Safety Leadership | Safety Excellence For Business

Moving to a Safety Culture of Excellence

April 2, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles 2 Comments

Most organizations seem to be comfortable with being at the level of safety compliance. This is a start, but is not good enough over the longer run. We have to meet the OSHA guidelines and train the people in how to work safely and use equipment properly. There are lots of people doing the safety training and the American Society for Safety Engineers (ASSE) has many, many resources for the safety professional. Most of the people in most organizations have some knowledge about how to do the work safely, know how to use the PPE and have some knowledge of the safety rules.

Reaching high levels of safety performance when working in organizations like these is very hard. Sustaining these levels of performance is even harder. Once the people have been trained, proven that they know and understand what they have learned and then actually doing the work as they have been trained often falls short. For a variety of reasons people don’t follow through; people take short-cuts, forget, are pre-occupied, feel pushed, don’t believe that management really cares, there are not enough people to do all the work, management does not listen, they hear the words about working safety but their supervisor ignores the words.

There is a powerful need for our organizations to shift to safety cultures of excellence. Way too many people are being killed (~4,600 in 2011). Most of these accidents are preventable. Our existing cultures need to shift from top-down driven processes to ones that are more self-organizing and sustainable. Yet many people resist change.

Being fearful of changing job assignments, bargaining unit challenges, abuse of the rules, not knowing what is going to happen to them and their jobs is one major reason for resistance to change. Another fear of change comes from the uncertainty of who the new people will be that they’ll need to work with if they are reorganized; they have a set of relationships in their current job and any change will upset these. Another fear of change can relate to their status as relationships and structure change. Another reason to fear change relates to the level of control that a person currently has in their job over their work and uncertainty about how that will change. Almost all of these fears come about because change is imposed with little input from the people who will experience the change.

However, change is with us all the time. It is not some unusual incident which is being shoved at us.

If the processes of Self-Organizing Leadership are used most people will not resist change. With Self-Organizing Leadership the people are co-creating the changes that need to be made. People do not resist changes that they create, but rather they push these changes. Most imposed change efforts fail; most co-created change efforts succeed.

The four-step, Safety Leadership Process we use enables the people in the organization to co-create their safety culture and transform it to one of excellence where injury and incident rates drop almost to zero. In this process the first step is to use the Process Enneagram© to work with a cross-section of the organization to co-create their Safety Strategic Plan. In using the Process Enneagram an important, compelling question is developed; one that the group feels is really important and one they want to resolve. Then the facilitator begins to move the group through the sequence of conversation relating to each point helping them to develop clarity and coherence relating to what they want to accomplish and how they will do it. Everyone makes inputs which are written down onto the Process Enneagram Map.

The space is created so that the environment is safe and open for honest conversation.

This part of the Safety Leadership Process usually requires about a day so that the issues, assumptions, Principles and Standards, and goals are understood and the energy required to accomplish their transformation is released.

In the next part of the Safety Leadership Process, the Process Enneagram Map they have created is taken out to those who were not involved to share the thinking and to seek improvements. In these conversations, trust and interdependence are built as people see what management wants to accomplish and are walking the talk.

The next part of the process is to talk with people about what they are doing, listen to them, discover ways to improve the work and help the people to make the needed changes. As we do this, people become more comfortable in talking together and opening up.

Another part of the Safety Leadership Process involves actually looking at what people are doing.

Systems problems show up as we make our observations. We often see very high levels of unsafe behaviors that are the result of people trying to work within the work environment and making mistakes. This is not an employee discipline process, but rather a process of discovery and learning. As the organization continues to make observations enough data is collected that the observations can become a predictor of a potential injury. Then we show the leaders how to react and avoid the injury.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: complying with OSHA guidelines, safety compliance, Self-Organizing Leadership

Safety Excellence for Business

March 22, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

The Goal is Zero sets us up for failure.

