Honor – Little things that make a big difference

Homes and farms in my rural living area offer produce, flowers and perennials for sale by the road this time of year. The stands are often unattended and operate on the “honor system.” Once your selection is made, you put your money in a cash box or an old coffee can. After that it is off to home to enjoy the fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers.

But, unfortunately the honor system doesn’t always work. I talked this over with one of my friends in as she told her tale. One day she glanced out her window a saw a well-dressed woman load pots of perennials into her vehicle. My friend was all smiles as she mentally calculated the profit from her labors. However, when she later checked the cash box it was empty!  The honor system revealed that this person was not honorable.

Perhaps to this person, taking the flowers seemed like a little thing. However, being honest in small things indicates how we will respond to the big things. Honesty in all areas of our lives is one way we can bring honor to all that we do and to our profession that deals with the saving of lives. Whatever we do in word or deed we should do with honor to those who brought us up, to the organization that employs us, to the profession we serve, to the higher authority we respect. And whether we realize it or not, others are watching and learning and evaluating based on what they observe about our words, deeds and actions. This is an observation system that is truly behavior based and has repercussions that go way beyond what is seen.  Let us all strive to live in untarnished honor in the small things and beyond.

The Doc 

The four “I” words behind safety culture excellence

There is no “I” in the word “team,” but according to one of our customers there is an “I” in safety – four of them, in fact. Four “I” words sum up what this customer believes it took to get his organization to begin the safety culture improvement journey.

Illuminate:  There is often a lack of understanding of what safety culture really is and how an effective improvement process takes place. There is general knowledge about regulations, the foundational basics of reacting to conditions in an effort to protect employees from the hazards that exist in the workplace. There is usually also some fairly general knowledge of visually recognizing unsafe acts and the need to address those who aren’t doing a job as safely as it could be done. Recognizing unsafe acts and conditions is not enough to achieve non-injury excellence for the people at the workface. There also has to be an illumination of the tools, techniques and commitment the personnel at all levels in an organization must utilize to improve a safety culture.  This goes way beyond knowing what to react to; it’s about engaging our people in the relentless pursuit of safety excellence.

Irritate:  The illumination knowledge experience must deliver an irritation with the current state of our safety culture reality. Complacency is the death of any initiative, safety or otherwise. The pearl of excellence does not begin without the irritation that initiates the building process. Or to quote another cliché, leading a horse to water doesn’t necessarily make them drink. The leadership of the organization must decide to do begin a journey of safety excellence.

Inspire:  Hopefully the Illumination stage of how to do this work coupled with dissatisfaction of the current state delivers enough dissatisfaction/irritation to begin the work necessary to transform the whole safety culture. This next step requires leadership across all levels of the organization to be a catalyst in the inspiration process. Upper management, supervision and hourly personnel must all actively inspire the followers at all levels to engage in the long term commitment necessary to improve what isn’t correct with respect to safety.

Implementation:  Understanding the theory does not deliver the solution. Planning what to do must lead to doing what is necessary. Our people must then check on the result of the implementation and actively work on what is necessary to keep improving and delivering an ever growing culture of correct. Just like in the famous quality improvement initiatives Plan – Do – Check – Act is a necessary living, breathing element in implementing a safety improvement process that delivers excellent results. 

The Doc

Fish – Improving your safety culture

There are a number of safety cultures for most every organization.  How does your organization handle the government regulations that focus on conditions, policies and procedures?  What about the culture that reacts to what is seen (both corrective and positive reinforcement) with respect to safety in the workplace and off the job?  How do safety accountabilities come into play for hourly, supervision and management personnel during work hours and beyond?  And how do you engage people from all walks in your organization in a focus on improving what just isn’t good enough for all those things you just read through above? 

In the ever changing organizational dynamic there is a need for all of us to learn how to engage in making our workplace, home and recreation safety cultures ones that just don’t tolerate what can lead to injuries.  The dynamic complexity does not allow us to be thrown a fish when it comes to getting better.  We need to learn how to fish so we can solve the safety problems which inevitably exist in both our working and off the job activities.  

Fortunately the necessary tools are not complex and require no math whatsoever.  They are simple concepts like POP (Purpose – Outcomes – Process), AIM (Action Item Matrix), Complaint Equals Goal, Cause and Effect Diagrams, Fault Tree diagrams, Process Maps and the like.  Learning how to use these simple problem solving and group engagement tools can revolutionize how your organization gets much better, much faster with respect to safety and productivity, and quality and customer service. 

Our upcoming webinar, “Learning to Fish: Preparing Your Facilitators to Leverage Caterpillar’s Continuous Improvement Model,” on May 22 by Caterpillar’s Todd Efird, CSP, will be an hour of in-depth, practical teaching about how to be a successful angler in the world of delivering safety culture excellence.  I hope this brief introduction has sufficiently baited your interest so you will hook up with Todd as you go deep and catch on to what it takes to successfully land a most excellent safety culture. View and preview of the presentation and register at safety.cat.com/webinars.

The Doc

Unicorns – Tackling unique safety problems

In times gone by my papa provided me with a wealth of practical knowledge from his school of hard knocks.  As a youth much of what I experienced was new territory to me, but déjà vu to my old man.  I just had to be open to accepting and applying the wisdom he made available to me.  On more than one occasion I was faced with difficult situations that could lead to troubling (or disastrous) results if I handled them poorly.  I think you readers can remember all kinds of personal decisions you also experienced while growing up such as; dating, driving, drinking, daring, etc. As Pop and I discussed these kinds of situations I can still hear him telling me, “Son, don’t ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.” 

