IOSH 2013 – Keep up, or crash out

In the third of a series of articles examining what practitioners can learn from the business practices of some of the most successful companies in the world,1 and in keeping with the IOSH Conference theme ‘fit for the future’, Peter Roddis looks at how the profession needs to adapt and change its offering.

Against a background of unprecedented technological and socio-economic change, the health and safety profession has to face up to the future. We need to look over the horizon and realise that the principles and practice of the 20th century don’t work for the Net generation. It is crucial to realise that the Internet is transforming the world.

The worst thing we could do at this stage is think “this is what we are, and how do we shine it up”. New expectations are emerging and if we are not striving to understand and reshape our offering, we will be left behind.
Becoming frustrated and disillusioned by the lack of engagement with health and safety and allowing that to drain us of vitality will get us nowhere. We need to radically change the way we do business. It’s not easy to change our own attitudes and behaviours, but that’s what we need to do for change to become real. We need to realise that in this connected world, effective change requires inspiration, passion and innovation.

Passion

To be successful in this challenging new world, we need to be truly inspiring. As Richard Branson says, “you are far more likely to be persistent, inspired and dedicated if you love what you do”.² We need to be passionate about what health and safety means to people and how it improves the world. Success requires passion and leadership, so we need practitioners with the passion and self-efficacy to change the world. That means we need to develop and believe in our ability to communicate.

We need to learn to think more creatively, become more flexible, much more adaptable, and more fully engaged as business partners within our organisations.

We need to start by realising that the very way we go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right. The perception that we are unrealistic, overbearing and bureaucratic results from arbitrary interpretation of what legislation and best practice require. The current regulatory framework has underpinned our very being for almost 40 years but the context now needs to change. We can try to blame the no-win, no-fee insurance culture, politicians, or the media, but we need to accept our own part in all of this, too.

As Peter Drucker said,³ the toughest job for knowledge workers is defining the work, and this is a key issue for us. It is time to reflect on our own behaviour, identify ways in which we inadvertently contribute to our problems, and then change how we act.

Success and failure are closely related to the ways in which we view ourselves, and our relationships with others. What we believe and how we present that influences the power we have and plays a major role in how we approach our goals, tasks, and challenges. The likes of Apple, Twitter and Facebook are great storytellers; they capture people’s imagination, with stories of how they enable innovation, break rules and reinvent the world. Any good trainer or presenter understands the power of storytelling to engage and explain in a way that people can relate to. We need to become more effective storytellers, because it’s the promise of a possibility that we’re selling to people, and around which we are trying to mobilise them.⁴

But we need to take this a step further and become good storychangers,⁵ because telling a story isn’t enough. People will see right through a great story about a lousy product. James Dyson provides an example of how this works in practice: he didn’t take the old approach and make it better, he revolutionised the vacuum cleaner with his unique ball-pivot system and cyclonic design.

We are a profession of 40,000 people, and we need to bring together that collective wisdom. We need our most influential and innovative practitioners to help us change what we do.

Innovation

If you believe that social media is just about keeping in contact with your old school-friends through Facebook, you need to realise that the very fabric of our new world depends on social media. It connects millions of individuals and is built on a culture of sharing, interdependency, openness, collaboration and integrity.⁶ Facebook has 1 billion users, 600 million mobile users, more than 42 million pages and 9 million apps.⁷

The proliferation of mobile communication methods, such as mobile phones, tablets and cloud computing requires us to change the way that we communicate, both within our organisations and as a profession. Wikis, blogs, discussion boards, crowd-sourcing, Google, Twitter, YouTube and innovative mobile applications are revolutionising the way that information and knowledge are managed and accessed. As a profession, we must embrace the power of the Web to harness our collective intelligence.

One of the most highly touted features of the Web is the rise of blogging, yet we have failed to fully embrace it. Many would say that blogging is nothing new, as home pages have been around since the Net began. Clearly, opinion columns have been around for much longer in the traditional news media, but blogging is potentially much more powerful. If you write a really useful blog article today, even if you stop writing tomorrow, it will continue to deliver traffic.

