorry.

(Tim)

Okay, that's okay. You go ahead.

(Cristian)

So, so yeah, so really when you're starting to look at behavior and you're trying to understand why people do what they do, what you start to realize is that everything that we do is comes from that three-pound mass of jelly that sits in our heads. You know, take that out, and we don't react to the world. So, everything that you know that explains why people do what they do comes from the brain. So, for me, the interest is to try and understand the functionality of the brain better in order to try and influence people down a path of behaviors that are safer in the long term. So habits if you like.

(Tim)

And I like that. Habits is where it's at. So, then the neuroscience behind safety, if you are able to develop good habits, does that help you develop better neuropathways.

(Cristian)

Uh yes. So, I would look at it the other way. What I would say is I would say that um up until the age of, we're 15, we're very passive learners. And we learn based on the outcomes of our experiences. So, if you do something and you get some pleasure out of it and you don't get an incident out of it, you repeat it. That repeatability wires certain neurons together, creates neural pathways. And those neural pathways now can make you do things more automatically. And that's essentially what a habit is. So, a lot of the habits that we do have by the time we're 15, we haven't consciously decided. They've just been built from the outcome of our experiences. Now, some of those habits are the safest, others are not. And what I try and understand is I try and understand how the brain forms and changes habits in order to be able to help people shift from those baseline habits which may not be the safest, to ones that are safer.

(Tim)

That makes sense. Now, earlier five words, that's hardly enough to explain anything, but I have to give you kudos because I really believe you did it, you did an honorable job at explaining that. And then thank you for telling us, talking, us through about habits reform because of neural pathways. And I got that mixed up. So good job with that. Now in your book, you talk about the three layers and the reference in the book. And so, for our listeners, the title of your book is The Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece. Would you just briefly give us an explanation of the three layers that you're referring to?

(Cristian)

Um, so look, um, I've been in safety now for 25 years. So, I'm just going to talk a little bit about the different ways in which people think about safety. And then when we get to the third generation, I'll talk a bit more about the three layers of the brain. Um, so what I've noticed in safety, and I got in safety through management systems, being an environmental scientist, if you like, did an environmental management system certification for the people that I was working at. The safety person wanted to do a certification for the safety management system, so he asked me for help. That's how I got into safety. What I noticed and really surprised me was that a good safety management system didn't always lead to good safety performance. So, I kind of scratched my head a bit and thought, okay, well, there must be something else to this stuff. Um, did a lot of leadership stuff, you know, care, trust, commitment, engagement, all those kind of things. And what I noticed and also surprised me was that good leadership didn't always sit, or didn't always result in good safety performance. So, I got this sense that there was something missing. And when I started looking at what we did for safety, what I found was I found that we eliminate the hazard, we fix the system, or we try to make safety more conscious. Uh, those three things are the way by which we have managed safety for the last 40 years. And given that those three things weren't always resulting in a good safety performance, I started looking for what else there might be around. And I started looking a whole bunch of different things, but you know, inattention, human error, advanced safety awareness, you can call it a whole bunch of different things, but at the end of the day, what it was saying to me is that these are all words for humans being human. So, if you want to understand why people do what they do, you have to understand what goes on in people's heads. Otherwise, it's very difficult for you to influence them in a way which makes their habits safer. So that's where third generation came in. First generation was about the system, second generation was about the interactions you had with other people in order to make safety more important and make it more conscious. The third generation was about okay, what's going on inside people's heads that maybe isn't allowing them to behave in the best way. Maybe they're making poor in the moment decisions, and what can we do in order to help them shift away from that to a place where it's a little bit safer. So once I started looking at the brain, what I found was there were three different layers. And the first layer was an unconscious layer. So, things that were to do with basic life systems, you know, breathing, hunger, all that kind of stuff. The second layer was a subconscious mind, which essentially, I found it was quick responses to common situations. So, there are things that you're aware of, but the behavior is driven in an automated fashion. And the third layer was really the conscious mind. And the conscious mind was very much about analysis and improvement. Now, when it comes to safety, the unconscious stuff, you can put that to the side, not much happens. But when it comes to behavior to do with safety, then it's really a war between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, and they're fighting for control. Now, the subconscious mind is infinitely more powerful, so it tends to win hands down. And that's why so much of what we do is governed by our habits. So, if you think about the history of safety and the fact that it's tried mostly to influence the conscious mind, and I get that if you make people more conscious about safety, that's not a bad thing, it's actually a good thing. The neuroscience estimates that 95%

of what we do is subconscious. So, if you consider safety behavior from the conscious perspective only, you might get it from 5% to 10%, you might even get it to 20%. But you're leaving a lot of benefit, a lot of potential improvement on the table. And I was interested in getting my head around what that was. How do you influence that 95, 90, 80, whatever it is, after you've tried your hardest to make safety conscious? What else can you do in order to help people be safer?

(Tim)

I feel like I've just learned more in the 10 minutes of your discussion and explanation than I have in the last 20 years. My gosh, that was a lot. So just reiterating, you had three generations. Um, and if you could just outline those generations for everybody one more time, the first, second, and third.

(Cristian)

Yep. So the first generation is about eliminating the hazard or giving people some training for the hazards that are remaining because you can't get rid of all the hazards. And that led to a safety management system, which basically means that when people think about safety from a first-generation perspective, they're thinking about compliance. 

(Tim)

Got it. That's first generation. 

(Cristian)

Second generation is about the conscious decisions that people make. The way that you influence those is by having lots of conversations with people about the importance of safety. And we'd use new uh social science to get that sort of as good as it could be, things like care and trust and commitment and engagement and those sorts of things. Now, what we got out of that was a whole bunch of conversations about safety, which made safety uh a bit more conscious. That's second generation. Okay. But it's like neither of those two led to zero incidence. So, when you think about the third generation, that's about the subconscious processes that drive most of your behavior. And that's very much about understanding a little bit about how the brain works, but it's about the repetition and the practice required in order to change those neural networks so that you do something automatically safer.

(Tim)

Then it makes sense. Uh, you added at the end of your book title the missing piece. So, you feel you feel like in your research and your explanations that this is what's missing in a lot of organizations.

(Cristian)

So, my experience with safety over the last 30, 40 years is that there are three ways that people think they can influence safety. They either fix the environment, or if you like, eliminate the hazard, they improve the system, or they make safety more conscious. Those are the three things that I see continually of what safety is about. But if you start looking at the neuroscience, what you end up realizing is that a lot of the behavior is not really sort of impacted by doing those three things. A good deal of it is, and that's why we've written, you know, safety performance has improved so much over the last 30 years. But these things I'm grateful for, they've only got us to where we are. If we want to go further, we need to start looking at what drives most of human behavior, and that sits mostly in the subconscious mind.

(Tim)

Excellent. Okay. That's starting, it's starting to come together for me. And thinking about all the generations, sort of like a hierarchy of an approach to safety, which I really, really am gravitating towards, and then talking about what the missing piece might be. So then why don't you tell our listeners how does neuroscience help them in injury prevention? Perhaps like maybe avoiding complacency, or is it through better habits, or is it something completely, totally different?

(Cristian)

No, no, it's uh it's along those lines. So essentially, what we have is we have some neural pathways that have been developed through the experiences that that we've had. So, the outcomes of our experiences. If we've had a favorable outcome, we tend to repeat it, and that repeat that that repetition wires it in. So that's the starting point. Now, the first step is that you know some of those um wiring pathways are not the safest. But through repetition, you can actually rewire your brain to do something safer. So, if I give you, if I give you an example of texting while driving, now lots of people do it. I talk to them about do you know that it's illegal, do you know that it increases the risk? Nobody denies that. So, the conscious mind is fully informed. Yet what drives the behavior is the fact that they've done it plenty of times before and nothing bads happened. So, there's been a whole bunch of repetition. Now that repetition makes it automatic. So rather than I saying yourself, Freddie over there, so he texts while driving, he makes the wrong decision every single time. That's not true from a neuroscience perspective. What's actually happening is that he's done it so often that the conscious mind doesn't get involved in the decision. It can, but it tends not to because he's done it so often and nothing bads ever happened. So, if you don't talk to Freddie about looking at the world from a different perspective and getting him to understand that he's just rolling the dice and sooner or later he might get unlucky and he might end up sort of with a bad outcome, he won't do anything about it. So, one of the ways in which we deal with it is we say to people, um, well, we ask people, um, when what do people wait for in order to change their habits to safer ones? And you get this blank look in in audiences. And what I say to them is what they wait for is for life to teach them a lesson through pain. 

(Tim)

After it's already too late.

(Cristian)

Exactly. So, you've got that ability, I've got that ability. We all grew up with that ability. So, then I give an option. I go, you can either wait for the pain to teach you a lesson, or you can understand how you got to that habit and you can start repeating something that's safer, like keeping your eyes on the road when you're driving. Which one would you rather? So that puts them in a position where you're not telling them what to do, but you're giving them a choice. And that's important when you're trying to influence the subconscious, is getting people to decide for themselves. Now, what I can tell you is that nothing will change unless the repetition takes place. But by giving them a choice, you get more people to buy into it, and you get more people to do the repetition, and more people change the safer habits.

(Tim)

That is a well, that just seems like it's everybody's organizations-wise problem right now is that they're trying to find what they can do to help out, and they don't seem like they have a framework or something that they can wrestle back to. And you we always go into this leading indicator, near misreporting, all the stuff that can help out before a major after-the-fact incident, as you as you refer to. And then, you know, if you get into this component of neuroscience, like you're talking about, that gives them an opportunity to be leading and proactive and progressive in their in their attack towards safety. And I really appreciate you mentioning that and giving us that kind of a layman's terms explanation. I was just thinking, too, um, if I'm if I'm coming back from break and I'm supposed to be doing a 20-second inspection of my operation of the truck, and I skipped that step for years. And nothing's ever happened. And then ultimately what ends up happening is that I got to go back and do it again.  Or I run something over, or I run someone over, and then it's already too late. So, then you've got the pain to kick you, kick you back into gear, and it's unfortunately already too late. So, I think I really appreciate your tone when you delivered that that way, because it gets me to open up to think, what have I done? That's not necessarily all the right things. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just suggesting maybe I could do better. So, thank you for that explanation, it really means a lot.

(Tim )

Yeah, no, no, it's not it's not about right or wrong. It's about can you do things in a slightly safer way? 

(Cristian)

So, when you talk about the neuroscience and what it brings to the table, I talk about the laws of neuroscience. So, the first law of neuroscience is what you repeat, you get to keep. You don't get around that one, right? That's the first law. And the second law is um the more you do for someone, the less they do for themselves. So, if you think about the way that safety, first- and second-generation safety has worked, fix the environment, eliminate the hazard, you're doing something for them. You know, you're training them, you're giving them some information in order for them to avoid a hazard. And at the end of the day, you can give them all the information in in the world. You would think that if they have the knowledge, they're going to avoid contact with it, but only, you know, if only that was 100% true. And then you come around and you give them and you talk to them about how important safety is, as if they don't know that it's important. But that that does help in making it more conscious. So those three things are very much from the outside in. And when you're dealing with stuff just from the outside in, you actually help people be more inattentive. So, if you think about the technology in cars, if I've got a car that will stop before I hit something, uh, what incentive is there for me to pay attention to what's in front of me? So, the problem with a lot of the stuff that we do for safety is that we don't factor in how the human is going to compensate for that additional help. And that's one of the things that interests me. And the reason why I sort of got into the neuroscience aspect of things is because I think that that's an important piece. I the more you do for somebody, the less they do for themselves. So, what I'm interested in is teaching people to do more things for themselves, and that way they're going to be habitually safer, irrespective of what's happening around them. 

(Tim)

That's so good. That’s so powerful. It's so good. I thought I was thinking about what's happening here in North America. We've got several systems that are being used in terms, like you mentioned, first generation, talking about safety management systems. And then there's the hierarchy of controls that everybody often refers to as you know, you go through engineering and administrative work practices. But in your book, you list three types of controls. Can you explain to the customers or to the listeners what those are?

