Safety Leadership Training in the workplace | Blog | Safety Excellence For Business

A Time of New Opportunities

January 17, 2017 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Our new year is full of opportunities, dark clouds and unknowns. The world is full of strife of all sorts. Our political situation here in the U.S. is full of hope, tension, noise, and unknowns. So many people are screaming about their opinions that it is almost impossible to hear. I get so tired of it that I often just quit trying to listen. That is probably a mistake for me to do that; we are all connected and I can’t just go away and hide. None of us can do that.

Here at home in the U.S.A., our culture is undergoing a shift towards the right with a move away from the centralization of power and decision-making towards one with a broader base for the exercise of power and decisions. Many people have very strong views about this shift in our culture and concerns about what will happen. What is going to be good? What is going to be bad? The complexity of all this prevents us from clearly knowing just what decisions is best.

All of this change (at both the macro and micro levels) presents us with opportunities to step in and make a positive difference. More opinions are floating around, more ideas being offered, more questions emerging. In the heat of all this, we each have an opportunity to listen for the truth, think about what is possible and to more openly share our ideas and thinking. Each of us can make a positive difference. While some people try to be louder that others, this in not where the best thinking will come from.

The best opportunities for truth and the best decisions to emerge are when we each engage together in thoughtful dialogue, searching for what is best for us, those around us and our larger communities, cities, businesses, and our country. For our specific work and how we choose to live, we each probably have the best information about what is most appropriate for success. We are engaged with living as it actually happens. When someone tries to impose his or her ideas as to what we should do or how we should live, we get resentful. Our higher leaders have a broader scope of information and know more about what is happening in the broader picture, but they do not know our specific needs or the best solutions for us. We need to talk together at all levels so that we can all develop a better understanding of the broader picture and make appropriate decisions together. This is true in our personal lives as well as our work lives.

When we can come together with respect, listening, being in a search for understanding together in our dialogue, new thinking, ideas and possible solutions emerge. We are all learning to live in this new world and we need each other’s help and support. None of us individually have the “right” answer, but together we can discover solutions that can really help.

Bringing This Into Our Workplaces and Businesses

As we bring this sort of thinking and being together into our workplaces, we can seek ways to improve our safety performance and business results. I have found over and over that we can vastly improve our safety and business performance when we share information together, listen for understanding, develop trust among us and see how well are all contributing, solutions emerge. When we help to change the behavior of bullies of get them out of the work place, we get even better.

Every organization has work groups within them where the safety performance and business results are excellent. In our dialogues, let us search for these fine examples and learn from them. The people in these groups have a lot to offer us so we can learn together with them.

When the upper management and leaders create the environment where people doing the work have the information they need and can make the appropriate decisions about how they perform the actual tasks, then each group can make the best contributions to the success of safely working and developing the best business results.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Self-Organization Tagged With: engaging together, make decisions together, support each other, work together

Helping Each Other – Managing Ourselves

January 10, 2017 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

We will inaugurate our new President on January 20, 2017. Lots of change is promised. We are all full of questions and wondering about the unknowns. In all of this, we need to depend on each other in our families and workplaces so everyone can thrive.

I think that this is a time, for the good of our families and co-workers, when we need to come together by being respectful, helping, listening, and sharing information, ideas and the workloads so that our families and workplaces are kinder and safer for us. We can control how we are willing to be together even though the world seems in turmoil.

To start 2017 off on a good footing, let’s choose to manage ourselves and decide to help each other through all the unknowns.