None of us wants to have anyone get hurt in our organization. We are trying hard in various ways to keep people from getting hurt. Sometimes organizations can achieve very long periods of injury-free performance. One large plant I know of went 24 years without a lost workday case (LWC), and another one went for about 10 years. These sorts of strings of injury-free days are commendable. This can tempt us into believing that if we just work hard enough that we can achieve workplaces where there are no injuries.

We do indeed have to work hard, but I don’t think that we can ever achieve injury performance forever. The things that people do or don’t do relating to safety are the cause of over 95% of all injuries. None of us is perfect. Our minds wander. We get into a hurry. We forget something. We get distracted. We are upset by a problem at home or at work. We develop bad habits.

I expect that all of us do something unsafely every day and don’t get hurt. But one day the conditions will be just right for things to come together in a new, different and unexpected way. Then we suffer the consequences.

When management sets the “Goal is Zero” we set ourselves up for failure. There is very strong pressure in most organizations for people to report what management wants to hear. If the “Goal is Zero” then the pressure builds to look for ways to avoid having to report an injury or near miss and the cover-ups begin. People will tend to just report things that are too big to hide. A major source of our safety information disappears. When we don’t report the small things then we can’t learn from them. Problems persist, bad situations are not addressed, and reporting can get a person on the wrong side of their management. Sometimes management creates a reporting system that is so difficult and exposes the person making the report to criticism, that the people just avoid reporting. Trust among the people in the organization is impossible to establish. When trust disappears, learning stops!

In order for trust to be built information needs to be openly available to everyone. The environment needs to be secure enough that we can talk and learn together. We need to help each other becoming our brothers and sisters keepers. Listening and respecting each other is critical.

When management creates a culture of openness, trust and interdependence, and an environment where everyone can see the big picture long periods of injury-free performance can be achieved.

John, a wise friend, told me once “When the safety gets right, everything gets right!”

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: business safety, injury performance, injury-free workplaces, safety excellence

Self-Organization is a Powerful, Natural Phenomenon

February 5, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

One of the key insights from chaos theory is that nature self-organizes.

Machines do not self-organize. Studies have shown that living systems self-organize and follow many of the laws of chaos theory.

Self-organization is everywhere in the universe.

The galaxies are self-organized.
Our weather systems like hurricanes are self-organized.
The forests are self-organized.
Bee colonies, ant colonies and termite colonies are self-organized.

Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela have written about how living systems are self-organized in their book, The Tree of Knowledge.¹

While out for a walk one morning, I realized that people are self-organizing all the time. This natural tendency to self-organize is so pervasive that we usually don’t pay any attention to it. It is like gravity…all around us, but usually unseen. In the early days of my work with Meg Wheatley, we wondered how we could get people to self-organize as if we had to do it for them. Our thinking was way off base because people self-organize all the time! We see it any time people come together to do something that is of interest to them. In organizations, people self-organize into groups sharing common interests.

The three conditions for self-organization are:

Information (what do they know collectively and how do they process it)
Relationship (their level of knowledge, trust and interdependence among them)
Identity (the unique way that they see themselves in relation to the outside world)

Examples of self-organized groups are interest groups, gangs and clubs. In organizations, the different management levels and various crafts like chemists, pipe-fitters, electricians, machinists, and welders can be seen as self-organized groups. The ways these groups share information among themselves, how they relate to each other and see themselves, tends to set up dynamics of “us” and everybody else. Each group is unique and different. When they feel pushed by those outside their group, they bond more tightly and become defensive.

Think about a community gathering where everyone is mixing, talking and having a good time. The level of energy would be high. There would be a lot of noise. People would be smiling and talking. The groups would gradually evolve spontaneously as people moved from group to group to talk to new people and meet other friends. This is a chaotic system and is called a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) in looking at what was happening or a Complex Responsive Process (CRP) in looking at how they were talking, sharing information and responding to this.

This is the way things are happening within our organizations. The various groups of secretaries, supervisors, craft people, managers, sales people, shipping people, etc., are behaving in ways that are very similar to those I just described for the community group. There is a lot of energy and creativity in these groups. We can think about the organization as if it is a living system.

