"In a crisis, we don't rise to our plan, we fall to our culture"

In Episode 1 of Foresight Matters, host David Cloake speaks to international safety learning and development specialist Nuala Gage. Nuala has spent decades consulting to high hazard industries (oil and gas, construction etc) on embedding safety culture into organisations as the norm. From a business resilience perspective, David asks Nuala what the key elements are in building such a culture. How do we get people to believe that bad things happen and we should be prepared daily for disaster in a way that strengthens and makes the business more resilient rather than paralysing progress?

Nuala offers several insightful examples of how our communication style and organisational culture around psychological safety play a huge role in changing outcomes when disaster strikes. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

You help organizations design great resilience, great crisis management plans. The work that I do goes what happens when those plans collide with reality at three o'clock in the morning on a night shift? Because we don't kind of raise to our plan in a crisis. What we do is we fall to our culture.

Speaker 0:21

That's Nuala Gage, a safety learning and development specialist who spent decades working in high-hazard industries to improve workplace safety cultures. So, how do you transform a company culture to improve safety performance or create business resilience? That's today's big question on Foresight Matters. In an unpredictable world, Foresight Matters. Welcome to Foresight Matters. I'm David Cloak, Managing Director of Foresight Solutions, and my guest today is Noula Gage. Where do we find you today on this podcast? Because you're not in UK waters, are you?

Speaker 1 0:58

I am currently in Johannesburg in South Africa. So right at the tip of Africa, on a rather chilly UK weather day.

Speaker 1:06

It's chilly all the time here in the UK. Tell us a bit about your work and your professional background.

Speaker 1 1:12

I am currently the learning and development leader for a company called Synapsco, and my background is very much being a safety and leadership consultant in high-hazard industries. I've worked in oil and gas, mining, construction, nuclear, and various other types of industries for over 20 years. I don't know if that's giving away my age or my wisdom, but we shall find out. And one of my core fundamentals is working with leaders and teams and about strengthening the human skills, the non-technical skills that drive performance. So communication, decision making, speaking up, learning, and creating risk-aware and resilient cultures where people can speak up, because that's how we actually prevent harm and that we really create business resilience. So I am delighted to be speaking to you today and look forward to where this conversation goes.

Speaker 2:11

Basically, you're the doctor and I'm the patient. Should we try it like that? So here's my problem. So, as you know, Foresight Solutions. We do a lot of work in resilience, business continuity, risk, emergency planning, crisis management, you know, and some wider business planning as well. So here's the thing. We have in this country, and in fact globally, so many crises, and so many crises that affect organizations in a profound way, whether it be cyber attack, whether it be supply chain, whether it be our own internal capabilities. One of the things I've noticed over my career is getting people and getting organizations to actually believe that there's a problem or potentially a problem, and believing that they need to do something about it. Now, with health and safety, obviously things like law kind of helps you out. You have to do something about that, but it's it's not the be-all and end all. What sort of advice would you give me in terms of trying to transform a mindset in an area where a lot of people believe, yes, it's needed, but actually they generally say, well, possibly not in my company.

Speaker 1 3:22

Have you heard of, I think it's called the hero bias? That we believe that bad things will not happen to us. They happen to other people. Crises don't happen in my company. I don't get into car accidents. I don't cut my hand when I'm chopping up onions in the kitchen. That happens to other people. And in safety, we often talk about prepare for the worst and plan for the best. And I think one of the things is that acceptance of it's okay to believe that bad things are not going to happen. We don't want people to be in terror and in doom and gloom. What we do want is people to say, how do I have those conversations with my team within the organization? That goes, what are the potential unintended consequences if something does go wrong? And are we prepared to deal with them? Because you help organizations design great resilience, great crisis management plans. The work that I do goes, what happens when those plans collide with reality at three o'clock in the morning on a night shift? Because we don't kind of raise to our plan in a crisis. What we do is we fall to our culture. And when people go, but it's all okay around here. And trust me, we have the same issue when we're talking about safety culture. Because organizations are going, but we've got a great safety culture around here. And then you go on site and you go, maybe not. Is that really how it happens?

Speaker 4:58

Maybe not. You speak my language very, very much in terms of trying to encourage that sort of thinking. The sort of obstacles, I think, to this question of believing that you need to do something is until you've metaphorically crashed the car or cut your hand, then you think, oh, I better do something about it. And I think making sure that organizations, leaders, individuals are thinking about this before they metaphorically crash the car. So that just seems like a challenge. Because most of my clients come along and say, I need you to fix this. We need this plan, we need this capability, we need business continuity, we need resilience crisis management. And something has prodded them. Is that always the way that they have to be prodded before they are inspired or motivated to do anything?

Speaker 1 5:45

I think it's a very sad reality. And you mentioned earlier, I'm in the world of safety. So we have technical safety, we have non-technical safety. I'm very much focused on the non-technical safety. Technical safety, you have certain things you have to do. They expire. So you have to go, for example, if I'm working offshore, I have to go and do my Bose. So my basic offshore survival induction and escape training. If I don't have that, they will not let me on a helicopter. However, nobody asks me before I get on the helicopter, do I know how to lead people? Do I know how to have good conversations? Because that's not the legislative part. That's not the part that you're going to get a smack on the wrist. However, when we have those things in place, we excel. We have fewer incidents, we have fewer accidents. People communicate, they speak up better. And one of the biggest difficulties in getting people to believe that this is the right thing to do before something goes wrong is that people don't know what crisis they've saved themselves from when they have put the crisis management in plan and they've made sure the system can support that.

Speaker 6:56

They don't see tangible benefit either, do they?

Speaker 1 6:58

No.

Speaker 6:59

And I think that that's always been a real challenge for me is you know, we we've got all this uh you know, wonderful plans, and then all of a sudden we blow the dust off and uh lo and behold, give it a bit of a a bit of a wander out as an emergency exercise or a crisis exercise or something like that. But uh nobody really sort of sees the benefit until it really does go wrong. What would you advise leaders, not just in safety, but in areas like resilient operation in terms of crisis management, in terms of dealing with the unexpected? If I was a new manager put in front of you now, what would your advice be to me?

Speaker 1 7:33

You mentioned an interesting word maintenance earlier.

Speaker 7:36

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 7:37

And you think about systems. So we have systems, we have all these good things. When do we actually go back and look at them and say, are these fit? Are they effective? Are they working? When something goes wrong. We have this wonderful crisis plan or this whatever it is, safety management plan, whatever it is, it looks brilliant on paper. And then you get the new person in, they look at it and they go, okay, so that's what the piece of paper says. They go out on site and they go, well, it doesn't quite match what the piece of paper says. And everyone goes, but that's just the way we do things around here. And it gets accepted. So what I would say is go and do some maintenance, not on the equipment, but on actually what is happening that you say on the document and what is happening in reality. Do they actually match? Is it going to work at three o'clock in the morning when the plan is supposed to help and support you and the crisis collides? Because if you're doing that, you're reviewing those, you're looking at them, you're testing them, do a pressure test on them and say, are we actually going to be okay if something really does go wrong? Because the likelihood is if they do that, they'll be picking up the phone to you and going, David, we've just done a pressure test on this because right now we have the capacity. When things are not going wrong, we have capacity to look at it.

Speaker 9:04

Or they've been prodded in some respect or have seen someone else get it. Like, for example, a cyber attack.

Speaker 1 9:09

Exactly. And now all of a sudden it's panic mode because are our systems okay? So how do we maintain those systems? What is that Peter Drucker quote, uh, culture eats strategy for breakfast?

Speaker 9:24

Yeah.

Speaker 1 9:25

Well, you know what? Resilience is the cutlery.

Speaker 9:28

Okay, I like that. We're going to use that. Dear listener, feel free to use that one as well.

Speaker 1 9:32

Absolutely. And then you can take it a step further and go, the conversations of care that we have as leaders and in teams determines whether that meal is going to be safe, it's going to be resilient, it's going to be trusted.

Speaker 9:46

What do you think the turning points are in your experience or in your mind that takes an organization from one place of thinking or even not thinking we need to do something like this, whether it be resilience or safety or whatever? What takes them to that place? Is it just the prod or is it more of one thing or is it more of another? Or is it a combination of factors that take people into a place where they're saying, we need to do something about this?

Speaker 1 10:13

In the 20 odd years that I've been working in this industry, the majority of the time that I get called in is because something has gone wrong. It isn't because we want to prepare and plan and make sure that things are going to work well. So again, it goes back to that almost disappointment of what stops people from picking up the phone and saying, we want to get this right before something goes wrong. And not having the prod. I often ask people, do you actually understand the true cost of your organizational culture? The true cost of your safety culture, specifically when I'm going into a client. And they look at me like, um, what are you talking about? There was a specific client I was working with, and I said, I've had a look at your incident reports for the last X, Y, Z time. Many of these could have been prevented if the right systems were in place, if there was a culture of care, if people felt safe to speak up. So if you take all of these and one of their vessels, it was a marine contractor, had been in the shipping yard for over eight months. The cost of that operationally to the business, loss of income, is exorbitant. Introducing a process or a way of improving the organizational culture, improving the way that it works, improving the system, and not looking at standalone. You know, resilience isn't built on standalone individuals or s or policy documents. It's a bit like the forest and the tree. You can have a tree standing alone. It's not as strong as it being in a forest, because it has an entire support network. So in a forest, one tree gets attacked by pests, it sends out a network of information through all of the roots and the fungus systems, and every tree starts producing a chemical that will make the pest go away. So if we're in an organization just thinking we have to have an individual standalone, we're not looking at the holistic system of the organization, then we're not building a resilient organization. You're not building an organization with a strong safety culture. You're having standalone processes or teams or systems that you hope are going to keep you safe when something goes wrong.

Speaker 12:30

It's interesting because you're now sort of touching on uh a point where you've kind of entered the building, if you see what I mean. The doors open. There is acceptance. If you look at the Business Continuity Institute good practice guidelines, they say you start with top management, this expression top management, get that senior buy-in. And that's all well and good. But what have you used to expand that sense of belief, sense of adoption and acceptance of a change of culture? What sort of tools, what sort of areas, what sort of tricks, possibly even, that you've used? Not suggesting you're some sort of magician or something like that. What tools do you use to promulgate, promote, and embed the culture and the necessary steps for change?

Speaker 1 13:19

So I might not be a magician, but I have been asked if I go around and sprinkle fairy dust when I'm doing long-term coaching programs.

Speaker 13:26

I know the feeling, because I've I've had exactly the same experience.

Speaker 1 13:30

He said to me, We have no idea what you've done while you've been here. But it's the first refurbishment of a vessel that we have done on time, on budget, with no incidents. What do you do? Sprinkle fairy dust.

Speaker 13:43

Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 1 13:44

So there we go.

Speaker 13:46

I'm just going on to the internet now to order my uh boatload of uh fairy dust. So thank you for that. That's that's a good one.

Speaker 1 13:52

Absolutely. Sadly, we can't order fairy dust. But what we can order is, and it might even start off with that uh kind of being candid, bringing candor into the organization. Hold the mirror up and go, where are we? Honestly. Not the wish list. Often you go into an organization and they've got these amazing values up on the wall. You can even just start there and go, okay, so these are the values. What does that look like in reality? Well, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. And I'll be like, hang on, you're going to do?

Speaker 14:26

Or are you doing it now? Are you progressing?

Speaker 1 14:29

Because if you're going to do it, it's a wish list. If you do it, then it is a reflection of your organizational culture. So you have to start with being do a diagnostic, be honest. Where are you? And one of the best ways of doing that, unfortunately, takes time. And that is conversations with people. Going and actually seeing what is their reality. Because you can ask people to fill in a questionnaire, and trust me, I have done many safety culture diagnostics where there's a questionnaire portion, there's an interview portion, maybe some on-site observations. The most honest feedback you get is the on-site observations and actually watching what people do in reality, because there's only so much that they can pretend to do, and then reality kicks in.

Speaker 15:19

And your point about questionnaires is well made. And there's been a number of occasions where in the business continuity process, data gathering is absolutely essential. It's known as business impact analysis, understanding what is needed, minimum levels of service requirement, timescales, but also the key resources. The face-to-face opportunity to really coach and question just can't be underestimated, can it?

Speaker 1 15:43

No. And don't get me wrong, there's a place and a time for questionnaires, absolutely. But that face-to-face where you can really watch the whole physiological energy of the person in the conversation. Are they trying to tell you what they want you to hear or they think you want to hear? And then you can dig deeper. Many years ago, I was actually working with one of the oil majors. Total, they were converting two VLCCs, which is a very large crude carrier, into FPSOs, floating production, storage, or floating units. It was such a joyous project to be on because they flipped the narrative with their contractors. And instead of going in there and saying, This is what you must do because we are telling you, they brought us in to come in and do on-site diagnostics, where we interviewed the crews, we interviewed the supervisors, we had working groups where they came up with the solutions of what would help them be safer, what would help them be more efficient and work more effectively. But we couldn't have done that without that buy-in from the top. And for some sites, it was very difficult to accept that feel back.

Speaker 16:54

Why, though? Because this sort of goes into this very nature of belief. What were the barriers then to this sort of progression? Because to me it sounds like what a fantastic idea. You also get the what's in it for me kind of questions. The answers come from those individuals themselves, and they there's that bing moment. But what do you think the barriers were? And how did you overcome them?

Speaker 1 17:18

Sometimes it's fear-related. And that might sound a bit bizarre. You know, we're talking here potentially about top management. You know, these are experienced people who have been there, done it, seen it, and yet they are having their band-aid ripped off because the people who are on the ground are actually speaking up in a very neutral environment where they can say, but this is actually our reality. And the further you get away from being on the ground, so there's a big difference from working on the shop floor to now you're promoted to supervisor, then you're promoted to senior leader, and now suddenly maybe you're in a management office that's off site. And your belief of the way things are happening. We talk about in safety, workers imagined versus workers done. So you have this belief. It's your work as imagined, it's sunshine and roses, everything is perfect. Your systems are built for a perfect day. But then you find out that actually there's a perfect storm and your systems cannot cope with a perfect storm. There isn't capacity, there isn't resilience.

Speaker 18:28

And it must come as a sort of a bit of a personal shock as well to people, isn't it? Because, you know, nobody wants to be accused of not doing a good job or not recognizing and dealing with flaws that are apparent to other people but not apparent to them. That's where the blame or personal blame or the internal blame or I'm blaming myself may cause one or two issues.

Speaker 1 18:50

Very much so. And it's often one of those tough but good conversations to have with people around, you know, I've never met a perfect person. Not even the one looking back at me in the mirror every day. And I cannot expect anyone else to be perfect. And you have the experience you have, you have the knowledge that you have. What is a greater fear for me is when people are not even prepared to be in a space to hear the difficult questions or to be asked the questions that they wouldn't even be thinking of asking themselves. So I'm gonna imagine you. You're gonna come into my organization and you're gonna say, right, Noula, we're going to have a look at what's in place and what's not. And you start asking me questions, and I can feel this flush of red coming up my neck and my cheeks, and I'm going, I can't answer those questions. I don't have this, I didn't even know we needed that. Where would I find this? And there is, there's that embarrassment, that fear, that blame of, but surely, in my position with this amount of years of experience, I should see this, know that, do that. And that is where you can actually step back from ego, come into a place of care and vulnerability, and rather go, how do we learn from this to become better? One of the colleagues I worked with years ago, they did a very candid report back to a client. This report got put into the bottom drawer. The person that they gave it to refused to share it amongst the management team. This company had quite a few really bad incidents a couple of years later. And someone said happened to ex-consultant that was in here. And they finally got a copy of that report. And many of the concerns that were raised in it could have been sorted out that would have prevented all of this happening further down the line.

Speaker 20:54

I'm sure that that well there are lots and lots of examples of that, aren't there, right? You know, across the working world when that happens. It does sort of touch on this psychology or psychological element as well, isn't it? Um what are the issues around a sort of psychology of good management of things like safety or resilience or something that's new, potentially well, let's just say, uh could cause, you know, embarrassment or exposure of problems. How do you manage the sort of psychology around that? Because there must be two extremes. One, yes, we totally accept it and we're gonna do it, and on the other, complete juxtaposition, fingers in ears, la la la la la.

Speaker 1 21:31

With most consulting work, and I'm sure you've experienced this before, the relationships that you have are just as critical with the people that you're working with on that project or on that process, as it is that the relationships that people have internally in an organization. There's a specific time coming to mind where there was a client who had very colourful language with the feedback that I was presenting. And was very we're supposed to be talking about safety. Why are you talking about humans? Why are you talking about this this this warm and warm and soft stuff?

Speaker 22:10

You mean the key beneficiary of a safe organization. Oh, I see.

Speaker 1 22:14

Yeah, exactly. I'm not a psychologist, so I can't really answer completely on the psychology side. I I wouldn't put myself in that position. But on my experience, it has been a case of you also have to meet people where they're at. So with that particular person, I could have gone in there and absolutely headbutted, you know.

Speaker 22:33

I'm glad you didn't. Or I could have just. I'm glad you didn't because you're here with us now.

Speaker 1 22:37

Exactly. But you know, it it really was a case of acknowledging where this person was coming from and then being curious and stepping back from judgment. Because it's easy to step into judgment, and that kind of brings into that blame culture, that kind of stuff. But when you think about things like we want people to hear feedback, to acknowledge, to speak up, to say when things aren't or on are working well. If we come in as a consultant and we give feedback that is hard to hear, we rip the band-aid off. I mean, like literally, we have ripped the band-aid off.

Speaker 23:14

Again, all out.

Speaker 1 23:15

They're going ow. And they also probably feel a little bit naked.

Speaker 23:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 23:19

You don't keep pouring something painful on top of that. Let's step back. Let's have a look at what is the objective around us. And accepting that not all news is received well, but bringing it back to a care and curiosity conversation. I'm giving you this feedback because you brought me into your organization and I care enough about your organization doing well, improving, stopping hurting people, being prepared for the unthinkable that could happen in your organization.

Speaker 23:54

Or even the thinkable. I think that that's quite a barrier. Despite the fact that we see cyber attack, we've obviously been through pandemic, lots of other challenges. Simple things like fire, fire safety, and the consequences of a major fire to an organization. I've seen it firsthand myself when I've worked in local government. That's the sort of issue, isn't it? You really want to encourage people to make that journey from forgive the sort of religious connotations, but from a non-believer to a believer that this can really help and the candor that is needed to as part of that transformation?

Speaker 1 24:28

Absolutely. So many, many years ago, I was running crisis management workshops for an oil major across Africa. And part of that was that we had to do simulations and scenarios. I have a very vivid imagination. So I was introduced to the importance of safety when I was quite young. And that wasn't because of my imagination, but it taught me that you never anticipate things happening to you. It always happens to other people. That was my first lesson in that until it happened to my family. So I'm now doing these crisis management workshops, and I have to come up with scenarios. So I research every city that I'm going to where this major is, what are all the kinds of things, what's been happening locally, and I come up with these scenarios. As you're doing crisis management workshops, you start the scenario and you just keep adding more fuel to the fire, literally. And we were in Mauritius, and the country manager looked at me and he said, You came up with this. This is insane, but it's so potentially possible.

Speaker 25:32

Yeah, yeah. I've I've been there as well. I've been there as well, particularly with various emergency exercise or crisis management scenarios that you put in. Because I think it's got to be believable as well when you're looking at, you know, as part of um embedding this. And if you're you're training and exercising against um particular scenarios, I've always said don't use scenarios or experiences which are just totally unbelievable. There's a little bit of thing called exercise itis. You could expand the sort of the envelope of the scenario and its impacts and consequences of things like that. But keeping it real, that must be part of the strategy.

Speaker 1 26:09

Keeping it real and also helping people understand that if you are, whether it's developing a crisis plan, looking at how resilient your organization is, if you can have that conversation around the table where you go, here's my idea. Now let's pull it apart. What could go wrong with this? What are the unintended consequences? If this happens, what could be a ripple effect? And that only happens in a group where there is strong psychological safety. And I know that that is a term that has been bandied around and possibly misinterpreted or misunderstood. But when you look at it from a team perspective, so there's a model by Timothy Clark that I think works wonderfully in the organizations I work with. It's the four levels or four stages of psychological safety. The first stage is that everybody wants to be included. So when you're in a team, you want to feel included. I can show up as Nuala. I don't have to pretend to be somebody else. You can show up as David. You don't have to act differently just to fit into the crowd. The second stage is that I am safe to learn. So I can ask questions, I can be vulnerable and say I don't know. And I will be developed by my peers. The third stage is contributor safety, which is my contributions are valued. So when I speak, the team listen to me, and then we can have a conversation around whatever it is and expand it. The fourth level is challenger safety. And challenger safety is where we want everyone in an organization to be. Whether we're talking about safety, whether we're talking about crisis planning, resilience, any of those, we want people to speak up. We want people to challenge. We want to say, hang on, I don't feel safe here. I think we need to do this a different way. Or I'm looking at this and going, that's not really how we do it. How we actually do it is this. Maybe we need to adapt the way we're doing it or we need to adapt our processes. The problem is that we expect everyone to speak up, but they don't feel included, they don't feel safe to learn, and they don't feel that their contribution is valued.

Speaker 28:27

Taking that on as well and moving it into a kind of perpetual stage. How difficult is it to maintain the approach, the enthusiasm, the interest, the core values and the tools and processes around that? Have you seen examples where everyone's got in, to coin a phrase, all gums blazing, and it's worked well for a year, and then one or two people leave? Because it's always down to individuals sometimes, particularly in what I call the treacle layer of management, the middle managers. You get some people who move on, promoted, retire, win the lottery, whatever. How difficult is it to keep that momentum and what would you recommend in terms of keeping up the momentum of what you're trying to achieve with this change in culture? So it becomes the way we do things around here?

Speaker 1 29:20

One of the things I would say is how are you having regular health checks? So are you having regular health checks with your teams? Are you understanding what are the things that they're doing? Even a question of what did we do last week that didn't work so well that we haven't spoken about or addressed?

Speaker 29:41

So this is both formal and informal mechanisms of informal.

Speaker 1 29:46

Yep. Because if you're not having those conversations, we're just assuming that things are going on and that things are okay. And assumption, as we know, is not such a good way of running a team or a business.

Speaker 29:58

No, no, no, no, no, no. It'll never happen around here. Never, never, never.

Speaker 1 30:02

Oh, definitely not. And if you're not having those conversations, you're actually flying blind because you're imagining that everything's okay. And how do you then continue those health checks? And then you mentioned a really important point. Teams change. People come and go. The industries I work in, people come and go every six weeks, sometimes every three weeks, and you're working on different shifts on different rotations. So you're not in fixed teams. How do you create the induction, the way of being? I have worked on Joel ships with four different rotational teams. One team just did not operate at all like the rest of the teams. I actually took it to the offshore installation manager, the OIM, and I said to him, You have three teams with an incredibly healthy culture of safety. Because we all have a safety culture. It might be a poor one. And these three teams had a very, very healthy culture of safety. This other team, it was hard work. I speak to everyone. I am comfortable with everyone. I felt uncomfortable walking into the room with that team. And it's about okay, what is the organization going to do? Because that team unfortunately will start impacting others. And vice versa. But they had to have some tough conversations, and there were a few people that got changed out because they just did not fit the organization. They weren't building it, they were breaking it.

Speaker 31:37

And ultimately, particularly in the area of safety, and I've done some work at X Nuclear myself, and behavioral safety very much in the uh late 90s, early 2000s, was a big, big push, particularly within the nuclear industry. Ultimately, your indicators, which every senior manager wants to hang their hat on, is the target is zero. Remember Mark Days, the target is zero, so zero accidents, zero incidents, and you're learning from experience, da da da. That's a very subjective and measurable measurement, an indicator. What other indicators, softer indicators, would you use when you're looking at culture change, whether it be in safety, whether it be introducing continuity, crisis management resilience? What other indicators, soft, hard or otherwise, are useful for any management team to utilize?

Speaker 1 32:28

I'm going to bring it definitely back to conversations. What conversations are people having, and importantly, what conversations are people not having? Are people capable and able of having difficult conversations? And let me reframe that important conversations, because it doesn't have to be difficult. So your important conversations are we're about to do an operation. This is like let's say on the shop floor, somebody puts up their hand and says, I don't feel comfortable. Can't tell you why, but I just feel like we're missing something. Can we take a look around? Or watching a toolbox talk, and the supervisor is, you do this, you do this, you do that, everybody okay? And the head nods up and down, and you see all these bobble dolls going up and down, and they walk away, and you hear someone going, What are we doing today?

Speaker 33:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in a few of them myself.

Speaker 1 33:20

Exactly. To senior leaders picking up the phone and going, What's happening with production? How far are we? What are we doing? What's the time frame? You know, we've only got two hours left on this shift. It speaks volumes about what is important. Then there's an accident or an incident, and it's a case of, well, I didn't tell you to short it, uh, take a shortcut. What I told you to do was get the job done as quickly as possible and be safe. You can't have them both. You can either get the job done quickly or you can be safe. So what are the types of words people are using? What are the norms? Do people speak up? Do people walk away from things and start having little private conversations? How open are people to actually doing observations of unsafe acts?

Speaker 34:07

Yeah, and empowerment as well. Empowerment, you know, particularly in emergency management, empowerment is everything in terms of trusting your people to make the right decisions, to make the right calls. That must be in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 34:19

Absolutely. You mentioned zero. And I'm very glad the industry is to some degree moving away from zero to creating capacity. Safety is not the absence of incidents, it is a presence of capacity. And often when we go in and we do work with organizations, they are quite horrified. So we do warn them up front that you know what, after about three or four months of this program, your incident reports may skyrocket. It is a very healthy good sign. Yeah. Because people are not hiding. When you're focusing on zero, we want zero incidents, we want zero accidents. People will give you what you're looking for.

Speaker 34:56

By not reporting.

Speaker 1 34:57

Absolutely, and hiding.

Speaker 34:59

And hiding, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 35:00

And lying.

Speaker 35:00

Yeah.

Speaker 1 35:01

Are people accountable? Do you have a culture of accountability where I can say, you know what, I just messed up here. It was not on purpose. I wasn't being reckless, and I now need to let you know this is what's happened.

Speaker 35:15

Yeah.

Speaker 1 35:15

And I think people often confuse psychological safety and accountability. In a very healthy psychologically safe team, everyone is 100% accountable to each other. There's no stepping on eggshells, there's no any of that. We stand up, we speak up, we take responsibility. It's a lot of the the human interactions. Now, do people only focus on work? Or do they actually know each other? Do they know each other's family? Do they know that this person's mother is going through cancer treatment?

Speaker 35:49

There are other stresses and pressures in there as well. Absolutely. You're touching very much on sort of like the personal touch here and the uh personal connectivity is is a really important part of culture change as well. And bringing people closer together.

Speaker 1 36:03

Culture change isn't going to happen without human connection because it's the humans that make the culture happen. It's the human, the way of being. Let's say timekeeping is an important thing. Does everybody slack off and kind of appear when they want to? Or does everyone arrive on time? Because this is the time that we start. We're not actually going to punish people who are on time by making them wait for everybody who's tardy and late. Do we create capacity for skills development, for learning, for sharing, for creating an environment where people feel that they can say, in my experience, I've seen X, Y, and Z and share stories because that's how people learn. I do touch very much on the human side, on the human, non-technical skills. Do people listen? Are they heard?

Speaker 36:56

So what sorts of or types of questions would you encourage people to ask?

Speaker 1 37:02

On a safety perspective, some of the practical things, I would say, are asking questions like, what are we not talking about that we should be? What are we missing? What is making it hard to do this safely, to do it efficiently, whatever the case is? And often one of the best things to do is look at a situation and go, what are we going to do? What could go wrong? How do we prevent it? And I think that works on varying aspects across an organization. And it's not just the questions we ask, but what I would also say is what are the behaviors? Be more curious, be caring. Care enough that you actually want this culture to change because then people will believe and you will believe that it's the right thing to do. Thank people. Those are two of the most powerful words that you can ever use in anything that you do is to say thank you.

Speaker 37:59

Totally agree with my one.

Speaker 1 38:00

Yeah. And don't be afraid or think that you have to be perfect. Ask those around you, honestly, what are we missing here? What do we need to do differently? And if you think that your organization is the one that nothing's ever going to go wrong with, you've got everything. It's all in place. You're amazing. You are the person that needs to pick up the phone to David and say, David, I think we need help.

Speaker 38:26

Nuala, it's been an absolute joy speaking with you.

Speaker 1 38:29

It is my absolute pleasure. It has been wonderful.

Speaker 38:33

This is Foresight Matters. A really interesting conversation which has invited me to really have a bit of a think and to draw some strands together and to offer you a personal perspective of what I take away from the conversation and where I feel that you and your organization may need to go. The first point is realization. Actually believing that there could be a problem. And actually, right now, before anything happens, let's put into place the right approach to crisis management, to emergency management, continuity, resilience, risk management. Give the topic a bit of a shake at the strategic level of your organization and see what pops out. And once there is that recognition, that belief, that installs one of the most important foundation blocks. But it's not the only foundation block. I think the second of the four foundation blocks of this is leadership. Now that sounds quite trite, doesn't it? Yeah, we're all leaders. I've worked at board level, I've worked at head of service level, we're all leaders. And yes, leadership is a natural part of what you want to try and achieve. But when I talk about leadership for one of these, you know, potentially a niche kind of subjects, something that you're not used to and perhaps something you're a little bit afraid of. I found that it's given to a director or a head of service or someone uh senior or semi-senior, and it's kind of a bolt-on to what they do rather than becoming more mainstream and associated with their portfolio of work. And that is so important to demonstrate your belief and to demonstrate your values in this area, particularly if you are introducing it. And that brings me on to the third point: enablers. Just because you've got a lead director or head of service or senior member of management fronting up the charge on this, if you don't have the resources and the enablers and a capability where the organization, its people actually believe that you're taking this seriously. And that even if you don't know anything or or everything about this particular subject, you're gonna learn and you're gonna make sure that it is embedded, introduced, nurtured, and delivered for your organization. And finally, to support that culture change results, how are you going to demonstrate that this is actually part of business as normal? And there are some very, very easy things here that are directly associated with crisis and emergency management, such as very overt training, exercises, rehearsals, reviews of key resources and key capabilities, like, for example, your IT capability? Or do you have particular single points of failure in terms of that person in the office without them, if they go on holiday or if they magically win the lottery, which I think we all want to do, they're gone. What do we do? Well, why don't you put into place a process that enables you to look at this and to provide results? And that will really galvanize belief in the organization, and I think produce the right source of results. If you'd like to get hold of us, guess what? We'd love to hear from you. Please do drop me an email. It's david at foresightsolutions.net. That's David at ForesightSolutions.net. Foresight Matters with David Cloak is a trending audio production.