I’m reminded of the mid-1980’s when self-managed and self-directed work teams first came into vogue. Each team lived by a set of principles to which they committed to do the work they collectively needed to do (without supervision or having to be told what to do and when), while respecting each other’s individuality and contribution to the overall team. Those behavioral principles are good ones…a little bit of self-management (EQ) (a.k.a. “controlling your emotions in healthy ways”) can go a long way to interpersonal success.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Self-Organization Tagged With: interpersonal success

Releasing the Forces for Excellence

December 12, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

As this year comes to an end, we will be looking at our overall performance to see how we did and to plan for 2017. We will usually look at our injury statistics like the total recordable injury rate and try to determine how we performed. Often quite independently, others will look at other performance indicators to see how they came out. We act as if these are independent of each other, but in our organizations everything is connected so all aspects of performance influence each other. Everything happens through the people. All the parts are interconnected. Excellence in safety performance is strongly related to our total performance because it all works through the will of the people.

We traditionally try to apply safety and other metrics to our organizations in a machine-like fashion. We see that something needs to improve so we push harder as if we are pushing a wagon up hill. Too many regulators and managers sit in their offices trying to imagine what needs to be done and write a new procedure or rule so that things will be better. Then they issue edicts pushing everyone harder. However, the work as imagined is never the same as the work as done. Why do managers think that sitting, bound to their office chairs, that they know everything? How can they? Then at the end of 2017 we will do this all over again trying to understand why things did not get better. Around and around we go!

We break this vicious cycle by opening up ourselves to a different way of thinking, seeing and being.

Work-as-imagined and work-as-done are ideas developed by Erik Hollnagel in his book, Safety-I and Safety-II (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., UK). Safety I is our traditional top-down management approach to safety management where rules and procedures are issued by those far from the actual work. This is like the approach discussed in the proceeding paragraph. I think that a lot of people are trying to do good safety work from the Safety I perspective, but the results are not improving fast enough.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported that the rate for nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 100 people dropped to 3.0 in 2015 from 3.2 in 2014 and 3.3 in 2013. That is a 10% drop over three years. That is way too slow! In 2015 2,900,000 injuries were reported. That is WAY TOO MANY people getting hurt. In an earlier paper the BLS reported that the number of fatalities has hovered around 4,700 people a year for the last 5 years. This is WAY TOO MANY!

This is not just a US problem. For example, Worksafe, New Zealand recently reported that the health and safety laws have had little effect on reducing fatalities further.

While driving safety from the top has had benefits historically, the effort is having less and less impact. But when we change our approach to working with the people to co-create our future, things change for the better quite quickly. This is true! It’s proven!

In the work of Richard N. Knowles and Associates, we approach the organization as if it is a living organism. Time after time coming out of our Safety Excellence Workshops, the performance improves quickly. When we engage with the people this way and help them to co-create their safety future, building on the positive strengths of the people, safety and all other aspects of their work get better quickly. For example, when I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle Plant in West Virginia we worked this way, and our injury rates dropped by over 95% and earnings rose 300% in just three years. This is similar to Hollnagel’s Safety II approach.

Whenever we, at Richard N. Knowles Associates, work in organizations the safety and total performance improves quickly. Everything happens through the force of the will of the people. We release this force helping the people to co-create their shared future. Then we show them how to sustain their work for the years ahead. All dimensions of the business improve; costs are lower, productivity is higher, morale is better and far more people are working safely.

Call us at 716-622-6467 so you can release the positive, creative forces in your organizations quickly!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: safe work environment, safety excellence, Safety Leadership Process

Even When the “Force” is With You, Things Can Go Wrong!

November 11, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

The background story:
A recent article in the October 13, 2016 Daily Mail reported a £1.6 Million fine (equivalent of $2 Million) against Disney after actor, Harrison Ford, was crushed by the Millennium Falcon’s hydraulic door on the set of the latest Star Wars Episode VII, “The Force Awakens”, movie which was being filmed in June, 2014.

Ford had gone through the door, hit a button, walked out the door, and unexpectedly turned to walk back through the door when it came down on him. He assumed that the set was not live since it was a rehearsal. In this scene, Ford was helping his injured Wookiee friend through the door into the spacecraft. The door, which was operated by a person who was remotely located and could not see Ford, quickly closed it as he unexpectedly turned back into the spacecraft. Ford screamed and an emergency stop button was pressed, stopping the door just eight inches from being completely shut. They described it like a blunt-edged guillotine with a force comparable to being hit by a small car. Ford was pinned to the ground, suffering a broken tibia and fibula, a dislocated ankle and cut hand. The door had to be opened by the operator.

