Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep209

We are in the business of change.  But we aren't always great at it.  This is a podcast about babies and blindness, carrots and elephants, and the necessary tension between where we want to go, and where we are right now. 

I don't think we will ever be able to rest on our laurels, even if we become the most influential and effective safety professionals in history.  Even if all the hazards are identified, all the controls are known and in place, I think two things will always be true.  The first truth is that the only thing that stays the same is change - change in operations, change in people, change in resourcing, change in the work environment or industry context.  The second truth, or maybe I should say what I believe to be true, comes from the High Reliability Organising research.  Even when everything seems great, our ongoing job is to create and maintain a sense of unease about things, which keeps us tuned into and anticipating change and what needs to change. 

I gave up the clever but trite phrase 'my job is to make myself redundant' many years ago for this reason. I will make the argument that not only is the job never finished, that we need to earn our place in our organisation using this very logic. 

And until that time, it can feel really, really frustrating. 

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:

Ep207: On the Hook & the Cost of Free, with Andrew Barrett

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep207

Today, you can access the entire collection of information used to create university-level health and safety programs, for free.  Today, you could sign-up for an MBA, and in a year from now have an MBA, for free.  If you haven't done either of these things, and you probably haven't, there's a reason.  For the people who have taken that first step, almost all of them drop out and walk away.  This is a story about the rationality of never starting and of giving up, and how we can create the conditions for you and those around us to actually get better. 

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 worked in an organization in which it was normal for people to talk about responsibility saying things like 'ok Jill, you're on the hook for that action'.  When discussing significant projects, or high workload, or risky things to have your name one, people might kindly ask 'do you want to be on the hook for that?'

At the time I thought it was a strange phrase.  It conjured up images of 'catching' slippery sea creatures and dragging them to their demise, or in darker moments the more dread filled meat hook so favoured by horror writers and medieval dungeon keepers. 

It tuns out the idiom 'on the hook' does come from fishing.  A fish on the hook has been caught, it no other options, what happens next is decided.  On the flip side, a fish not yet on the hook is free, and one which was on the hook but is no longer, has 'slipped' off the hook. 

This metaphor for gives us a long runway into a discussion about responsibility and accountability more generally, which I will explore in an episode soon, but for now we need to talk about putting ourselves on the hook, taking responsibility for the things we control.