Making better use of social networking will allow us to build communication assets that will keep delivering.⁸ The emerging generation has already embraced this power to communicate its messages. An example is Martha Payne, aged ⁹, who has recorded more than three million hits on her NeverSeconds blog about school meals.9 Attempts to stop her blogging resulted in a social networking outcry supported by celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver. The money she has raised through blogging has already funded the building of a kitchen in Malawi by the charity Mary’s Meals.

The emerging generation also communicates increasingly through video, using YouTube in the same way that most of us use Google. YouTube currently has 800 million users and gets 4 billion views per day. Ask a teenager what they do when they are stuck on a video game and you will find that they no longer Google for a solution, they search for a video. Teenagers are giving video-game lectures to thousands of other kids.¹⁰

We are failing to make better use of online videos because we believe that in order to do video well, we have to have high production values. We need to realise that in the age of YouTube, and as long as it’s interesting and useful, production values don’t count for much. Most of us have smart phones sitting in our pockets and need to make better use of them. It’s so easy to turn the camera on yourself, get someone to interview you, or take a video at a conference.

Relationships and trust

In this new world it is often said that “relationships are key” and this means that trust is more important than ever if we want people to engage with us. A major focus for us over recent years has been to get managers to take responsibility. INDG417 ‘Leading Health and Safety at Work’, suggests a ‘carrot and stick’ approach more focused on winning hearts and minds at the most senior level. There’s no doubt that success requires managers to change their behaviour, understand their roles and make the right decisions. As tempting as it is to play on their fear of being prosecuted, we know that senior managers do not really change as a result of being constantly hit with the legislation stick. Thus, INDG417 encourages us to use the carrot by presenting and promoting the business case for good health and safety management.

But, if we are to be successful, we need to realise that we rely on an over-simplified view of how business decisions are made. Decisions within organisations are the outcomes of often-complex processes, deciding between competing interests, considering hidden agendas, and often requiring strong input by technical experts. We need to ensure that business leaders see the value and importance of technical experts such as ourselves – professionals who have nothing but their and the organisation’s best interests at heart.

But technical advice alone is only part of the solution, and the best advice comes from business partners – professionals who understand the business world, the context, business drivers and constraints that managers face. Such a person is a thinking partner – not someone who knows all the answers but someone who thinks alongside managers in order to find the answers. It’s about managers and safety professionals working together to get to the right decisions, and communicating more effectively with each other.

Insanely great experiences

As well as being more inventive and inspiring, we also need to become more customer-centric and routinely deliver the exceptional. We need to seize the new opportunities that the Net provides, to contribute our ideas and our passion to help shape this dramatically changing world. In this way, we may even start to confound the expectations of our most jaded customers.

To be successful we need to create insanely great experiences for our customers. We need to ask them what they are looking for from us and what they hate about doing business with us.

We also need to get all of the tiny things right – all the things that conspire together to make a service truly exceptional. Our systems and processes need to work intuitively, seamlessly, and reliably but this can only happen when we take the trouble to sweat the details.

Steve Jobs had two communication strengths: obsession over the details and a constant belief that Apple was unveiling the very best product. So, we need to carefully explain our intentions and we need to be clear and committed to the same view; that our advice is the very best that we can offer. But we must not hesitate to share the “why” behind our decisions. We must talk aloud, sharing our rationale and understanding.

Rather than tying others and ourselves in knots of bureaucracy, we also need to care enough to keep thinking about something until we find the simplest way to do it. As suggested by Dr Seuss, “sometimes the questions are complicated but the answers are simple”.¹¹ We need to establish a culture within our profession where people take great care to develop, or present the most pragmatic solutions possible. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more difficult but it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move swiftly in the opposite direction.¹²

Success in the modern world is all about innovation in products, services, and business models. We need to ensure that we actively support this by becoming enablers, not blockers, of new approaches and technologies. The changes brought about by the likes of Apple, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Twitter are having an incredible impact on how we all live, think, work and play. We need to be just as innovative in the way that we approach health and safety. We need to move beyond the narrow parameters of our legal framework and embrace the best that the world has to offer us in terms of systems, communication, leadership, learning and training.