In my early development as a manager in DuPont, I was taught how to manage as if the organization behaved like it was a machine. We had various parts like sales, manufacturing, accounting, human resources, and research arranged like stove-pipes that were not connected very well. We reorganized by moving the parts and the people around as if they were pieces on a chessboard, hoping to solve a problem or get better performance results. This idea of seeing organizations as if they were a living system, like I have described, was a hugely different paradigm from the one I, and most other managers, had learned.

Operating out of the organization seen as a machine paradigm, when I was assigned into a new organization, I went into it with my ideas about how to improve it, solve problems and get better results. I would tell people about how things needed to be, reorganized as I felt suitable and told them what to do. We have all experienced this sort of management behavior. People resist change when it is imposed on them. They dig their heels in and everything gets very difficult. Improvements can be made, but it’s slow going and not sustainable. Most of the energy and creativity of the people in the organization is devoted to preserving the identity and safety of the self-organized groups that are being turned upside down and resisting the new world being imposed by me as their new manager.

There is great energy and creativity in the organization that can become very supportive and creative for helping the organization fulfill its mission providing it can be engaged in purposeful ways rather then being used to resist management and other groups. Learning to engage with the organization as if it is a living system is very much more effective and sustainable than in our traditional way of trying to impose our will.

This applies to any efforts that need to be changed, strengthened and improved. Safety is a wonderful example to consider. Most of our traditional ways to improve our injury and incident performance are imposed. I drove the safety improvement effort so that I was getting myself and everyone else very upset. There was a lot of fighting and anger. This hard pushing and driving people did result in improvements in our performance but it was harsh and not sustainable. But, once the safety fundamentals were in place, we were able to move to a different way of leading safety using the things I’d learned from CAS and CRP studies.

¹ Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. (1992). The Tree of Knowledge. Boston, Shambhala.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Self-Organization Tagged With: self-organization

My Journey to Self Organizing Leadership

January 17, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

Here is some background on my journey into to learning to live and work in organizations as if they are living systems.

In my DuPont career, I learned an immense amount about myself, the people with whom I worked with and about how organizations worked or not. I also had many great opportunities to learn from top scientists and inventors. I learned from people outside DuPont who opened up windows to new ways of thinking and being. I was always learning from my first 14 years as a Research Chemist, making discoveries for 40 US patents, to 2 years in sales support and development, to 3 years in business development, to 17 years in manufacturing and plant management.

All this time, I was watching, listening, and learning about people and why things happened like they did. I also read and studied the traditional organizational development literature as well as expanding into new ideas like chaos and complexity theories. I had the privilege of working with people like Meg Wheatley, Fritjof Capra, Tony Blake, and Tim Dalmau. Always learning, watching, listening, and testing ideas against my experience of what seemed to work best to generate the best results for both the people and the businesses. When something worked, I followed the lead; if something didn’t work, I abandoned it.

Being introduced to and learning about the work of the British philosopher, John Bennett, in 1984 was critical. Through Tony Blake, I learned about systematics and the importance of and significance of number.¹ My introduction to the ideas of chaos theory in 1992 was another critical step in my adventures.²

All that I’d learned in my traditional management training courses taught me the practical aspects of managing, but didn’t feel right in how it related to people. There was a lot that was forced and coercive. But, I learned to manage this way and was good at it.

My approach was tough, top-down and looked at the organization from a mechanical perspective and the people as parts of the machine to be pushed and manipulated so the desired results, prescribed by those at the top, could be achieved. It was push, push, push, drive, drive, drive. Over time, the more that I worked this way, the more unhappy with myself and the way I was treating people I became.

A new window opened up as I learned more about systematics, chaos and complexity.

The thinking I was developing and beginning to use was much more effective and felt a whole lot better. This opened up the highly successful work I was able to do with the people of the people in the DuPont Plants in Niagara Falls, New York and Belle, West Virginia, and with the people living in our neighboring communities.

¹ Bennett, John G. (1977). Deeper Man. Edited by Anthony Blake. Charles Town, WV. Claymont Communications.
² Wheatley, Margaret J. (1992). Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco, Barrett-Koehler Publishers.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership