Improving Workplace Safety: Dr Todd Conklin

Well now, what needs to change to reduce death and injury in the workplace? This week the government launched a three-month consultation period on reforming health and safety at work, particularly where machinery, tools and structures are involved. This accounts for about 50 deaths at work each year. There was a decade high of 57 workplace deaths in 2013. The last fully reported year, 2017, the total was 50. According to WorkSafe New Zealand, at least half of this year’s fatalities have involved trucks, farm vehicles or other mobile machinery. And they fear we are heading for a high toll for 2019.

Eleven people have died working in the construction sector alone so far this year, including three road workers who were hit by a truck in Whakatane in March. Over 200,000 work-related injury claims were made in 2017 as well. Our guest is an international health and safety advocate and author, Dr. Todd Conklin. He spent 25 years at one of the world’s foremost research and development centres, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Throughout his career, Todd’s worked to improve workplace safety in industries like shipping, utilities, oil and gas, and forestry in the United States.

He’s been invited by the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management to speak at workshops around the country where his core message is people make mistakes and managers need to take more accountability so people can fail safely. Dr. Conklin is in NAPE here. Good morning, Todd. How are you, Catherine? What a treat to get to be on your show this morning. Welcome. Many people would have thought straight away of the atomic bomb when they heard Los Alamos National Laboratory. That’s definitely a part of our origin, but we’ve moved well past that. I understand. But what does happen there now, and what are the levels of specialisation in the research?

Well, it’s one of the foremost laboratories and one of the largest laboratories in the world, and we do research at every level. Lots of work with the human genome, lots of work with high energy, lots of work with high magnets, and we do a certain amount of research around special nuclear materials and the like. It’s a really exciting place to be. So what is your specialty there, and how do you advance knowledge in what you’re doing? So I’m a psychologist who actually studies high-risk operations, and specifically what I look at is how do we create workplaces that are really safe, resilient, and agile, that they can respond to variability at any time. That’s kind of what I look at.

And which organisations have you worked with in the United States that you really are going to be sharing knowledge here about? So a lot of knowledge from the oil and gas industry, really globally, they’ve really taken on the moniker to try to reduce serious and fatal accidents as much as they possibly can. Utilities, forestry, heavy industry. So I’m lucky I get to work with lots and lots of people, because this problem is an important problem, and companies are very interested in doing better. What do you mean by failing safely? It’s a really good question, Catherine. I think part of what has put us in the position where we’re in now is that our definition of safety success is zero harm.

In fact, you hear all over New Zealand companies talk about zero harm, and that’s a great definition of success. The problem is telling workers to have zero harm doesn’t tell workers how to have zero harm. What I’m really trying to do, really globally, and it’s exciting to do here in New Zealand, is redefine what safety success is. Safety is not the absence of an accident. Safety is the presence of capacity to have that accident safely. Does that make sense? Yes, it makes a lot of sense.

When you apply it to workplaces, what’s the process you go through to accept there will be, when we say failure, does that mean accept there will be accidents, or accept there will be situations that can create accidents? So both, for sure. The second one is probably better, because those situations that can create accidents are always in the work your workers do. So if you’re a construction worker working on the side of a road, risk is always present. We probably can’t manage risk. So if we can’t manage risk, then what we manage is our capacity to handle risk.

So we make sure that when a failure happens, the right barriers and protocols and controls are in place, so that the failure takes place, but the consequence of that failure is dramatically reduced. When it comes to fatalities, though, and I am just looking through a very sobering list of them and how they happened right now, many of them, I don’t see how what happened could have happened safely. These look like situations that you simply have to prevent happening. Well, first of all, it’s incredibly sobering. But part of what I would challenge you is we’ve built health and safety efforts really around the globe so that we watch small events in order to predict large events.

I would tell you, and this is something to think about this morning, is that the things that hurt people are almost never the same things that kill people. And so part of what we’re working at and being here with the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management for these two weeks is we’re really changing the discussion around the discussion of trying to prevent all bad things from happening because it’s impossible. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t have perfect environments. We don’t have perfect procedures.