Disney’s subsidiary, Foodles Production (UK) Ltd., admitted to two counts of safety violations. In the main violation, while the company had done a risk assessment recognizing the risk of death, they had failed to talk to Ford so he was unaware of the precautions he needed to take. In earlier films, the door was operated slowly by a rope and pulley by a stagehand. The mechanized operation moved the door very quickly, surprising the 71-year-old Ford. After Ford’s recovery of about eight weeks, the film was completed.

The Meaning of the Story: Looking at the Blunt End and the Sharp End of Safety

This story illustrates so many of the changing conditions and people involved in our work places. Most of our companies do a good job in risk assessments and developing safe working procedures. However, this planning often takes place away from the actual location where the work will be done. This is sometimes called the “blunt end” of the safety process where the people doing the planning do not understand what happens in the work at “sharp-end” where conditions and demands may be quite different, and where most of the injuries happen.

Relating this Story to Safety Theory and Practice

In Erik Hollnagel’s book, “Safety-I and Safety-II” (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Surrey, UK), he discusses ideas like the significance of the gap between “the work-as-imagined” done by managers and engineers planning and designing the work and the “work-as-done” by the people actually doing the work. This is illustrated nicely by the Ford Star Wars incident where the people doing the “work-as-imagined” failed to understand the actual conditions and mindset of Ford doing the “work-as-done.”

Hollnagel describes the way in which we have traditionally done our safety work as reactive and where so much of it relates to “work-as-imagined” as Safety-I. The gap between where the “work-as-imagined” and “work-as-done” is where there are very difficult communication challenges. We tend to react to what has gone wrong. Bridging this gap moves our safety work into Safety-II where we move into the world of more performance variability, more adaptability and resilience. This is a world where everyone needs a better understanding of how and why things work, particularly our organizations. It is a world where we need to have a sense of both the whole and the parts. It is a world where we focus more on understanding what is going right than just on what went wrong. It is a world where we are more proactive in our safety work.

The Bottom Line: Re-engaging the Force…People and Business Together

At Richard N. Knowles & Associates, we help organizations move into a world similar to Hollnagel’s Safety-II world. Our work environments and tasks are complex. Our organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Building on these ideas, we help organizations to learn how to open up the communications, to engage everyone, to help and support each other, to listen and learn from each other, and connect real caring with the work that needs to be done. We help organizations to reconcile the relationship between the needs of the business and the needs of the people, which results in the release of enormous energy and creativity.

Give us a call so we can explore this more fully with you and help you see the sorts of improvements you and your people can make. We are here at 716-622-6467 to meet your needs.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business Tagged With: safe work environment, safety culture, safety education

Working with Multi-Generations in our Workplaces – Safely!

October 10, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Historical context:
Consider the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge (San Francisco) built between 1933 and 1937, an architectural marvel, thought to be impossible because in order to bridge that 6,700 ft. strait, in the middle of the bay channel, against strong tides, fierce winds, and thick fog, meant overcoming almost impossible odds. But it was built, with a grand opening in May of 1937, deemed, at the time of its completion, to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest. A man named Joseph Strauss engineered many new ideas, including developing safety devices such as movable netting, which saved 19 lives; though in all, there were 11 men lost during this construction. Thousands of men – workers of varying ages and from varied ethnic groups – came together to complete this project. (They had to listen and learn to be successful together.)

Consider the feat of building the monumental Hoover Dam (1931-1936) – a miracle of technology and engineering. No dam project of this scale had ever been attempted before. There were 21,000 people working at that site with approximately 100 industrial deaths. The walls for this structure – that would uphold the weight of the dam – required workers called “high-scalers” who excavated the cliffs, dangling on ropes from the rim of the canyon. Can you even fathom this?

