Safety on Tap

Are we doing enough? Is the fundamental question of H&S governance. And the answer, it seems at least in New Zealand, is largely not one given with confidence. And beyond NZ, the answer sometimes seems vague, unclear, or uncertain. Governance arguably is the lynchpin around which all health and safety performance relies - so there is something in this conversation for everyone. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. New Zealand has had its fair share of problems with health and safety. Catalysed by the Pike River disaster, new legislation introduced in 2015 styled off the Australian harmonised model promised to strengthen many aspects of health and safety including better control of risk, clearer duties for officers of the organisation, and greater clarity to support regulatory activities. The sad news is not much is changing, with health and safety performance lagging well behind similar regimes in countries like Australia and the UK. Existing guidance was created around 2015 for the new duties imposed upon senior managers and directors of organisations, called 'The Blue Book'. It's clear that whilst well. Intended, this simply has not been enough, with the backdrop of tumultuous government policy for health an safety, constrained funding, and claims of bare incompetence at Worksafe NZ. The new Good Practice Guide for Health and Safety Governance was led by the NZ Institute of Directors, in close collaboration with Worksafe NZ, the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum, and the General Manager Safety Forum. The Steering Group was led by Chris Jones on behalf of the GM Safety Forum, and the Lead Author and Expert Advisor is Craig Marriott, both of whom join me in today's conversation. Chris Jones is an experienced strategic health and safety leader, having had Head of Safety roles in both the UK and NZ, in rail, poisons and corrections, and now at global dairy giant Fonterra. He has also worked in health and safety lead roles within the NZ government, and a swathe of industry, regulatory, and expert advisory groups and government consultative committees. Chris is fast becoming one of the most popular health and speakers in this part of the world. Craig Marriott is currently consulting under his own brand, having most recently been the General Manager HSEQ at FirstGas, as well as the Chairperson of the Safety Innovation Community in NZ. With a background in high hazard industries, things that really go boom, and the regulation and creation of safety cases in both the UK and NZ, Craig's experience spans both senior health and safety positions, and a diversity of consulting leadership roles. Craig is both a keynote speaker and author of Challenging the Safety Quo. Chris and Craig are arguably two of the most well known and well respected senior health and safety professionals in New Zealand today, and both have spent time working in senior roles at Worksafe NZ. It's no wonder they've been able to bring their knowledge and leadership to this impressive piece of work on health and safety governance along with a committee of clever and hard working colleagues. Let's talk health and safety governance, with Chris Jones and Craig Marriott:

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep220 The piece you might be missing as you try to build new things and all your efforts for making change, might actually be deliberately blowing things up. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. "Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world" The song Closing Time by Semisonic is one of those classic tunes of my transition into adulthood. "Closing time, one last call for alcohol So, finish your whiskey or beer Closing time, you don't have to go home But you can't stay here" After it was released in 1998 it was pretty common that this song was the very last song played in the bar or pub before the lights got turned back on and everyone had to leave. "So gather up your jackets, move into the exits, I hope you have found your friends Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end" It turns out that this anthem of the very late night party people had nothing to do with going out of drinking, or even going home. The whole song is a metaphor for the birth of a child. Lead singer Dan Wilson was soon to become a father as he was writing this song, and the literal meaning of the last song in fact came to be a much deeper insight into the realities of getting bounced from the womb into the world.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep218 You seem to have answers for everything, he said to me. He was 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time. This is a podcast about how that can be, and how you can engage with better answers. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. Before you think that this episode will be a gratuitous brag about how good I think I am wrapped up in some parable of a story, stay with me for a few minutes. When he said to me, 'you seem to have answers for everything', he WAS both right and wrong at the same time. He was right because to him, it did seem that I had answers for lots of the things we were talking about and working through in our coaching together. He was wrong, because I wasn't really giving him answers in the way that questions are usually asked, or problems are usually solved with solutions. What I was giving him was responses. Responses to his question, to his story, to his context. Responses aren't answers. Responses are what we do when it's our turn, in a dialogue two or more people engage in a turn-taking exchange. Dialogue is an ancient word, very central to modern human experience, which comes from two Greek words put together: dia- translates to through, and logos translated to meaning, dialogos, or dialogue, the movement of flow of meaning through the people involved. You can see turn taking all the time, which isn't dialogue. It's more like tennis. One person serves, another receives and returns the ball. The object of tennis, and the object of a huge proportion of our interactions with other people, is to get to the end, to resolve the point, usually in favour of one person or the other.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep216 Radio, television, and the content we consume have changed enormously since I was a kid. This is a podcast about the physics, and the metaphor of this change and how we can change too, but only if we want to remain resonant. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. There used to be just a handful of TV stations, and a handful of radio stations. It was kind of easy as a kid, because the TV guide fit onto a single page in the newspaper, and the discussion about what to watch was easier because there were only a few options to choose from. Cartoons on Channel 7 on the afternoons we were allowed to watch TV, then Channel 2 at 6pm for the ABC news, on Wednesdays the highlight of the TV week was a bit of police drama with Blue Heelers on Channel 7 at 8.30, and Friday night football on Channel 9 kicked off the sporting entertainment of the weekend. Bandwidth used to be a constraint. On the radiomagnetic spectrum, there are only a limited number of frequencies which TV or radio could use to broadcast their content to you. Even if you have a digital radio in your car or at home, you can still see the remnants of this bandwidth constraint, when a radio station includes a number in the name - Mix 106.5, 104.1 Today FM. The number is the actual frequency (measured in Mega Hz for FM stations), the actual number of times the wave goes up and down per second. That number meant it was easy for you to tune into the right station, to listen to what they had to offer, loud and clear. If you were one point off, one tweak of the dial, and not only did you have the wrong frequency, you had garbled, snowy, or no radio content to listen to. There is no doubt that the use of the radiomagnetic spectrum for communication, and its associated constraint of a limited number of frequencies, shaped our culture enormously. Until the constraint disappeared. With the internet we went from limited bandwidth to broadband - because we jumped off the radiomagnetic spectrum and entered a world of limitless channels to choose from, unlimited space for broadcast, and people who were more than happy to no longer be constrained to the 3 or 5 channels they used to have to choose from.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep214 Two quick questions for you: first, did you get what you got in 2023 by design, or did your year kind of happen to you by accident? Second question, what's going to change for you in 2024? I have gifts for you inside, keep listening! Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. This episode will be released on the 18th of December, and many of you may have even stopped work for the year. The past few weeks are a unique time in the yearly cycle, when the health and safety leaders I work with turn their minds to those two important questions I just asked: - Did you get what you got in 2023 by design, or did your year kind of happen to you by accident? - What's going to change for you in 2024?

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep212 Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. If we want to improve our performance in ANY area of our life, work or otherwise, there are ONLY three ways to do it, three kinds of how before we decide what to do. For most of us, the decisions we make every day, many times a day, about which of the three ways to take, is invisible. Until now. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. Most people who go to the gym exercise more than people who exercise on their own because of the very fact that they are at a gym, and there are people around them are working out. And research suggests that you tend to exercise at the level of those people around you, whether they are high fitness or low fitness, you'll tend to match them. Exercising at home is entirely possible for almost every person on the planet, and free. But when we invest in doing it with help and with the right kind of others, it almost always accelerates our results. Take that up a notch with a personal trainer, where you get more tailored help for your situation, you have built-in accountability and boosted motivation because of the design of the help/support you invest in (the PT). I mentioned there are three ways to improve performance, and only three. Everything you do in your life fits into one of these three categories.