Let’s assume failure will happen and build recoverability into the system so that when it does happen, we’re prepared for it and we’ve built systems, processes, environments in which failure can be safe. Can I give you an example? Please do. So why do you think we put people in fall protection when they work up at height? We put a little lanyard and a harness on them and we hook them up to something. Because they probably are going to fall and where we fall, we want them to fall safely. Exactly. And so if we think about managing the inevitability of the failure, and that’s a big shift in thinking. And it’s a hard shift in thinking. And it’s a challenge really across New Zealand.

Now, I’ll tell you guys, you’re really forward thinking as a country. And Pike River was a horrific event that changed the way you look at industrial safety really throughout the country. Part of what we want to do is create a system that’s really ready to fail. And not a system that expects perfection. Interesting on building sites now, those safety kits have been replaced in many cases by compulsory scaffolding when working above certain heights. And I suppose this makes sense in a way that the cost people might balk at.

But with the amount of building happening in this country, the high volume number of people up in that risk situation, it has clearly been decided that this is the way to minimize fatalities in particular and the number of events that are going to lead to serious consequences. So that’s an interesting shift in the construction industry. But to get there, and you’re right. I mean, first of all, you and I should travel together. I don’t know what you’re doing the rest of the week, but I’ve got a couple of presentations you can co-present with me on.

But the idea of investing in scaffolding, which is expensive and slow, creates an environment that when a worker falls, they fall one foot as opposed to 50 feet. And it really changes the consequence of the inevitable failure. And that’s the way we have to think about it. But to get there, we have to sort of give up this idea that we can prevent all accidents. We have to accept the fact that accidents are unexpected deviations from a normal outcome. And when they happen, what we want to do is be ready for it.

The question, though, of them being an unexpected deviation, if we talk about forestry, in which a lot of effort was put into not just having safety procedures, but trying to ensure compliance, and we saw fatalities fall. How much of what happens is where good systems are set up, good procedures are set up that minimize your exposure to the highest risk of something going wrong. But then are not complied with. Well, so compliance is really interesting. Compliance is important. But compliance really is managed one worker at a time, one company at a time. It makes a huge difference. But I guess I would ask, is it enough?

You can be in compliance and still have a variable event that you didn’t expect and not be ready for it. What I talk about most of my career is that we always prevent, we always comply. But we’re always ready to recover. And it’s that coupling of prevention, compliance, and recovery that actually creates the safest possible environment for which workers can do work. Can you give me an example of what you mean by recovery? Clearly, if a circumstance is the consequences of fatal, there’s no recovery for that individual and family in the sense of having their loved one back. So when you talk about recovery, what examples could you give us?

Post-consequence, a great example is your car, the car you drove in this morning. That car is really set up to wreck safely, to crash safely. It’s got seatbelts and airbags and bumpers and safety glass. There’s about 3,000 things that exist in that car. When that car crashes, that car is ready for the crash. And that readiness for the crash, that capacity, that’s the recovery part. Once an event happens, there is no recovery. Once the worst thing possibly happens, the best we can do is look at the horrible event and think of it not as a cost of life and treasure, but as an investment in getting better. So learning from failure becomes vital.

But what we learn is really as much about the prevention as it is about the recovery. Pike River is very much an example of that, and one of the biggest issues to come out of that situation is that, again, you can have systems designed to manage risk, but they are of little use if for multiple reasons they’re not functioning properly or there is not compliance. And one of the biggest things to come out of that case was the pressure to meet targets, meet deadlines, the pressure right through an organisation down to the front liners who wonder about the efficacy of them reporting things or whether anything will be done.

Could you speak to what goes wrong organisationally and what you can share about that? So organisations are vital in creating an environment in which the work happens. And production pressure, especially with the New Zealand get it done culture, which is really strong and something you should be proud of, that pressure is always present. What we have to create is really a way to look at accountability for doing work within compliance safely and restoratively. We have to look at accountability really as moving up the organisation so managers create an environment where workers can be successful.

