PAPod 528 - Embracing Uncertainty: Navigating Change in Today's World

Show Transcript

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So let's have a conversation about a project I just did that you might find interesting.

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And some of you have already found

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it interesting because I've seen some feedback on the interest level.

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And I'm always surprised by what works and what doesn't work,

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what people think is interesting, what people don't think.

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Like in the podcast, episodes that I'm super excited about, I mean,

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like, this one's going to be great, don't get the same feedback.

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And episodes where I'm like, that one could have been so much better.

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Huge number of downloads.

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So I'm convinced I don't know what people want or like.

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But I'm all right with that because it keeps me trying.

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The enemy of learning is knowing.

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And the minute I know something, then I'll stop learning something.

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So I think it's actually good for me that I don't know what people want from me. We'll be right back.

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Music.

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Hey, everybody. Todd Conklin, Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast. How are you?

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I hope you're doing great. I mean, that's my wish for everybody.

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I hope everybody's doing great. it is an interesting time to be alive.

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Without question, it's an interesting time to be alive.

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Now, to be fair, I would guess throughout history, people have always said that.

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And that's the interesting thing about progress. And it's the really interesting

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part of uncertainty is that it's probably always, it's always interesting to see society develop.

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And there's always a question about what's going to happen next.

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And because, generally speaking, human beings, for many reasons,

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we could talk about all of them, or not inclusively, but tons of them,

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but for many reasons, human beings aren't very good at predicting the future.

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We know that we don't know what will happen next.

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And to me, what's been so interesting is that right now, uncertainty levels

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are high. Risk is continuously high and in motion.

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And we're expected to function, to produce, to work in the midst of high risk and high uncertainty.

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Well, that's an interesting time to be alive. And that's kind of right where

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we find all of us. We find ourselves right in that position.

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And what's amazing is that we're really learning and growing and improving.

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But improvement happens kind of incrementally. And I've said it before.

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I mean, I'm sure I'll say it again.

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Improvement's relatively hard to measure using classic metrics,

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because classic metrics can tell us how we've done, but they're not very good

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at telling us how we're doing or where we're moving.

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And so if you kind of shift from the idea that we can measure things in order

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to manage things, which is really kind of a left-handed way to say we measure

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things in order to control things,

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to more of a notion that we monitor and we can sense improvement by not measuring,

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but by monitoring, by thinking of it kind of like a gas gauge, right?

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I mean, it's not a metric per se, or even a compass might work, right?

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You can sort of see to what degree you're making a difference,

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to what degree things are happening.

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And that's kind of part of what we want to talk about today.

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Because I've told you before, and I'm sure we'll have this conversation again,

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so don't worry if you miss it, That what we really do in our jobs,

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helping organizations improve their stability,

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their resilience, their reliability, their safety.

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Those kind of things we do, right?

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What we're really doing is helping an organization learn and change, learn and improve.

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And so I became really fixated on the fact that this idea that we want to create

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change in an uncertain environment and that that's not easy to do because change is hard.

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Change even for the good is hard.

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I mean, it's just difficult.

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And change that sort of falls on top of us where we don't have a lot of control

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or say-so or engagement, that changes even harder.

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And so I started thinking about that and I thought, well, I wonder what this

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all means and how can we take this and learn from it?

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How can we take this and really think about it?

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And what happened is I started to keep a little list. And that's what I want

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to talk about today is this little list that I started keeping and what happened with it.

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Music.

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So I just published a book pretty recently, and you may be listening to it right now.

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I mean, that's how recent it is. And the book is entitled New Ideas for Old

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Problems, A Human Performance Approach to Sustainable Change.

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And it's not really per se a cookbook on how to change safety or the 10 steps

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to make a better safety culture or the five principles to human performance.

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Or name any safety book, and there's a million of them out there.

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This book really is kind of a collection of thoughts and ideas that were rattling

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around in my head that I didn't really know what to do with,

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but I knew were pretty important.

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And when I started looking at this list, ICAP, and you probably do the same thing.

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You hear an interesting thing, or you have an interesting idea,

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or there's an interesting question to ask, I kind of jot it down because I think,

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well, maybe I'll come back to this or maybe I'll need some time to think on it.

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And this will force me to actually think about what I was thinking about.

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And so I started keeping this list and I guess I've been doing this a while.

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And if we've talked before, and we probably have,

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you know that one of the best places, at least for me to think,

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is when I go out and ride my bike around because I don't really have an agenda for my bike ride.

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I'm just riding around. I'm just, I'm getting out. I'm enjoying the great outside.

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I'm traveling around. It's really fun. I get to see and say hello to people

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because I really practice preventative politeness.

