What Were You Thinking?

Moving Beyond the Safety Plateau Begins With a Decision To Do So.

Joe White is a seasoned safety professional with more than 20 years of experience in the field. As a Business Process Consultant at DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS), White has dedicated the majority of his working career to advancing the practice of safety.

While working at DuPont, White, like many other safety professionals, has found himself asking more than once, ‘what could he (or she) possibly have been thinking?’ in response to a number of incident investigations following injury.

“In spite of all the best intentions and management practices we have in place, people still get hurt. It seldom involves incident absent knowledge of hazards. It’s the misalignment of perceived and actual risks that routinely bites you.”

After years of safety consultation, DSS began to receive requests from clients wanting to know how they could move beyond their company’s safety plateau. In many instances, these requests came from companies that had mature safety cultures and a track record of demonstrated growth and improvement. Yet they each shared a common source of frustration; all forward progress seemingly stopped in spite of continued, and in some cases, increased levels of safety initiatives.

“We’ve used the same management type tools for decades, what happens [with] our clients — even within DuPont — performance gets to a certain point, where we just can’t get any better, that’s called safety plateau,” said White.

White recognized this phenomenon early in his career with DuPont and has invested more than 15 years in search of answers. The result of his research is the development of a new DSS offering, a tool that bridges the most current thinking in cognitive sciences with the practice of safety. It’s being positioned as the next generation of best practices for what DuPont refers to as, “felt leadership.”

“Whereas traditional safety practices focus on managing actions and behaviors, the new leadership offering focuses on the decision making process. There’s a wealth of knowledge that has been gained in the cognitive sciences over the last 20 years that have a direct application to the practice of safety. More effective leadership and communication practices are needed to move beyond plateaued performance levels. It’s all about influence; not edict.”

The Traditional Approach:

• Companies set expectations, (rules and procedures).
• Observe behaviors for conformance, (management and supervisors).
• Provide feedback, (positive or negative reinforcement).

“The theory behind the traditional approach is that you change people’s decisions by managing their behaviors,” said White. “If the process is repeated often enough, in theory, people become ‘conditioned’ to act in a desired manner.

The Felt Leadership Series Approach:

• Decisions precede actions.
• Decisions can occur consciously or subconsciously.
• Most decisions and subsequent actions are subconscious.

“In practice, you change behaviors by influencing decisions,” White says. “The primary objective of the felt leadership offering is to help leaders first and foremost understand how decisions are made. Secondly, it’s to provide skill sets that more effectively influence decisions, as opposed to managing behaviors.”

What is the Felt Leadership Approach?

The felt leadership offering is a cognitive-based model, developed to help companies move beyond a plateaued safety performance.

“From a cognitive perspective, people perceive, interpret, and respond to the world around them based on a number of factors, not the least of which is past experience,” said White. “By our very nature, we tend to make decisions that are automatic, intuitive, and efficient, representing how we feel and not necessarily what we may think about a given situation or circumstance.”

According to White, this process is guided by perceived outcomes that are either good or bad, which is represented primarily by feelings due to past experiences and not necessarily conscious thoughts. This whole process takes only fractions of a second and therefore needs to be ingrained rather than simply memorized from a policies and procedures handbook. He said it’s about changing mindsets around the decision making process that’s needed to ultimately alter the behavior.

The First Phase of the Felt Leadership Offering Includes Four Initial Workshops:

• Decisions and actions – How decisions are made.
• Risks and rewards – How anticipated outcomes influence the decision making process.
• Motivation – Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and how to effectively influence change.
• Changing culture – Leadership qualities and how to apply the cognitive sciences to safety.

As part of the workshops, the felt leadership offering incorporates peer coaching to discuss application of learning objectives given the participants culture. For most, it’s this critical step that proves to be invaluable in terms of transferring applied knowledge to the workplace.

White said DSS is just beginning to commercialize the felt leadership offering and has been seeing an overwhelming response to the learning modules provided within the offering. He said that once the knowledge base is laid through the teaching of the first two modules, DSS then works with clients on designing application strategies through the last two modules, which are exclusively designed to transfer the applied knowledge to practice. These can include making communications and training initiatives more image and experientially rich, among other steps that can be taken to more effectively influence desired changes.

As noted by White, sometimes within industries like oil and gas, supervisors are younger than many of those they supervise. He said this is where leading well, rather than simply managing, is extremely important. In addition, remote workplaces require different resources, strategies, and skills. “In such high-hazard industries, it’s about recognizing that the consequences of an error or mistake can be catastrophic,” White said.

He wanted to be clear that this approach is not about abandoning any current management practices but about further improvement using knowledge gained through cognitive-based research conducted over the last 25 years. “You need more effective leadership and not necessarily more effective management,” said White. “We believe that this is the dawning of a new frontier.”

The series and its coaching are centered on understanding and more effectively influencing the decision making process. As a prerequisite to change, leaders must understand the value of relationships and the power of influence. He said at the workplace, we generally go about changing behavior by writing a new procedure and implementing it via edict. “If you’re like me and you’re like most, that same approach, doesn’t work well in the home,” said White. “In the home, you’re far more reliant on your ability to influence change.” He encouraged putting the same skill set and the same motivational factors into practice in the workplace as you would at home.

“You want to enter through the heart rather than the head,” he adds, “using images and emotions. The more personal you can make something, the more influence it has on someone’s behavior.” White acknowledged that you may have to rely on some policies and procedures at times within the workplace, but stressed that it’s the balance of this external motivation and the added internal motivation that really makes a difference. It’s at this point that the team becomes part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem, a key characteristic of true interdependency.

“I think the boundaries are really unlimited,” he said, adding that companies will see this approach affecting other areas of their workplace. White said that the series provides solid nuggets of great information that can be pulled back into the industries and be practically applied. “It’s promise and hope that there is another wave of safety that is just now emerging. Perhaps for the first time in my career, we can finally not only understand what he or she may have been thinking and why, we can now more effectively do something about it.”