Learning

It is said that the affairs of life represent a multitude of interests, and he who reasons within any one of them, without consulting the rest, is unsuited to control the business of the world.¹³ In other words, we will fail if we maintain a silo mentality. We have so much to learn from other professions, from academics, from the amazing business and technological changes that are happening all around us.

One of our common assumptions is that getting managers to learn is largely a matter of motivation. We believe that once managers have the right attitudes and commitment, good health and safety management will automatically follow. The reality is that managers often feel that health and safety is extremely important, but they fail to take effective action. Effective learning is not simply a function of how people feel; it is a reflection of how they think.

The cognitive rules or reasoning they use to design and implement their actions are referred to by Argyris¹⁴ as a kind of ‘master programme’ stored in the brain, governing all behaviour. This can result in defensive reasoning, which can block learning, even when the individual commitment to it is high, just as a computer programme with hidden bugs can produce results exactly the opposite of what its designers had planned.

So, if we want to change the way that managers think about health and safety we must become more adept at creating real learning experiences within our organisations and beyond. We must develop a profession that is capable of bringing about change in others and, to do that, we also need to become more adept at learning ourselves.¹⁵

Conclusion

Change seems more important than ever but it’s no good waiting for it to happen. We need to realise that if we don’t like change, we’re going to like irrelevance even less.¹⁶ Darwin’s theory of evolution suggests that, by order of natural selection, only species that have learned to adapt to their environment will reproduce and survive, while others die out. This theory is analogous to the business world and, in order to remain relevant, health and safety must adapt.

What this means in a time of such dramatic economic, political, social and technological challenge is that we need to ‘step up’ and face the challenge head on. Rather than seeing this as a negative attack on all we hold dear, we must accept that there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in health and safety. We just need to ensure that we embrace the modern world and take the initiative back from politicians and the media.  

References

1    See also SHP July 2012 ‘Brand of opportunity’ – www.shponline.co.uk/ features-content/full/developing-the-profession-brand-of-opportunity – and SHP October 2012 ‘Let’s face the music’ – www.shponline.co.uk/features-content/full/ developing-the-profession-let-s-face-the-music
2    Richard Branson: ‘If It Can’t Fit On The Back Of An Envelope, It’s Rubbish (An Interview by Carmine Gallo – www.forbes.com)
3    Drucker, P (2001): The Essential Drucker, New York: Harper Business
4    Daniel Goldman article published on LinkedIn – http://linkd.in/13uyECX
5    Clark, D (2012): ‘The End of the Expert: Why No One in Marketing Knows What They’re Doing’ –  www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/11/11/the-end-of-the-expert-why-no-one-in-marketing-knows-what-theyre-doing/
6    Tapscott, D and Williams, A (2010): Macrowikinomics (October 2010)
7    Digital market ramblings – http://expandedramblings.com/
8    Clark, D(2012): ‘Be interesting or be ignored” – www.forbes.com/sites/ dorieclark/2012/10/31/be-interesting-or-be-ignored/
9    www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-18454800
10   ‘Why the next generation will hate Generation Y’ – http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2012/12/21/why-the-next-generation-will-hate-gen-y/
11    Wesemann, HE (2007): Looking Tall by Standing Next to Short People: Other Techniques for Managing a Law Firm
12    Schumacker, EF (1973): Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, ISBN 0-06-131778-0
13    Fenimore Cooper, J (1838): The American Democrat
14    Argyris, C: Teaching Smart People How to Learn
15    Schön, DA (1973): Beyond the Stable State. Public and private learning in a changing society
16    General Shinseki, quoted in the New York Times – www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/us/politics/11vets.html?hp

Peter Roddis has more than 26 years’ experience in health and safety.