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So if I'm nice to you before you're mean to me, then you won't yell at me for

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riding my bicycle on the sidewalk.

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You'll have to say hello. And so one of the things that happened is in these

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bike rides, I think about stuff.

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And one of the challenges that I've been thinking about a lot lately,

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and it probably makes sense if you think about it in the timing of everything

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that's happening, is how we can actually help organizations change.

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Because talking about these new ideas for safety, right, they're exciting.

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And you can really whip people into kind of a frenzy for a little bit.

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But then the problem is, is what do they do with it? How do they apply these ideas to real life?

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And maybe even more richly, how do they apply these rather new ideas to a mature

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system that generally is functioning pretty well?

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Our old safety system isn't bad.

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It's just not good.

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Do we want to throw the old system away to actually use this new system?

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And what do we do differently to ensure that, A, we're actually changing our

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approach, our philosophy of safety.

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We're changing the definition of safety.

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And once we get that shift in

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the conversation, how do we get it to sink in? How do we get it to stick?

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How do we get it to be sustainable in the smallest sustainable,

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not in the largest sustainable use of the word? How do we get organizations to take that on?

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And this all started to be really honest with you, because why not?

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Might as well be honest at this point. Kind of no benefit in not being honest.

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Is I thought a lot about the new definition.

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So one of the things we've done, you and I together, and it's been kind of an important thing.

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I don't know if it feels important because we're doing it and we do it all the

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time. And so it feels a little bit old hat.

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Like these are ideas we've had. We've had these for years. Don't bother me with

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these. I already know that.

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And yet every time we say this new definition to a group of people,

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it may be their first time to actually think about the problem that way.

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And the definition is really easy.

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Traditionally, we've defined safety as the absence of injuries.

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In fact, we've measured safety as the absence of injuries.

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And we've done it for years. In fact, I think it's fair to say we have kind

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of a lot of maturity around that definition of safety, and that maturity has

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ended up coding itself into our systems and processes,

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especially things like regulatory compliance and contract language.

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So people will look at your reportability numbers and determine whether you

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are a good company or a bad company, whether you're in compliance or out of

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compliance, whether you're contractable or not contractable.

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So that's a pretty deep ingrained notion that.

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For a rather old and tired definition of safety.

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Because one of the things probably most of us will agree, I'm guessing,

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although if you don't agree, you're still welcome, I'm glad you're here,

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is that safety is not the absence of accidents.

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Safety is the presence of capacity. It's the presence of barriers and controls

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and leadership and training and direction and culture and all the things we talk about.

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Safety's job isn't to take bad things out of the workplace, because we're never

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going to do that, because there's always bad things in the workplace.

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And every time we remove one bad thing, two new ones come in.

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Safety's job is to put good things into the workplace.

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And that's always true. You don't make a system better by removing the failure.

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You make a system better by adding in the capacity.

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And so we build this case that says organizations that are actually safe or

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safer or responding safely, I even think that's a better use.

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The reason they're so safe is not because they don't fail, not because they

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don't have events, not because bad things don't happen.

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The reason they're so safe is because they have capacity that when something happens,

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they have the ability to absorb or to recover or to respond, or as David Wood says,

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to gracefully extend their processes so that they can encapsulate the event

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without having the horrific consequence.

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So we know that. That definition is a big part of it.

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And when we share it, that probably is earth-shattering to some people.

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I know it is. I mean, even today, it's earth-shadowing to people.

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The crazy thing is that idea is a pretty easy thing to introduce,

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but how do we get it to stick?

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How do we get it so that that idea slowly becomes the dominant thought?

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And soon, contract language and governance language stops looking at the presence

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of injuries and starts looking at the presence of capacity. How are we going to get there?

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Well, that's kind of what the lists started to do,

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is they started to really approach this idea, that how can we create the conversation

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that helps this change stick around a while.

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It may not be permanent because kind of nothing is.

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Organizations are constantly ebbing and flowing. That's what they do.

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But in fact, it's a worthwhile way to start hardwiring into our processes,

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practices, systems, and eventually our organizations, these new ideas.

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And so these lists started to appear.

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And the funny thing about these lists is that they really were just ideas.

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And they weren't really created to, you know, go together.

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I mean, I didn't make a list of a special category, all these things go into

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page one. No, it wasn't like that at all.

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These were individual ideas that I was thinking about, and yet they started to come together.

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And that's what led to this little book.

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It's not a big book at all. In fact, it's probably less than an hour's read.

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And I made a mistake with the publisher, and the typeface is really large.

