PAPod 515 - Engaging Insights from the Santa Fe Workshop Q&A Session

Show Transcript

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Hey everybody, Todd from the future. How do I sound, future-y?

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So this is a part two. If you haven't heard part one, it was last week's, but it hardly matters.

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Although if you get a chance, it might be good because I do give kind of a brief

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description of what this is about that I probably will not give this time.

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Either way, enjoy the pod! We'll be right back.

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Music.

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Hey everybody, welcome to the Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast.

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I'm Todd, your host, Todd Conklin, just in case you don't know who I am.

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And this is part two of the outbrief of the 2024 Santa Fe Workshop open question

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and answers that we use for the ending.

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So the first one went great. You loved it. Lots of feedback telling me so.

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So this is kind of the rest of it. And I think you'll enjoy this.

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Well, I'm figuring just about as much, if not more. So it's a big weekend for me.

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So I am currently at the Winfield Bluegrass Festival listening to,

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I probably am, even as we speak, discovering new music that I didn't know before,

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which is always kind of a, I don't know, when you find a new band,

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even at my ripe old age it's kind

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of exciting because two things happen one

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is you've discovered a new band which is always super cool

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but two you're like i wonder where were they were why didn't

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i know about these people where were they what's going on that's kind of the

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excitement so that'll be fun and then i'm zooming off to you know do some stuff

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and then i'll be nestled in my house enjoying fall as it appears around me in

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new mexico hope you're doing good how are things going,

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getting back into the swing of things and doing great work, good work done well

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for the right reasons, if you know what I mean.

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I'm hoping so. So what else about the conference in Santa Fe?

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Well, the other thing I would share with you, because it's worth sharing, is we've over, because.

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Because I'm connected with a t-shirt artisan, Steve Thomas, the t-shirt artisan,

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we have created some t-shirts that we give out at the workshops.

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And I was especially pleased with what t-shirt artisan Steve Thomas did on this

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one because it's a sugar skull.

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And if you don't know what that is, that would be something to look up.

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It's a thing from Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, and it's a skull.

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So it's kind of creepy because skulls are kind of fundamentally creepy,

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but they're normally made out of sugar, and they're a treat, a dulce, a little candy.

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But we took that same design, and on a t-shirt, we put Dia Sin Muertos en Los

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Trabajos, so Day Without Death at Work.

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And it came out great. People loved it. That was exciting too.

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So that was kind of a hit and fun to wear.

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So if you wear t-shirts, that would be the one to wear. I don't know if they're available.

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That's a really good question that I don't know.

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We'll have to see if we can find that out. If so, and you want one,

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maybe we can hook you up with one.

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We can probably do that. That's probably doable.

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I hadn't thought about it, but they're kind of cool looking.

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You'll think they're fun.

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That was a fun part of it as well. So let's pick up right kind of where we left

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off with Mike Peters and Martha Acosta and Jennifer Long and Bob and Andrea, oh, Bob Edwards,

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I should say that, and Andrea Baker and myself listening to some questions,

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some interesting questions that were we're sort of tossed out to the crowd.

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So without any further ado, let's jump into the pod.

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Sound familiar? This will save you time. They said it used to take me 30 minutes.

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Now it takes me three hours a day.

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So we actually didn't listen to them. We didn't ask them. We did this to them, not with them.

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And because of that, now we put more time pressure on them.

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If you ask people who get work done, what is in your way that doesn't help your

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operations? I've done learning teams on this.

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Supervisors, what gets in your way? They thought they'd get one or two things.

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They got a flip chart page of things that is absolute waste of their time.

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So in over a couple of months with a leadership sponsor, those supervisors were

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able to say, this doesn't help, that doesn't help. Let's automate this. Let's get rid of this.

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And in about a two to three month time, they gained back six to eight hours

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each per week. Would you like that?

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Yeah. So I came Came back to that site. I said, how'd it go?

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And the sponsor said, really well,

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I couldn't believe all the crap we have them do that brings no value.

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And he said, we have really freed up a lot of their time. And he looked at me

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with all seriousness and said, Bob, what should we fill the gap with?

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I said, you don't have a gap. Leave them alone. Let them go supervise.

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The problem was is we were doing things to them, not with them.

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People resist change. Why? Because we do it to them, not with them.

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When we did this change with them, they showed us where the wasted time was.

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And if you can get a supervisor closer to work on a regular basis,

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that's actually what supervising is supposed to be.

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So where did that all come from though? A leader willing to listen to the people

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actually get the work done.

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So yeah, I think we can alleviate some of this time pressure because I think

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we're doing a lot of stuff that there's a waste of time.

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Yeah. Yeah. So Bob makes me want to add.

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So actually, Bob and I worked the same company and they came out and we did

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pretty deep dive learning in the supervisors and they were spending two full

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days, 16 hours a week in timekeeping.

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So I had to do the board of directors, senior leaders meeting.

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And I said, I can buy you two additional days of supervision in the field.

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And of course, everybody's ears perk up.

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And I said, hire somebody to track your time, right?

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Because there's whole companies that are willing to come and do timekeeping, right?

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And it was the most interesting meeting because, and you know this guy too,

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the CFO of the company said, I've heard that shit for years.

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That's what he said. And the big boss, the big, big boss, like the board of

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directors boss said, and today we'll listen. Yikes-o automatic.

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I'm going to say one last comment on this.

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I think too, because I work with a lot of the senior teams, when it's a growth

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issue and you've got the time pressures,

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some of them aren't doing good strategy where they're really looking at what

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are the aligned actions and what are we doing over the next 12 to 18 months

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to actually solve whatever it is, especially if we're not really prioritizing well.

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Because I think if they're not there aligned or

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something that's that's going to help prioritize you're

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left with the pressure of try to get it all done it sounded

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like i don't know it sounded like you use small pockets of success to influence

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and spend your time at that level and and it just started to perpetuate and expand to probably a

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point where it caught the executive's attention to go,

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I want to understand more of this rather than expel all that energy at the front,

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trying to convince a bunch of executives.

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And plus you got engagement from the floor up behind you, right? Yeah.

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Yeah. As far as I can tell, anyone chime in, just from all of the organizations

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and the different examples that we've been able to see, there seem to be.

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Two more prevalent ways that this tends to happen in an organization.

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The first is what you just explained, meaning that there's folks that are somewhere

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within the organization, usually somewhere in middle management.

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They hear something about this topic. They really think it's a good idea.

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They don't have a lot of influence in the organization, and so they spend time building influence.

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They do pilots. They influence the people around them. They make small change

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until something catches someone else's eye, and they have a meeting with someone,

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and then they're able to actually bring that to someone else in the organization

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that has more influence.

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That's one model. And then the other model, which I'm sure Todd can talk more

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to, is something bad happens that has caught somebody's attention,

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and they're looking for an answer, and the answer comes in the form of Todd

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Conklin, usually, right? I said the answer.

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And that's usually in those organizations, change starts from the top of the organization.

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Is that a fair summary of what seems to be true?

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Yeah. But I actually think that Andy's first example is more sustainable and

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between us chickens, a million billion times healthier.

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Because after something bad happens, like a fatality, multiple fatalities,

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I just did a decapitation that really took this company, just surprised them.

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Well, so first of all, of course it surprised you. If you have a leadership

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team that says, well, we're expecting a decapitation soon, that's a pretty scary leadership team.

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The challenge is, and I think this is really the big part of what we deal with,

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is the realization at some level that leaders need to be curious.

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And so the only thing I can say, because I don't know how to fix leaders that

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aren't curious, that are already leaders, they're kind of a problem.

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But I will tell you, when you're hiring people that work for you,

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when you're building the next generation of leaders that are going to come and

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take your job, and if they're really good, maybe they're going to take the job

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above you, hire people that are genuinely curious.

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Because curiosity is really important.

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And always reinforce the message that it's way sexier to not know than it is to know.

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If you already think you know the answer, right, which we deal with all the

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time, you can name the boss that fits that category.

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Then when they go to the field, what they're going to do is look for ways to

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reinforce what they know, right?

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So there's even a name for that in psychology.

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So, and that bias is really strong. What you want is a boss that is genuinely

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comfortable with not knowing, which we've talked a lot about him.

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But one of the things about your boss, Scott, is he was completely comfortable

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at every level with the opportunity to learn. In fact, I think it's fair.

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I think he found that the best part of his job.

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That's what he liked to do was to learn. So that's key. I hope that helps because

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that's a really good question.

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So one thing that really kind of sticks out with me is the phrase,

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what's happening when nothing is happening? Not a great question.

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It's a very proactive phase.

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So I see such huge value in going out and doing the field engagements and things like that.

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What would be, I guess, your, as a panel, what would be your,

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I guess, thoughts on how do we sell that proactive stage when we're actually very reactive?