How does this unicorn theology apply to safety?  When you are faced with a high-risk circumstance do not live in denial. Do not try to avoid dealing with the reality.  Do not play around with it or treat it lightly.  You can’t leapfrog it.  You must face it, tackle it head on and work through the reality that faces you – and do so very carefully.

The Doc

Keep it Simple – The need for policies and procedures in safety

James Madison, fourth president of the United States, was instrumental in drafting the United States constitution.  He warned against creating laws “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”  Based on some of the complicated government forms, promulgations, policies, procedures and the like I read Madison’s warning as timeless advice that should be heeded in safety and other areas, as well. 

A common tendency in safety deals with addressing an injury, incident or close call by writing a new procedure or rule that gets published, read to the troops and a short time later completely forgotten.  I remember a conversation with safety pioneer Dr. Dan Petersen in which he railed against job safety analyses (JSAs) because the engineer who wrote them felt good about addressing a dangerous issue and the operations group never really implemented the intent of the JSA.  The net result was a false sense of security and a safety culture that looked strong from a paperwork standpoint, but in reality was a house of cards. 

Is there a simple solution for this common pitfall?  Some of our customers’ continuous improvement teams have delivered rules of engagement for their work cells that are to the point, easily understood and as a result lived by the people in the work group, those most at risk.  Examples include: “The following PPE will always be worn when this work cell is operational: ………...”   “No metal tools will be used on equipment that contains 1.1 energetic materials.” LOTO becomes something like “Before any equipment is worked on it will be completely de-energized.”  Other employee-based teams write practical JSAs and then are required to train them to the rest of the employees as a part of job safety briefings.

How can you and your organization “de-obfuscate” and get to a simplified, more effective safety culture?

The Doc   

Editor’s Note: Join our May 22, 2013, Safety Culture World Webinar to hear how one customer achieved cultural transformation with Caterpillar’s continuous improvement model and now leverages its own personnel to deliver the Zero-Incident Performance (ZIP™) Process. 

Call Sign – What is effective safety communication?

You probably have heard a saying that goes something like “If you are safe, it is not by accident.”  The world of inspirational posters continues to be an industry that papers our facility walls with good looking, feel good platitudes that have no real, positive impact on safety. I wonder how many responses this blog site would get if you in the readership were asked to send in your favorite safety slogan?  Do our people who are most at risk really ever get impacted by safety posters, or bulletin board notices, or email blasts? I honestly don’t think so. We all live in a media intensive, social network world that has taught us how to quickly ignore messaging that is generic.

This brings to mind a comment from my brother-in-law Tom who retired from the Air Force after a couple of decades as a navigator in various fighters and bombers. I used to get frustrated trying to talk to Tom and getting no response. One day I asked him how he could concentrate so completely on what he was doing and thereby totally ignore outside input. Tom’s answer made a lot of sense. “In the high intensity, high speed, high risk combat theatre around Vietnam the radio traffic was non-stop and we all quickly learned to ignore any and all airwave communications that did not have our personal call sign as a part of it.”

And now we pretty much all live in this world where the battle is for our personal attention. Posters, emails, bulletin board notices, etc., are just background noise to our workforce. Personal one-on-one genuine communication gets our attention and that of our at-risk employees. The rest is NVA (non-value-added drivel). I am now committed to the catch phrase that sounds something like “I can’t trite.” Save your company’s poster budget and invest in being genuine by talking to your people.

The Doc 

Togetherness – Safety transitions that occur with mergers and acquisitions

Leadership changes affect performance in production, quality and safety. There is a true level of uncertainty with both the mergers and the mergees. Sure ‘Due Diligence’ takes place, but typically only to a minimum level when it comes to safety. Often the safety pro gets an email or phone call that succinctly states whether you are a new merger or mergee; and then the real work begins.

When put in the mode of being responsible for bringing a new company on board, there are some consistent approaches I have found to be helpful.

• We pull together a fairly complete package of what our organization expects. There are policies and procedures (PNPs), near-miss system particulars, downstream safety statistics, best practical safety practices from other sites, safety accountabilities for typical positions in an organization, continuous improvement culture process and expectations, Safety Perception Survey results, regional safety contacts and the like. I guess you could call this a sort of kind of ‘Death by Power Point’ compilation which represents who our company is with respect to safety.


• Next it is time to contact the newly acquired site leadership and schedule an onsite review of all its safety system/program realities. We are purposely precise with the timing of this event and purposely vague with respect to our request for information. We want to quickly see who they are and what they have with respect to safety culture and onsite realities.


• Once on site we have a full day of shared dog and pony time.  We are interested in what kind of leadership shows up at all levels of the organization, from hourly through site management. They get the first turn in the barrel followed by our Death by Power Point depth. Very quickly mutual evaluations take place complete with expectations and targets. There is also in-depth time as to how the mergee organization can become a viable part of the owning company and our safety culture realities.


• The next days are dedicated to an onsite level-one type review of how the organization stacks up to regulation requirements and front line physical conditions. During this workface phase we also schedule formal and extemporaneous interviews with hourly, supervision and salaried workforce personnel. This face time gives us a checkup on the safety culture reality as it is practiced by those who live the organization’s safety culture truth.


• The last onsite day includes a debrief, which once again is shared information and technology time. Our objective is safety excellence and how to get there, not punishment or degradation. We do go over the good, the bad and the ugly as well as reinforcing our principals, values, expectations and support realities. We will have regional safety professionals in attendance for the whole event which allows us to begin a more formal practice of on boarding the new organization so it can become a successful member of our safety culture excellence family.  


• All this leads to an action item matrix of what needs to be done, by whom and when. Included in this is our Safety Perception Survey diagnostic which furthers the process of safety culture reality and what to do to improve this important part of all of our family of sites’ safety cultures

The Doc