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I didn't mean for the typeface to be large, but I must tell you,

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friends, that there's something comfortable about large typefaces.

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It's pretty easy to read. I'll just say that. I mean, I don't know if you've

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noticed as you get older, your eyes don't change.

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You're super young and agile and amazing, but the typefaces get fuzzier.

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Well, this kind of corrects for that with this large fit. And what this book

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does is it really talks kind of about five categories.

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One is that this new safety idea is really some new ideas, new philosophies,

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new approaches for really an old set of problems.

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So that's helpful because that allows us the ability to kind of bridge these

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new things in a new way. And that's pretty cool.

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Then it talks about the rate of which change happens and the rate of which change takes hold.

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And that one of the things that the list kept showing up is that change doesn't

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happen when you want it to, change happens when the people want it to happen.

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And so you can have the best plan in the world, in the whole world,

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and yet not really manage the moment the new idea diffuses into the world.

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The third category is that leadership being successful in managing this new

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change means that the organization will have to change as well.

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That leadership and the organization are so intertwined, so interlaced,

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that one really can't move well without the other.

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And that if we want leadership to succeed, we have to create organizational

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systems and process an opportunity for leaders to, in fact, succeed.

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And that's really important. And then the fourth one is the idea that this is

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really a journey of continuous improvement that happens in degrees of change

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and increments of change.

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And because it's incremental, because that's how change happens,

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it's not going to be a big bang rollout. Boom.

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On Tuesday, we're going to have a brand new system and everything will be different.

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That's not very successful. But slow incremental change and change that's attached

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from old ideas to new ideas, change is kind of like a bridge.

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Those ideas are in fact the ideas

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that are most successful and what's

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remarkable about this little book and i'm not saying the book itself is remarkable

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it really is sort of a collection of lists it's not it's not like other books

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it doesn't have a lot of case studies and it doesn't have a thread that runs

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through it i mean i guess there is a thread that runs through it And that threat is change.

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What it does do, however, is just introduce a lot of ideas that may, in fact,

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influence the discussions and the approaches that you take for really any kind of change.

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This is specifically written around the idea of doing safety in a new way.

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But it's totally effective for a big bang rollout of a new software system or

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a new HR process or a new ops system or a new procedural tracking and management,

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a corrective action program.

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It's any kind of program where you're going from an old idea to a new idea.

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And there's a compelling reason why that happens.

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And one of the things that I think this book did for me, I'm curious to see

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what you think when you pick it up.

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But one of the things it did for me was it just helped me understand the incremental

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nature, the degree of which change happens, and how the battle we're fighting is not this giant.

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Philosophical shift, but in fact, it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

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little tiny philosophical shifts, which helps me think, wow,

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this redefinition of safety is probably pretty important because what the redefinition

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of safety does is it kind of starts in a small way, a new conversation.

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And that is pretty interesting. Now, the book itself was kind of fun to put together.

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I mean, I had a great time doing it. And as you know, because I've probably

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told you before, when I do a project like this, I usually try to find a place

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where I'm sort of out of the flow.

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So I'm far enough away that people can't call me.

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And I usually try to go to someplace where there's not a tremendous amount of distractions.

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And I'll just kind of sit down somewhere comfortable and start to write some of these ideas down.

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But this one was easy because a lot of the ideas I'd already written down.

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And so I would take these lists and kind of expand on those ideas within each

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one of the sections of the book.

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And so it's going to look like that.

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It's not going to be this smooth flowing river of information,

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but I'm not sure that's what you need when you talk about sustaining change,

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big philosophical shifts.

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When you're talking about doing safety in a new way, you don't probably need

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a complete roadmap because everybody's journey is completely and totally different.

00:19:32.539 --> 00:19:37.179
Our journey is not like your journey and other companies journeys won't be like

00:19:37.179 --> 00:19:38.039
other companies journeys.

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What you need are some ideas and maybe some discussion around the timing,

00:19:43.719 --> 00:19:46.219
the speed of which change happens.

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And that'll help you sort of judge where you are.

00:19:49.879 --> 00:19:54.519
And then I tried really hard to give you things to monitor, not to measure,

00:19:54.699 --> 00:19:57.919
but to monitor. Are we hearing different conversations?

00:19:58.179 --> 00:20:00.599
Are we seeing different outcomes?

00:20:00.879 --> 00:20:03.499
Do we have more effective corrective actions?

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Are we closing corrective? Do we have fewer maintenance reworks?

00:20:07.679 --> 00:20:12.619
Are we getting more and richer near misses?

00:20:13.139 --> 00:20:17.239
Those are all things you can kind of monitor. You don't necessarily need to

00:20:17.239 --> 00:20:21.679
measure them, but you can say, you know, our number of near misses is up.

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Even if it's up by one, it's up. And let's see if it continues to be up.

00:20:27.239 --> 00:20:31.099
And if it stops being up and starts either leveling out or going down,

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then that helps us understand. And that's what this book talks about.

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That helps us understand that we've probably got to look for other ways to understand

00:20:40.259 --> 00:20:42.279
how the change is diffusing.

00:20:42.819 --> 00:20:48.719
And one of the very lucky things that I got to do is to actually talk in detail

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about how ideas diffuse.

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So I studied for my doctorate with a gentleman named Everett Rogers,

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who wrote a really, really famous scholarly book called The Diffusion of Innovation.

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I've talked about it before on the podcast.

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And it's a really famous, it's a really important book, because he was really

00:21:11.479 --> 00:21:15.959
the first person to look at how new ideas moved through organizations,

00:21:15.959 --> 00:21:21.019
or new ideas move through governments or new ideas move through society.

00:21:21.659 --> 00:21:26.319
And what he studied, because he grew up in Iowa, I mean, just a country boy,

00:21:26.439 --> 00:21:32.299
just a farm boy, is he studied the diffusion of hybrid seed corn.

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And how farmers started using this new hybrid seed corn to grow corn that had a much higher yield.

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It would create more corn.

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And he studied that really carefully very early in his career.

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And he came up with this curve. You've seen it before, this S-curve.

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And it starts with this idea of leading adopters and then early adopters.

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And then you have sort of the leading majority, the lagging majority.

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And then he ends with the last people to change in the organization.

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He calls them the laggards.

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And what's amazing is that idea translates beautifully to your organization as well.

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You have early adopters in your organization.

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You have people, when you introduce new ideas, they're off to the races.

00:22:21.525 --> 00:22:23.565
They're running with it because things are happening.

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You also have people who are the last people to change.

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And in fact, when they do change, they change kicking and screaming the entire way.

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And one of the things that Roger says, and I think this is so beautiful,

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is that those different people need different things.

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And so change is not one size fits all. We've known that. I mean,

00:22:47.285 --> 00:22:49.085
that's not earth shattering.

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But I think we forget it, that some groups need less attention.

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In fact, some groups really desire and succeed with less attention,

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and some groups need more attention.

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And there's kind of a gradient in between those less attention groups and those more attention groups.

00:23:10.945 --> 00:23:18.385
And some approaches and ideas. That's all it is, lists of ideas that make change

00:23:18.385 --> 00:23:22.225
at least a little bit more potentially successful.

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Not by managing the change, but by creating conditions around which the organization can change.

00:23:30.793 --> 00:23:36.253
That's key. And that's what this book does. And that's what I hope it's done for you.

00:23:36.693 --> 00:23:43.733
New Ideas for Old Problems, A Human Performance Approach to Sustainable Change.

00:23:44.273 --> 00:23:47.253
It's an interesting discussion.

00:23:47.853 --> 00:23:52.813
It's kind of a book that gives us reason to further research these ideas.

00:23:53.093 --> 00:23:58.353
It points you towards other work because there are people who've done much deeper

00:23:58.353 --> 00:24:01.933
and richer studies and discussions on the idea of change.

00:24:02.333 --> 00:24:06.093
But it also is written to help you realize that we're all in this together.

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And that together is pretty important.

00:24:13.613 --> 00:24:18.833
So that's today's discussion about new ideas for old problems.

00:24:19.773 --> 00:24:25.553
It's an interesting way to kind of look into the way people are thinking.

00:24:25.713 --> 00:24:28.213
In this case, sort of what my

00:24:28.213 --> 00:24:32.713
lists look like, what the ideas that I'm contemplating kind of look like.

00:24:32.893 --> 00:24:38.073
But what I hope it does for you is creates an opportunity for you to make your

00:24:38.073 --> 00:24:42.073
own list, maybe on the margins of this book, just write stuff in.

00:24:42.293 --> 00:24:44.593
There's plenty of room because it's big print.

00:24:45.113 --> 00:24:52.193
But it helps to kind of share the knowledge that we've all learned from changes

00:24:52.193 --> 00:24:57.093
we've done before that have either been successful or maybe not as successful.

00:24:57.633 --> 00:25:00.813
And that's an important characteristic of change as well.

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New ideas for old problems. A human performance approach to sustainable change.

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Thanks for listening. Learn something new every single day. Have as much fun

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as you possibly can. Be good to each other.

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Be kind to each other. Check in on each other. And for goodness sakes, be safe.

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Music.