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We generally wait for something to happen to get ahead of something.

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There are so many soft signals that are out there.

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So I guess that would be my question is how do we get that proactive or reactive

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or from a reactive to that proactive phase?

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One thing is that weak signals are by definition weak, right?

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So weak signals are hard to hear because they're weak. Loud signals,

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super easy to hear because they're big fat accidents, right? Right.

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And so part of what we want to do is kind of change the attenuation of our organization

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so that we're actually identifying problems before they become catastrophic or consequential.

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And really what we're talking about is resilience and recoverability.

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So you'll always have to prevent.

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In fact, let me just take this moment to say, don't stop any prevention strategies.

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They're really good. keeping people from getting hurt and managing hazards aggressively.

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That's a really important thing. In the tree world, fall protection seems pretty

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vital to me. Don't stop that, right?

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The problem is, is it's not enough. And so it's the idea of building a case

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for resilience, which then causes the conversation to change.

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But let me give you just a quick hint. Instead of having your leadership go

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out and identify where risk is high, have them go out and identify where control is low.

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Now, you may say, actually, you guys won't say it because we've been hanging

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out a long time, but other people in your organization may say, what's the difference?

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That seems like the same question. And yet, your very question is encapsulated in that shift.

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When we ask people to look for where risk is high, which is a pretty good exercise,

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they're going to go out and tell you what the most dangerous crap we do.

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Except in your industry, where near as I can tell, everything's kind of dangerous.

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I mean, it's a dangerous work, right?

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If you go out and ask them where control is low, you're really tuning your ear,

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or better yet, tuning the organization's ear to listen to smaller signals early

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because they're going to tell you which part of the system is most brittle before it fails,

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not waiting till it fails.

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So I would guess that the answer to that question is highly dependent upon where

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somebody sits in an organization, right?

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If you have the ear of senior leaders and you can have that discussion up front,

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you could have an intellectual discussion where they're willing to try something new. That's one thing.

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There's many in this room that are lucky enough to have that position in an

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organization, and there's many that we don't have that much influence in an organization.

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So if you're in a space where you don't have the ear, right,

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you can't use you can't use a very cohesive and logical explanation to help

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somebody see something differently.

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What you end up having to do is sort of is prove it and prove it in small ways that add up.

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So the ways that I can picture where we tried to bring attention to looking

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at things proactively, I actually started reactively because that is the only

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thing that we paid attention to.

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But what I mean by that is I would take an event that we had already done some

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sort of investigation for.

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And I would do some type of operational learning to understand what people were still facing.

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And then I would take those conditions and label which of them haven't existed for a really long time.

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And I would do that after events, even after we had done sort of our traditional

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investigation to show that, hey, these elements, they've existed for a long time.

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And so we probably had an opportunity to look at them ahead of time.

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And then I would do the same thing with our audit. So we actually already have

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fairly proactive engagements.

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We just don't necessarily use the face-to-face interaction well.

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We could do something more with the time. So anything that was proactive that

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already existed, I did my very best to hijack.

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And I hijacked it at a site level because that's what I had control over at first, right?

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So we had requirements for observations, we had requirements for audits,

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and I would turn those into mini operational learning discussions.

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And then I tried to find a metric that I could show that there was value in

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doing that. And in my world, we had something called concern reports.

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And concern reports were considered good things, right? Meaning an employee

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was bringing up an issue, a difficulty, and it was being reported.

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And the more concern reports in my world, the better you looked as a plant.

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Well, I took all that information and shoved it into our concern reporting system.

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So suddenly we had hundreds more concerns than anyone else had because we were proactively learning.

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And then people started to ask questions. And when they started to ask questions,

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then there was a door for a conversation.

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Yeah, my question is almost identical to Pat. Him and I are on the fire department

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together, so we think alike.

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So in and around that, I want to know more about how to expose the dark corners,

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you know, the weak signals, specifically for the supervisors that we can take

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back and have conversations.

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We're both operations folks, spend a lot of time in the field, not as much as we'd like.

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And we have those conversations with crews, but they're so, I think,

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normalized by slight deviations, right? And we're performing at a pretty high

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level, but there's the things that creep up that you'd say, man, I never saw that coming.

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And that's why I was looking for, like, if you were to ask three questions of

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a crew or whatever it might be from a supervisor level, what would that be?

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What would that really look like?

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Because we always talk, you can really hone in. And I like what Todd said about the low control.

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I do like that. So anyways, I just didn't know if you could expound on what Pat was asking earlier.

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So if you have to have three questions, I'll give them to you because they're

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out there and there's really cool work being done around this.

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So there's tons of data and it's kind of exciting and it's all part of this

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story. I mean, it's a part of people that you hung out with.

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But before we go there, one of the things that's really important about these

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weak signals is that they're not indicative of failure.

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So mostly systems rattle and creak and buzz and fart and burp and don't fail.

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And so what we're really talking about when we talk about weak signals is trying to predict the future.

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And we really have a high need as human beings to sort of understand and predict

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the future. I'll just break it to you as gently as possible.

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Generally, we suck at it because you're you're in this room,

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we're not on your yacht, you didn't buy Apple when it was 50 cents a share.

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I mean, we're not good at it.

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But there are ways to sort of predictively think about uncertainty,

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and it means that you have to move from if-thinking to when-thinking, which is expensive.

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It's resource-intensive, and it's a much different conversation.

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Instead of saying, there's a probability of 70% this will fail.

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So we're going to manage this with 70% protection, which we've done for years.

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We have to say when this system fails, right?

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Not if, when the system fails, do we have robust controls in place to manage the recoverability?

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So two things have to happen. One is your organization has to be really comfortable

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understanding that failure Failure is normal.

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So we could talk about zero, but we already have.

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The one that actually bugs me more than zero is all accidents are preventable.

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So the problem with all accidents are preventable is that it really sets up

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this sort of false dichotomy that the accident happened because we failed to prevent it.

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So I guess that's true in retrospect. All accidents are preventable.

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But I'll also suggest that all winning lottery numbers are knowable after they've been selected.

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Like we're really good at playing the lottery after they pick the numbers.

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The three questions are kind of what is now being known as the sticky suite.

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Are you guys familiar with sticky? We talked about it a little earlier on the

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first day. Stuff that kills you.

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Although nobody I know in the whole industry calls it stuff.

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You can sort of fill in what they call it.

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So what'll kill you, when it happens, what keeps you safe, and is that sufficient?

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That suite of questions will do more for your organization on a continuous basis

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around catastrophic and significant failure, like fatalities,

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than probably anything else you do.

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So it's a really powerful set of questions. Want to add to it, anybody?

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I think if Mark Yaston was able to be here today, I think probably what he would

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echo is that for sure we're not great at predicting, but we are really good

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at learning what is happening and what has happened.

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And so he talks to post-job brief, right?

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So if you're going out into the field, rather than trying to get people to predict

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what's going to happen, it is a lot lot easier for them to teach you what did

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happen that surprised them.

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And oftentimes that gives you an insight into places where things were surprising.

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Usually it worked out, right? Because it was creaking. What did you say, Todd?

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It was creaking, groaning, squeaking, and burping and farting.

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So it was doing all of those things.

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It was doing all of those things. People could hear it because it's already

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happened and then and learning from what has happened, but faster,

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right? So we're not waiting for the bad thing.

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We're waiting for just what happened today. Like what happened today that surprised

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you? Anyone remember some of the questions he suggests on his post-job brief?

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You remember it off the top of your head?

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What happened today that surprised you? Anyone else?

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Well, multiple brains are smarter than one brain. Multiple brains are smarter than one brain.

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What are we missing? What worked well and what didn't work well?

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I think there's one more that I can't remember.

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What would you recommend? I think we have it on hophub.org. We've got his list

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of questions as well, and he has all the slides up there. So that might be helpful.

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And in honor of Mark Yesen, who's not here with us this week,

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unfortunately, but he is amazing and normally is with us.

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He also tells a story of where they put cameras on rescue helicopters to analyze

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the rescue. Did I tell you this?

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Did I tell you this one already? No? I did?

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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so I'm old.

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So yeah. So that, that whole notion of, of watching stuff to learn,

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right. That's the, that's right. We didn't talk about like football games, right?

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So people that are listening to this podcast may not have heard this,

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but the, the landing the helicopter and then that, that video going to the boss

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and the boss critiquing it was not helpful. It was scary.

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And they became more concerned about the video camera capturing what they were doing.

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But when they, when they told them about their leader was good enough to realize

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he was doing something they didn't mean to do.

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So now when they land, it gets sent to them and they can analyze their own rescue,

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right? So this is going to be on a podcast, right?

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So anybody on the podcast, if you haven't listened to or talked to Mark Yesen,

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man, reach out to that guy.

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He's