Consider the great Niagara Power Project (1957-1961). During construction, over 12 million cubic yards of rock were excavated. A total of 20 workers died. When it opened in 1961, it was the Western world’s largest hydropower facility. Many people, including from the “greatest generation” and the “traditionalist generation,” worked together on this project. It was a 24/7, multi-year project.

Note that the Niagara Power Project, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam construction (detailed above) all occurred before OSHA was in existence – the protections were sparse so people (young and old) had to especially look out for each other! Each of these great projects, nonetheless, took lives – workers that did not come home to their loved ones.

Today’s multigenerational Workplace – with Greater Safety Emphasis and Engagement

Fast forward to today…to your workplace…a different time and place…where people of multi-generations also come together for a purpose – to complete the work of your respective business (safely). Managing multi-generational workforces is an art in itself.

Young workers want to contribute and make a quick impact, valuing inclusion
The middle generation needs to believe in the mission – it has to make sense – they have to see the “why” of it
The older employees don’t like ambivalence; they’re looking for clarity, straight-forwardness, and no wishy-washy explanations

Does that make success (together) impossible? Absolutely not. The common denominator is that all people, regardless of their labeled generation, want to be accepted for who they are, to have their contribution valued, and to feel a part of the team/business endeavor. All want to go home from work safe. The need for their brother’s/sister’s keeper remains paramount.

In today’s workplaces, we often have a co-worker population that can represent age ranges of forty-plus years. With that range comes a host of different experiences, expectations and perspectives, and technology prowess. (All good; all offer ways to learn from each other.)

Everyone in the workplace came to there because of the employment opportunity – the opportunity to make a living – in order to provide for themselves and their families. (That’s a collective no-brainer…and the place to start in safety-mindedness – so we can all keep earning a living with all our parts, hands, toes, eyes, ears, etc. all in-tact, every day, regardless of what generation we touch.)

Granted, there are some differences in how teamwork is viewed, loyalty to the job and dealing with change, work-life balance, diversity, rewards and recognition, decision-making, personal growth and development – yet all of these differences are surmountable. Consider too, that all of these differences pale in comparison to the generations that went before, who demonstrated that when working together, toward a clear purpose, were able to complete the type of monumental projects described earlier in this article. To do what they did, required extraordinary teamwork.

I’m reminded of the (illustrative) story of four people going gulf fishing in a boat – a Traditionalist, a Boomer, an X-er, and a Millennial. All of a sudden the boat’s captain fell over dead with a heart attack and, in that process, did something destructive to the boat’s motor key mechanism as he fell over, as well as hitting the radio – breaking its channel mechanism. The boat stalled – dead in the water. Fully adrift.

So the combination of four people had to figure out how they’d get back to shore. Each of them devised a workable plan and got to work. The Traditionalist quickly determined what he could salvage from the boat to make more workable oars for paddling back to the shoreline and readied safety flares for expected overhead helicopters or airplanes; he also knew, instinctively, their directional status, fully understanding the sun’s position in the sky.

The Boomer hunted for and found the boat’s engine manual and was troubleshooting the starting mechanism, and how to bypass it – to restart the engine – plus was troubleshooting the boat’s radio, etc.

The X-er immediately used his phone’s GPS coordinates and was preparing to call in to the Coast Guard for help. The Millennial quickly text messaged an SOS to the Coast Guard with emphasis for HELP!

We often resort to solving problems with the technology to which we are most accustomed. In this illustration, each method had value. Each had potential to solve the problem and return the group to shore! Each person, regardless of his/her generational label, has something important to offer – a way of thinking about things. We each have ideas to offer for solving problems in our workplace; we are each other’s brother/sister in the workplace. We are all in the same boat!

We all can learn from each other, especially in safety. We all can listen to each other. History teaches good lessons. We all can share our concerns, our expectations, our perspectives, our technologies…for the betterment of the success of whatever it is that we came together to do (together).

We, at R.N. Knowles & Associates, work with leaders, teams, organizations, and businesses, helping them to solve their complex problems (together). We know that complex situations require new ways of thinking and being. We also are keen on the use of the Process Enneagram© because it is the proven “tool of complexity” that helps leaders and their teams resolve their complex issues (together and quickly). It allows for extensive input, ideas, perspectives, realities, understanding, and acceptance of various ideas, sharing and learning…so that we bridge perception differences and viewpoint gaps around any complex issue that you are facing. When we learn from our individual talents and work as a team, there is no limit to our potential achievements – including our collective safety!

Call us at 716-622-6467and we’ll show you how it can work for your organization, too.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: safety culture, safety education, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram

Breaking the Pattern – Allowing the New to Emerge…via The Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop

September 12, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In many of our newsletters, I have talked about helping organizations co-create their safety future using the Process Enneagram© complexity tool in our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshops. This is a powerful tool to help bring the people together around their safety challenges – breaking the old patterns, and co-creating a better, safer future (together).

Here is a brief description about how our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop takes place:

In a recent workshop, a cross-section of the people, including their manager, came together for a day. There were about 19 people present. We began with the question, “How do we improve our safety performance?” With this as our central focus, we engaged the people with the Process Enneagram©. Everyone participated in developing their living, strategic safety plan over the next four hours in an interactive dialogue in which everyone participated, including delving into the issues and behavioral patterns that keep recurring.

Together, the group determined what new commitments needed to be made (by all of the team) in order to get where they wanted to be, together – to achieve the best results for a safe workplace.

We then asked the people to identify what the top four things were that they needed to immediately work on and develop a plan of action. Then, they self-organized into four teams of about equal size to work on their respective topic. After about two hours, each team reported out to the entire workshop group, sharing their ideas and plans to improve safety and to solve their problem. They identified their leader, the team members, their plan of action and when they would be meeting again to do their work.

After the workshop, the participants shared what had happened with all the others in the organization who had not attended, asking for ideas for improvement.

In order to sustain this work, their manager needed to talk with all of them frequently about the progress of their teams. The manager supported each team with the resources and contacts they needed to do their work. About once a month, all the teams came together and reviewed their progress with each of the other teams and the manager. Open communications with the rest of the organization kept everyone informed of the progress.

The manager talked with everyone in the organization about their Safety Strategic Plan, sharing information abundantly, listening carefully, and building credibility. He/she also spent time with each team to understand their work. The manager often helped the teams to contact others in the organization or suppliers so they could make progress. The manager created the environment of open communications and trust to make all this happen and to sustain the work.

When Claire and I returned to this organization after about four months, each team met with us to discuss their progress, frustrations and successes. Every team had made progress and everyone was talking about how to help the organization improve. Several teams had completed their initial project and had begun to work on the next piece of work to help the organization get stronger and safer. Almost everyone in the organization was talking about ways to help to improve the organization’s safety performance. Clearly, the organization had markedly improved, moving forward to a better, safer workplace for everyone. And they co-created that future (together).

Discover how your organization can see safety turnarounds quickly. For more information, contact us at 716-622-6467.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: business safety, safe work environment, safety education in the workplace

Caring for Each Other: How to Hold Those Meaningful Conversations!

August 12, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In my June 29th presentation at the American Society of Safety Engineers 2016 Professional Development Conference, I discussed the fact that one of the best ways for the safety professional attending the talk to help to improve the safety performance in their workplaces was to show the people that they cared about them and to enable them to make decisions about their specific work. I want to elaborate on these ideas in this newsletter. This is not just for the safety professional. This is for every team leader, supervisor, and workgroup leader. Going into your workplaces and opening up the conversations is a journey; each time you do this it gets easier and more effective. (Caring, Understanding and Openness!)

Meaningful caring to me means that we treat each other with respect as adults.

As managers and supervisors we get out of our offices and go into the workplace.
Help people to see that it is okay to talk together and be open with each other.
We sit down together in their work place and have a cup of coffee together. We are not in a hurry just trying to make some specified number of contacts.
We share the truth together as best we can knowing that today’s truth may be different than the truth for tomorrow because the world keeps changing, and reminding them that you’ll be back tomorrow if things have changed.
We ask about how we each are doing. How is the day going? What good things are happening? What have we learned today or over the last few days? We listen to what we each are saying.
We try to build on each other’s good ideas.
We talk about how the business is doing? We talk about the contributions we are making to the success of the business.
We discuss problems together sharing our viewpoints and seeking possible solutions. If people ask you questions which you can’t answer, tell them you do not know and will get back to them…then do it. We pay attention to the dynamics and do not over stay our visit.

As we get to know each other better we begin to explore what is really going on around here.

Are we really doing what we say we want to be doing?
How can our communications get clearer and better?
What is the rumor mill saying? Talk together about the rumors and clear them up.
Do you see better ways to go after the problems around here than we are doing? What are we missing?
Are there hidden elephants we need to be addressing?
When we have made a mistake, we own up to it and say we are sorry. We ask for their help.
Are there better ways that you see to get your job done well?
What information do you need to get your work done more effectively? Let’s talk some more about your good ideas and see if you can make some improvements.
What is going on over and over that is really bugging you?

As you get to know the people even better, there will be opportunities to inquire about how the family is doing. You can ask…how the kids are doing in their sports and schoolwork, ask if there are things that you can be doing to help them, ask how everyone’s health is, etc. You need to use good judgment as you get into these personal conversations and not push things too far into their privacy, by accident.

These are the kinds of conversations that most of us would like to have with our own managers. How many times have you wanted to talk together with them to share an idea or problem and have not had a chance to do it? How often do you get to talk with your boss’s boss? What is important and good for you in talking with your boss is about the same as for you talking with the people in your organization about the things that are important to them.

We are all partners in making our workplaces to become healthier, physically and mentally, and helping the people in them to be the best they can be. This is a key element of Partner-Centered Safety!

Filed Under: Safety for Business Tagged With: injury-free workplaces, leadership, safety

Conceptualize “Caring” in Your Workplace! Then Conceptualize “Tragic Fatality” in Your Workplace!

August 10, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Eighty (80) pages and counting…that’s how far I got while perusing the numerous pages for the 2015 fatalities logged on OSHA reports – there were still many names and circumstances yet to read.

Each one of the entries represents a real person – who has a name, a family, a job, and was doing a task within his/her workplace. I also looked at the OSHA count for 2014 and the total fatalities in the workplace that year numbered 4,821.

Think about this tragic loss of life. 4,821 is a big number made up of 1+1+1+1 + another, another, another, and each single number is not just a number…it is connected to a personal name. Having recently visited the 911 Memorial in New York City, it really drives home the importance of an individual – a named individual. The visual has such meaning.

Making a living shouldn’t have to cost you your life. As Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health notes,workplace fatalities, injuries, and illnesses are preventable.

Employers and Employees share responsibility for safety. We say that we care. We know that we care deeply when we are touched by the closeness of a tragic injury to someone we know – we’re able to put a face and a name to the number. Yet, how many times have you tuned out during a safety meeting, thinking that the subject was boring, or giving only lip-service, believing it can’t happen here.

If only we all understood that every single safety rule has been written in blood. Meaning someone, somewhere, somehow was hurt badly enough that rules emerged to prevent a recurrence. Yet, the OSHA logs keep growing, showing real time statistics. We have a lot of caring to demonstrate!

Conceptualize real caring. What does it look like in your workplace? In the 80’s, there was something called a “Unity Triangle,” which was a useful model…to strive for commitment within a team structure in a way that demonstrates caring, understanding and openness (all three) so that individual growth is stimulated while team efforts are increasingly directed toward achieving safe workplaces, and organizational alignment of goals.

The learning is this:

Ponder this: We can have safe workplaces. We can have involved, caring, individual, safe-minded employees. We can understand that safety rules are written in blood and we can be open about connecting with our coworkers to keep learning and remaining diligent in keeping each other safe. We can be open to reaching out in ways we may not have done before; we can be open to achieving full Safety alignment…by everyone in the workplace, in our teams, individually and collectively.

That’s unity…that’s being aligned on the principle that making a living (anywhere) shouldn’t have to cost a real person his/her life…none of us are numbers. We are a Team, with named individuals, committed to the betterment of our collective workplace.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: business safety, safety

Shifting the Way We Look at Organizations

July 11, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

On June 29, 2016, I presented a paper at the American Society of Safety Engineers 2016 Professional Development Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled “Partner-Centered Safety: A New Leadership Approach for Safety Excellence.”

My message to those who attended my session was that the Bureau of Labor safety statics show the rate of improvement in reducing injuries in the workplace has slowed down since about 2009 and the rate of improvement for deaths has stopped; about 4,600-4,700 people are being killed at work each year.

The safety professionals and managers are putting a lot of effort into improving the safety performance in our workplaces, but we seem to be stuck. I think that the problem is that we are approaching organizations as if they are just complicated systems rather than as complex systems.

The complicated view of organizations has served us well, and a lot of progress has been achieved. Now we need to move forward in our thinking.

When we view our organizations as complex systems, a better description of the way organizations actually behave emerges.

While many people crave reliability, predictability, stability, and control for their organizations, this is rarely achieved. Our organizations are full of movement, feedback, changes, and surprises. Nothing sits still; everything is in motion.

When I learned to view my organization as a complex system, everything improved. Our injury rate dropped by ~97%, earnings rose ~300%, emissions dropped ~88%, and productivity rose ~45%.

My experience in leading the organization as if it was a complicated system was difficult and strenuous. I felt that I had to push everything to get the work accomplished safely, and we never achieved success. When I shifted to a complexity view of the organization, everything became easier to lead, my work was more effective and the improvements were dramatic. In working with the organization as a complex system, the people opened up, the conversations were more purposeful, and energy and creativity were released. All dimensions of the business improved and the people were pleased and proud of their achievements.

There is a lot in making this shift in perspective. I think that everyone can learn to work this way. I would be happy to talk with any of you about this and help you on your own journeys.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: business safety, complex systems, safety

Complexity & Change are the New Normal: Leading the Way

June 10, 2016 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Those organizations that are achieving safety excellence recognize that they must:

Abundantly share all information about their safety, environmental and business performance,
Engage openly and honestly with everyone building trust and interdependence and,
Help everyone to get a sense of their collective whole and see their part in achieving total success.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is on the pathway to safety excellence. We worked with Carl Stent, the NIWA National Manager, Safety and Wellbeing, in a series of 7 full-day workshops involving over 100 managers and scientists to develop clarity and focus on the best ways to help their people working remotely, like in the Antarctic, to make the best possible decisions and work safely – every day, every task.

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

This (picture above) is their Operations Leadership Team who met with us in Wellington for two days at the beginning of our work with NIWA. We helped them to see that organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Using the Process Enneagram©, our proprietary complexity tool for having the focused and disciplined conversations, they were able to effectively address their opening question, “How do we build and sustain an effective safety culture across our organization?”

The energy and excitement built during the day as information, ideas and breakthroughs emerged during the workshop. The Process Enneagram© map they created is serving as their living strategic safety plan.

We conducted workshops in six NIWA Centers across New Zealand, giving us an opportunity to meet a lot of outstanding people and to see a lot of their beautiful country. We also conducted one public and one private workshop which were also extremely successful in opening people up to the ideas of complexity and to approaching safety from this perspective. With Carl Stent’s ongoing, excellent support, NIWA is on the road to safety excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: safety excellence process, The Process Enneagram