Safety Moment - The Power of Success Stories in Safety

Show Transcript

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Music.

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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Pre-Accident Investigation Safety Moment,

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Operational Excellence Moment.

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I'm your host, Todd Conklin. How are you today? I hope you're good.

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Today's really a simple message, but it's pretty powerful. So I've been thinking

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a lot about safety and how we tell stories and how we do lessons to be learned

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and how we manage information.

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And I think we've done something kind of crazy, and that is we've allowed the

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distribution method to color the way we collect the data.

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And it's a pretty simple mistake. Things that we can measure,

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we measure because they're easy to measure.

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Things we can't measure, we tend to not measure because we can't measure them. Make sense?

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A lot going on there in that sentence. Here's what I'm going to suggest to you.

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One of the big problems we have is that the safety stories we tell are almost

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safe, almost always safety stories that are sort of negative,

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that talk about something bad that had happened.

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And I think our belief is that when we talk about the bad thing that happens.

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What will happen is you'll learn a lesson from that bad thing,

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and you personally won't do that bad thing.

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Therefore, you're smarter, wiser, safer, braver, more stable.

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When in reality, we know that's not true.

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In fact, when I hear a bad story, my initial thought is, wow,

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that's a bad story, but that could not happen to me.

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I would not do X. I would not do Y.

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I would not do Z. And I sort of, because of the probability of small numbers,

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I sort of justify why that poor sucker had that happen and why me,

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the other poor sucker, would not have that happen.

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One way to combat that is by understanding that when we tell success stories,

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success stories are much, much, much more powerful.

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Because success is always best when it's shared.

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Now, that premise is really simple, but it's really important.

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When we talk about what goes right, then we're telling people not to manage the unexpected.

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We're actually telling people what conditions to manage in order to create success.

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It's a simple idea, but it's a powerful idea. And it's an idea that probably

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probably, that idea's time has come.

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Not to be a Pollyanna, not to be overly optimistic, not to be naive,

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although all three of those things I could certainly do, but in fact to tell

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stories of success so that we learn what we manage in order to be successful.

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We're not managing outcomes.

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We're managing all the conditions that create the outcome. And the The way we

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can do that is not by talking about what bad things happen, but by,

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in fact, sharing what good things happen.

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What does success look like? How did they manage that success?

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How can we learn those lessons before they fail?

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That's going to be a tough one because we're sort of hardwired to talk about the bad things.

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But it's time now to start talking about the good things.

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That's what it's all about. That's your safety moment for today.

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I hope you learned something new today. Have as much fun as you possibly can

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and for goodness sakes be safe.

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Music.