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep209 I have some questions for you. As you hear these, just nod your head or shake it if you agree or disagree. Does it ever feel like you can't give a good clear definition of what health and safety is? That the work is never ending? That it's tricky to definitively describe what we are trying to do? That it's difficult to predict what will happen? That we can't make firm promises about our systems or controls or interventions? That what works in one context doesn't seem to in others so we are always creating things anew? That interpretation and multiple perspectives in health and safety are both frustrating but seemingly inevitable? Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. I wouldn't be bringing you this conversation today unless I was confident you'd be nodding to most of those questions I just asked. The logical rational way to solve those problems might be to get a clearer definition of health and safety, to do more research on what works, to standardise, to invest better metrics to measure….the list of things people are putting huge time and resources into are significant. Well what if I suggested to you that a lot of it could be wasted effort? That maybe health and safety can't be adequately defined? That it is necessarily reinvented in each context? That we cannot ever know the answer or even the problem until we throw something against the wall? The questions I asked you come from the definition of wicked problems, which means that if you were nodding along, it's more likely that you will come to see and understand health and safety as a wicked problem. And if health and safety is a wicked problem, then trying to improve it using methods and mindsets, tools and techniques from other kinds of problems might be as useful as trying to mow your lawn with scissors, or to educate your kids using social media as the teacher. My guest today is Craig Ashurst. Craig's a real T shaped person, with breadth of experience including risk and health and safety, and now significant depth in the area of wicked problems. If health and safety might be a wicked problem, then it might pay for us to understand wicked problems if we want to be more effective in our work. Here's Craig:

Ep208: Is your professional practice unethical? Full show notes: safetyontap.com/ep208 Is your professional practice unethical? Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. Let's begin with an agreement, I'd like to agree somethings with you before you keep listening. The first is that the work of health and safety is a fundamentally ethical thing, we do what we do because we believe it is what is right. So the first thing I'd like to agree on is that we can't talk about health and safety without talking about ethics. The second, is that we either can't, or shouldn't, call ourselves professionals if we don't understand the fundamentals of what we say and do. Plenty of people might know the words and activities of health and safety at a surface level, but what separates them from professionals like us is our greater grasp of the fundamental aspects of health and safety and all that entails. That's the second agreement - to be professional means a greater fundamental grasp of the nature of what we do and why. If you don't agree with these, stop listening, there isn't any point because this conversation will be nonsensical to you. If you do agree, then this might make sense, in which case it also might be helpful to you. You decide. Ok, you're still here, let's proceed. Today's guest is Simon Cassin. Simon has real range - from serving his community as a fire fighter, to lived experience of harm at work, through ongoing study and practice in the arenas of philosophy and health and safety, and importantly how the two interact. Here's Simon:

Ep206: Change and Change Managers, with Gilbert Kruidenier Full Show Notes: https://safetyontap.com/ep206 Change! It's the only thing that stays the same in health and safety. Today's guest is a professional change manager, though the label doesn't entirely capture what he does and how he does it. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. Gilbert Kruidenier is my guest today. He has worked all over the world in operations, process improvement, and change, which seems to be where he adds the most value, because that's why his phone keeps ringing. In some ways, for many of you, he is also a window into the future, designing his work around projects rather than permanent roles. He is a university lecturer on change, a leader in the Change Management Institute here in Australia, and co-author of the book 'Bad Change: 50 ways change doesn't work and 266 tips to make things better!' This conversation is a little longer than my usual interviews. I'm sorry if that doesn't fit into your commute or gym session, but I'm not sorry 'cos of how interesting and useful this conversation was, and we barely scratched the surface. Here's Gilbert:

Sometimes, 99% is as good as 0%. And it's really quite useful to know when that's the case. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. This episode is brought to you by real people, doing real high risk work. But even more than that, this episode is brought to you because well timed, well structured curious questions asked of the people who do that work, reveal insights that we can all learn a whole lot from. "210 to 318, am I okay to come past on your left side?" What you just heard is often called poscomms. Poscomms is short for Positive Communication. Poscomms serves as an important control measure to prevent the unwanted or uncontrolled interaction of people and plant, usually large plant or machinery in mining and civil construction works. Picture large dump trucks or truck and trailer, bulldozers and excavators. So what's the actual control, the things which is effective for minimising the risk of people and plant interaction? It turns out, it's quite a number of things. The basic ingredients are: People with radios The initial message The response 'I've got it Baz', I can hear you thinking. Why are you talking about a really self-evident control for a common risk on lots of kinds of sites, on a podcast designed for deeper professional development? Well to explain, we need to make a quick diversion and talk about the bung hole. Bung Holes A bung is a kind of cork, which you put into the holes in a boat to stop it sinking. Why do boats have holes? Most boats, most except really big ones which permanently stay in the water, have holes in them because the boat needs to drain when it comes out of the water. Boats take on water, so they need a drain hole. A bung hole. If you've ever been boating, you'll know about the bung hole. Because one single piece of cork or plastic is the thing that will, without a shadow of a doubt, make the difference between you floating, or sinking the boat. If someone forgets to put the bung back in the bung hole, you're sunk. Even if you did secure every single bung hole, but forgot one. You will sink. That's when 99% is as good as 0%. So we are sitting outside with this construction crew after their morning pre-start meeting. We were talking with the people who do the work in order to discuss with the senior governance committee about whether the safety vision was evident out on site. And yes, that is data, and the process was data gathering for reporting purposes - not everything is a number, but I digress. We had done a couple of things to do our best to get the psychological safety sufficient for the group to discuss work as done. I asked 'what's something you know, that's really important to you, that you wish other people knew?' One of the excavator operators jumps in without missing a beat. "No one acknowledges me radio calls, I just wish when I jump on the radio to a spotter or another operator, that I get an acknowledgement'. 'What do you mean?' I asked. I could have guessed, but in these situations, my only goal is to encourage the person to talk more, using their own words, without my assumptions or interpretations. If you want to stimulate good dialogue, a question like 'what do you mean' is what's called an encourager. 'I got no idea whether anyone has heard me call, who is around, and what is happening on the ground'. Remember what it sounds like? This poscomms control? Initial message. Respond. Initial message. No response. 99% is as good as 0%. No response, no poscomms, incomplete visibility, incomplete information. Uncertain delay, or just as likely proceeding blind. Uncontrolled risk. Drift towards failure. Approximately 70 seconds later, the group had talked about what good actually sounds like, and there was greater clarity of what people expected. Not only that, the group had started to self-organise around one person's expert knowledge of work as done. They took that perspective as important, and understood what needed to happen and why. The broader team who aren't involved directly in plant movement also became witness to this work as done, the potential for immediate adaptation, and what to pay attention to in the hours thereafter. How confident are we that what we think is working, is working? How comfortable are we with our current uncertainty? The idea of 99% = 0% is not the same as saying that everything is useless. There are positive changes that are evident, in the way that risks are understood, controls are defined, planning ensures there are enough spotters, that everyone has a radio, and the radio's are charged, inductions set clear expectations, plant operators are actually on their radio's and the calls are clear and understandable. The 99% = 0% Rule simply means that a lot of effort means diddly squat without all the right ingredients. These are the ingredients that come together to make the critical control cake. But even cakes need a minimum of critical parts - some dry stuff like flour, some sweet stuff like sugar, some wet stuff like milk or eggs, and something to help it rise like yeast or bicarb. And yet a big list of those things were in place on the site for that poscomms control measure to work. Except the plant operators don't hear anything back. The trap, the real temptation is when the 99% fools everyone into thinking that it's close enough to 100%. It makes mathematical sense if you round it up. It doesn't work that way. Near enough is good enough. The last bung missing in the boat. The yeast missing from the cake. The acknowledgement missing after the radio call. All too often in our game, the 99% is as good as 0%. And it's useful to know when. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, what's the one thing you'll do to take positive, effective or rewarding action, to grow yourself, and drastically improve health and safety along the way? Seeya!

I've taken a bit of a break from creating new podcast episodes, and as I come back to you with this episode, I started reflecting on what happens when you're gone. Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap. Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners. I've been gone from new podcast production for a few months. It was a break I didn't think I would need to take decided to take and it got me thinking about what it means for me to be present for you, what it might mean for being absent, and the parallels with health and safety practice. One of the questions I frequently encourage the professionals I coach to ask the people who they seek to serve, is 'what does good service look and sound like in practice?'

Hey it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap! On the 13th of May 2022 I had the extraordinary experience of spending a few hours in a virtual event with Safety on Tap listeners from around the world to celebrate 200 episodes of the Safety on Tap podcast. This is a podcast, but its more than that, it's a community, and I wanted to celebrate with you. We spent weeks getting your feedback on favourite episodes, most impactful lessons, questions for guests coming back and combing through years of feedback and emails you've been kind enough to send me. This is the recording of that live event, if you couldn't make it I'm sorry to have missed you, but hope you feel just as much a part of this community. We had a few technical issues with the recording in the first few minutes, so I'll catch everyone up on how it all unfolded. We recorded the event in my home studio, which is in Kaurna country in South Australia. We had guests joining us from all over the world, and we paid our respects to the traditional custodians of those lands and to elders past, present and emerging. I was chuffed to have previous guest and friend of the show Amanda Clements join as my co-host for the event. The event was in FIVE main parts: First up I shared a few reflections on the beginning of Safety on Tap Next, we created some time and space for the live audience members to connect with each other. I'll tell you more about that in a few minutes. Next, we lined up some rapid interviews with previous podcast guests based on your favourites and your questions. After that, despite my protests, Amanda insisted that she would turn the mic around and interview me with questions sent in by you, and Finally, we put a handful of real life everyday listeners just like you in the spotlight, to hear their lessons, reflections and insights from 200 episodes of Safety on Tap. There's only so much we could do in two hours, and we had so many past guests in the audience that if we spoke to all of them we'd have been there all day! Plus many more who sent their well wishes but couldn't make it. So, massive shout out to Tim Allred, Cam Stevens, Sue Bahn, Patrick Hudson, Todd Conklin, John Green, David Borys, Sal McMahon, Kersty Christensen, Andy White, Cam Warren, Clive Lloyd, Mark Stipic and my one and only, past guest and Dad, Brian Barrett. We co-designed the event for and with you, the listener, combining the three big goals of a Chief Connector like me: to connect you with new ideas, to connect you with each other, and to connect you with your better future self. Learning, and taking action to improve. This was not a webinar so the chat was free and open, and we had the audience talking to each other in the chat and asking questions of previous guests - no permission required, just simple and open learning through dialogue and reflection, it was amazing. If you were there, I hope this helps reinforce your learning. If you weren't, I'm sorry you couldn't be with us, I hope this is the next best thing.

I know her personally, we were part of a business group a few years ago. Having gotten far more focussed and proactive with my overall financial goals and position in recent years, I asked this Financial Planner to come over and help us plan our finances. We prepared a lot, laid it all out - mortgage situation, credit, assets, a business, a family trust, a farming partnership, superannuation (401k), insurances, cash position, investments.....it was all there. I wanted the Financial Planner to help challenge and refine our Financial Plans. I was confused when she kept suggesting that we really should buy more shares, and certainly move our insurances somewhere else. I just wanted a few hours of planning help I would gladly pay for. She left saying she would send some info, and I actually didn't hear from her. It turns out the Financial Planner isn't interested in helping people with their financial planning, but to push them towards products and services for which they get a commission. Call me naive, I was still surprised. And I didn't get what I wanted. So I laughed when today's email said 'We've got solutions for all your finance needs' - EXCEPT THE ACTUAL PLANNING PART OF FINANCIAL PLANNING.