Reflections on the Global Safety Innovation Summit
It’s a bit soon to have properly digested everything, but I’m sitting in the airport with nothing better to do, so here goes.
Let’s get all the obvious stuff out of the way that you will have probably already seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Yes, it was a great event. Well-conceived and well executed. Everything was smooth, easy and well catered for. The food was excellent and plentiful (I once was at a conference where they ran out of food. That got ugly fast). The evening events were awesome, with music, food and drink and much conviviality.
There were early morning (or, more accurately for some of us, middle of the night) fire alarms. At more than one hotel where lots of safety people were staying? Co-incidence or conspiracy? Someone getting their own back on all those safety types? Maybe.
New connections and re-connections everywhere. I lost count of the number of people that I have known on-line for years and met for the first time this week. As Jeff Lyth said, it was like LinkedIn Live. Do some people need to update their profile pictures? Maybe.
Clearly, this was not your common or garden safety event. I even took a photo (which I won’t post in case someone gets fired) of dozens of safety people walking down the broad staircase at the venue without a handrail within reach. This isn’t a blow-by-blow review of speakers and content, mainly because I am a terrible note taker and so will get lots wrong, just some points of interest.
There is a solid background of academic research for New View thinking, but also plenty of questions that haven’t been rigorously tested. But, as practitioners, we are not good at using that to build a case for our intentions.
Lesson – talk to Drew Rae if you have capacity for some field research and follow Ben Hutchinson for all that’s already been done. Then use that as the rationale for change and innovation.
There are now plenty of major organisations on this innovation journey. We heard about Shell, Tesla, BP and Bluescope steel, amongst others. All pointing out that, between the wins, there are plenty of challenges and it’s not all a bed of roses. They struggle to overcome the corporate inertia and unlearn so much of what has gone before. But small organisations also point out that it’s hard without the resources they need. Then contracting companies say it’s hard because the client is imposing contradictory demands, but client companies say it’s hard because they don’t have control over the people.
Lesson – everyone has challenges – get over it and work out how to manage yours based on what you need, rather than what someone else has done.
There were plenty of people just beginning to think in this way. The generosity of everyone to share their ideas and examples is just amazing. But we do need more examples of how it works in practice. Not to copy – because what works in one context may not work in another – but to learn from, get inspired by and build on to work out your own way forward.
Lesson – please share the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing in this space. It may not seem earth-shattering to you, but someone somewhere will find it an inspiration.
Having said we need more nuts and bolts examples, it’s important to remember that this is, first and foremost, a philosophical shift. If you don’t make that shift, especially at a senior level, no amount of tools and techniques will help. Lisa Lande talked about implementing a more ecological approach into the strongly engineering-based nuclear industry – this will have challenges (and lots of them) – but is doable as these are not incompatible. Someone else (no names!) talked about implementing HOP into a strongly compliance-focussed culture. In my view, this simply will not work – at least not in a widespread and sustainable way. They are fundamentally at odds.
Lesson – culture drives context. Gotta get that stuff right.
I got a little frustrated because I’d heard a lot of this before. But, although this thinking is becoming much more mainstream, there were still a lot of people getting exposed to it for the first time. Comfortable within our own troupes of fellow travellers, it’s easy to forget that it’s important to keep repeating it. But we also need more of those real world examples so people can see what it looks like in practice.
Lesson – keep sharing, keep exposing people and if you get the chance to come to the next one, take it!