(Cristian)

Sure. So usually, the hierarchy of controls has got five levels. So, the first one is eliminating the hazard. So, what I argue is if you eliminate the hazard, it's no longer there. So, you don't have to control it. And there's not much to work to be done. Exactly. It's done, it's gone, right? And ideally, if you get rid of the hazard, That's great. The second one is to substitute that hazard for a lesser, less a dangerous one, if you like. But at the end of the day, if you substitute it for a lesser one, it's still there. So, you have to do something about it. So really, it's the next three levels that are the ones that offer control. So, level three is engineering controls, guarding, you know, just stopping the hazard in the person coming into contact with each other. Then there's administrative controls, and then there's behavioral controls. So administrative controls are you know bits of paper, permits, all that kind of stuff, you know, which are good. Behavioral control is for me; it's about getting people to do the right thing in order not to breach the engineering or the administrative controls. And a lot of the behavioral control depends on what's going on in the person's head at the time. So sometimes I talk to people, and they go, oh, we've had a problem with um with compliance. And I say to them, what do you mean you've got a problem with compliance? They go; people don't comply. And when you start asking people why they don’t comply, 95% of the time, it's about rushing, frustration, fatigue, and complacency. And that's about what's going on in people's heads. So, if the neuroscience helps us to understand what's going on in people's heads, then we might be in a position to help them sort of manage the four states and therefore don't make the mistakes that cause the non-compliances and the resulting incidents afterward.

(Tim)

I like the way you said that. That's the way you laid it out. And I know if we wanted to go through all five and you start your way down from top to bottom, when you get into changing behavior, though, that's a whole other ballgame. I mean, you can't stop people from putting the duct tape over the interlock, which is a machine guard that you put in place for an engineering control. And they you ever talk to them about why they put the duct tape on there. Well, you are maybe you're pushing, producing more widgets than anyway. You can get down to the neuroscience, and that would be another discussion that we would have to tackle at another time.

(Cristian)

So go ahead. But through repetition, it kind of takes itself out of the game, if you like. So if somebody's been doing that kind of thing, and you wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't understand why they would, but if somebody was doing that kind of thing over a period of time, it's quite foreseeable from a neuroscience perspective to say, hey, there's no longer a decision here, it's happening habitually or automatically, because they've done it plenty of times before and nothing bad's happened. So that aspect never gets asked either. Right.

(Tim)

I agree with you. And also, if you think about the way mentorship occurs, somebody might have been trained to do that type of work in the field where it was never really captured. Um, in other words, like taping the interlock. They were meant, they were mentored to do that by passing that down from generation to generation to the next person, to the new person. Anyways, I totally get what you're saying. And that's uh something that uh wouldn't be a conscious decision. That was just something they were trained. It's just the way it was, and that's the way it was understood for many, many years by other people. Great, incredible explanation. So, we're just touching the surface here, Christian, but we're out of time. So, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to come back and um have a very specific discussion about those types of neural pathways and how to avoid them, and then of course, talk about the education um it takes to get the people to be motivated to do this the right way.

(Cristian)

Be happy to do that, team.

(Tim)

I appreciate you. So, this has uh been an incredible opportunity for me. I'm always trying to learn, you've been an incredible guest. I'll give you the final word. How can our listeners integrate maybe your incredible neuroscience into a potential SafeStart implementation?

(Cristian)

Well, I think what I try to do, and you know, the human brain is very complicated, and the neuroscience can be extremely complex, but you don't have to understand it to a great depth in order to put some things into practice. Um, so from my perspective, what I always try and encourage people to do is just to look at what they do from a habitual perspective and ask themselves the question: is there a safer habit that I can try and encourage somebody to take on board in order for them to be habitually safer in the long term? Um, so don't just look at it from a system perspective or from an environment perspective or from a conscious decision perspective. Have a look at from a habitual perspective what's going on with the person because sometimes it doesn't take a lot to get them to shift. And even if we get them to shift a little bit, then that sometimes is enough in order for them to avoid many of the incidents that they would have otherwise had.

(Tim)

Wow. I really just appreciate you being here, making take a time out of your busy calendar from all the way from Sydney. I just thank you. So, if our listeners want more information, how do they get a hold of you, Christian?

(Cristian)

So they can email me at um Cristian at habitsafe.com.au if they want more information about the neuroscience, and only if that's what they're interested in, um, they could also purchase the book from habitsafe.com.au again, Cristian.

(Tim)

Once more, if you have a podcast idea that you'd like to send to us, please don't hesitate to reach out. It's Tim at safestart.com. We'd love to hear your examples. And also, on behalf of Cristian, his email one more time is Christian C R I S T I A N at Safestart.com.au. Habit Safe is habitsafe.com.au. Remember, he's in Australia. Thanks again for joining us. Stay tuned for next week's episode. We'll see you down the road.