And when the inevitable failure happens, we’ve built in enough resilience into the system that the system has the ability to flex and adapt, not to break and fail. What is the role within that chain of command in your failing safely process? For example, workers, if they can see what’s happening and they know what’s happening, and then it’s a question of the effectiveness of the organisation’s response to what they’ve got to say. And under your process, what ought to happen when workers feed back risks, problems, things not as they are? What is it about the system that ensures failing safely results?

So workers are the experts of the small signals that exist in doing work that tell you your process is drifting towards danger, towards risk. So the management of an organisation has to create psychological safety so that it’s okay for workers to give managers bad news. And we do that by actually sharing accountability for reliable and resilient operations throughout the organisation. So one of the key components is how managers react to safety information, colors, how workers give safety information. So we have to create a culture that says it’s okay to identify problems.

And one of the ways we’re doing that and the discussions we’re having throughout the country this week is we’re saying let’s move from if thinking to when thinking. So instead of saying if this fails, what’s our plan? Now management is going in and saying when this fails, what do we count on to recover? And then those same managers are a part of that accountability discussion in helping create the environment where those controls are in place. How can you future-proof against poor management or managers or those pressures coming down from the top resulting in shortcuts and sort of cognitive dissonance? How can you lock it in? I don’t know if you can, Catherine, that’s a really good question.

And part of that is asking the bigger question. How can we create organisations that really align with the ideals, goals and standards of the workplace we want to represent throughout New Zealand? And part of that I think is really changing the vocabulary, changing the definition of safety from the standard of perfection to really a standard of resilience. And I promise you that redefinition makes a huge difference in the way you manage. Safety is not the absence of an accident. Safety is the presence of the ability to have that accident safely. And that gives us a whole different thing to measure. But more importantly, Catherine, gives us a whole different thing to manage.

What’s the impact of that change of wording on the managers? Do they feel like they can do something? Is that the difference in redefining it? That’s a very good question. And that you probably hit it right on the nose. It changes the role the manager plays from managing sort of perfect workers. If you care more and try harder, you’ll do a better job. It changes it to really more of a discussion of how can I help create an environment that is resilient enough for that environment to be very effective, productive, manageable, safe, environmentally sensitive. All of those things kind of fit together around this notion of resilience. And it’s a change.

It’s a change in the way you think about managing this kind of work. And that, in fact, changes the way you manage to work. Another point I think you make is we focus or we almost categorize what’s happening at work into physical injuries and psychological and mental injuries. Is that a mistake? So I don’t know if it’s a mistake. I think that taxonomy matters. And I think there are people that really need to look at injuries and understand how they fit together. What scares me is the belief that if we manage the small, tiny events, that will have impact on the big, serious events.

What I’m trying to really discuss while I’m here is the fact that we have to manage the classic industrial safety stuff, sprains, slips, trips, and falls, hand cuts. But we also need to manage the serious and significant potential events much differently. And that’s a big part of what happens. Now, that could equate into some divisions between mental health, wellness, industrial injuries, fatalities. But ultimately, I think it’s a picture that says we manage many different types of safety. We manage many different types of resilience. And it’s an exciting change because it makes a difference. I think I just heard your flight called.

I’m curious about the attitudes you are heading as you begin to walk towards the departure. Is it still seen as a chore? Is it still seen in far too many workplaces or industries as a nuisance as opposed to a core management challenge and responsibility, health and safety? Excellent question. That’s probably going to have to be our last one. I will tell you that’s the part that’s changing. What once was seen as something I have to do in order to be in compliance in New Zealand has now become something I want to do in order to create a workplace that’s safe, stable, healthy, and reliable. That’s fun to watch.

And organizations like New Zealand Institute of Safety Management and the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum, there are a couple of really, really forward-thinking. WorkSafe New Zealand, they’re working diligently to help redefine what safety looks like for you guys. I wish you the best of luck. It’s fun to watch. Thank you. Todd Conklin, about to get on his flight. He was in a workplace, as you could hear, right next to the cafe, I think, in Napier Airport. Todd Conklin is in the country as a guest of the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management, speaking at workshops. He is based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.