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/ep217

What does it sound like, to have permission to not focus on certain things in health and safety? What one concept are we missing from risk management that makes a massive difference?

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.

My guest today is Tim Lie.  Is he a safety professional? I ask him that, so you'll have to wait and see what he says.  What I can tell you is that his roles have included group HSE responsibilities, lifecycle alignment, culture, and capability.  You don't often hear those things in people's job titles, do you?

I met Tim a while back when I was invited along to a national health and safety team workshop.  It took all of 2 minutes for me to be really curious about Tim.  He is broadly read, he has both a practitioner and academic background, he is an engineer who loves solving problems but is hyper tuned into the messy people side of business, and he talks in a way that gives you a deep insight into how his brain works, which is fascinating. 

So that's why I wanted to introduce him to you! We had a wide ranging chat, dove deep on a few things but still covered a fair bit of ground.  I hope you enjoy, here's my chat with Tim Lie:

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.