Doing Safety Differently: A Discussion on How EHS Leaders Can Leverage SIF Prevention, Learning and Human Organizational Performance

Cary Usrey: Welcome Elevate EHS viewers, to our first co hosted podcast. Here I’m Cary Usrey and with me is my colleague, Hilary Framke, our VP of EHS Solutions. And we have our esteemed guest, Todd Hohn. He’s a VP of EHS&Q at ONE Gas utility based out of Oklahoma. He has a long and illustrious background.

We told him we don’t have enough time for your background. So we’re going to skip right to delving into your mind, Todd. So the first thing don’t tell me all about your background, tell me about a pivotal moment or experience that shaped your journey into EHS.

Todd Hohn: Wow. I’d rather talk about my background.

 I don’t know if it’s really interesting. I don’t know if there’s really one thing, Cary.

Cary Usrey: No, that’s good. 

Todd Hohn: I can tell you this. I didn’t think safety was the career I would be in when I went to college. So it wasn’t on my radar screen that this profession even existed. What really changed that is, I knew I wanted to be in the field. I wanted to be out doing something. Didn’t want to be stuck in an office. By the way, I’m not stuck in an office. But back when I started, I wanted to be out in the field and I wanted to get my hands dirty and I wanted to do those things. And the area that I was focusing on from a college perspective was within that group of safety.

When I was getting close to graduating, it was a really tough economy. And this is going back a little bit, but two years before people graduated, they had jobs and I’m like, I’m paying for college. It’s a struggle for my parents to pay for college. I want a job when I get out.

So I looked into safety and that’s how it ended up happening. Oh, by the way, the jobs came with company cars which was intriguing as well. That’s how I got into the function. Every day of doing this job there’s a lot of rewards associated with it. I think the biggest thing that keeps me energized, is the ability to impact people’s lives or change how we’re doing things. That’s really rewarding, just from a job satisfaction perspective. Opportunities to do those things and do things better. I’ve always had a continuous improvement mindset, the things that continue to keep me energized to do what I’m doing and energize probably the best word I can come up with. But it’s been a rewarding career and glad I made the decision I did. 

Hilary Framke: And you got some cool company cars.

Todd Hohn: I did. I had some really cool company cars up until about 2004, 2005 timeframe. So I had a long history of company cars. 

Cary Usrey: Excellent. 

Hilary Framke: Well, you talked about what’s energizing and I so agree with that. The number one thing that keeps me in EHS is what we can do for our employees, what we can do for the world. And I think it’s so transformative. Let’s talk about what some of the de-energizers are. What are some of the most significant challenges that you see facing the EHS industry today?

Todd Hohn: It’s interesting you ask that question. I do get the opportunity to talk about this a lot. And it’s really something that again, back to how do we change what we’re doing? And how do we get better at what we do? And I think there are a lot of challenges for this space.

There’s a lot of challenges for the safety professional in this space. There’s a lot of challenges for organizations. But I think if I were to prioritize today, what are the three things I would think about. Number one is we’re not learning like we used to learn in the element of safety.

And I think it’s important to put that into context. When I say we’re not learning, it doesn’t mean we’re not reading books and those sorts of things. What’s really happening is because we’ve achieved success in what we’ve done and the functions that we perform, we’re seeing fewer and fewer accidents.

And because we’re seeing fewer and fewer accidents, our ability to learn from those events and make improvements, that opportunity is much smaller. How do they break through and how do they get the next level. Really creates the opportunity of how do I drive more learning in the organization. It’s an enviable position for us to be in from a safety professional perspective. And we’ve had safety professionals say, I want to work myself out of a job. And we just chuckle at that because you’re never going to work yourself out of a job in this function.

And so even though you may have a low recordable incident rate, doesn’t mean you’ve achieved success. And what it also means that you’re probably defining the wrong thing. Safety is not defined as the absence of accidents, but the presence of controls. But you’re probably just one event away from something significant.

The second one, some of these elements have been existing and occurring in organizations, but it’s really become more prevalent in the last 18 months. And I’m going to coin a phrase here. I don’t think it’s even a real word but I call it a juniorosity problem.

And what that is, it’s really prevalent in high risk environments. We are seeing a less experienced workforce coming into jobs, compounded by a senior group of people leaving the organization. And so this has been happening for years, right? 

But what the nuance is here and if you’re in a high risk environment you’re in a highly regulated environment, you can have all the policies and procedures in the world. They will never capture the tribal knowledge that exists within people’s heads that have been doing this for 25 or 30 years.

So when you play this out a little bit more this juniorosity issue how it becomes more apparent or prevalent is if you talk to somebody that’s been in an organization for 25 or 30 years in oil and gas as an example, and you ask them when you started and you went to work in a crew, what was the tenure of the people there?

And they will probably say they were all 30 plus year veteran employees. And they had tribal knowledge. It was never written in a book or in a procedure about if you hear this, you see this is what this means. Today you hire somebody they’re going into a work group that may have the most senior person, five years of experience, right? So they don’t have that history and knowledge, that tribal knowledge that you really need to understand the risk associated with the work that we’re doing.

And so you can’t write a procedure or policy for everything. And so that tribal knowledge becomes really important. 

The learning means fewer accidents and then the opposite is more significant events in organizations. And that’s called serious injuries, fatalities, SIF, FSI. But that’s what’s happening. And so that’s just an evolution of where we’re at. But if I was going to pinpoint one element in there that creates heartburn for me being a safety professional, is how every organization is trying to jump into that space. And really what they’re trying to do is they have the solution to prevent serious injuries and fatalities. And I would suggest they don’t. Doing safety harder, isn’t going to result in improved results. What this really requires us to do from a safety profession is really to think and act differently.

That’s quite different than what a lot of those organizations are trying to espouse and sell. In fact, what they’re doing is criminal because people are going to die. So you need to really take a step back and understand how do we start to move the needle here. In reality, we have all these tools in our toolkit.

We need to identify different ways to learn in the organization before something bad happens. We always leveraged controls to prevent accidents, but how do we leverage those controls differently going forward? How do we verify? How do we validate that they’re in place? 

Hilary Framke: I have want to break into each of these in a deeper way and really understand it.

I’d like to jump into the juniorosity issue because that’s extremely overlooked by organizations today, about how much tribal knowledge has been a safety protection for a business. The more that those experienced workers leave our organization, our protections leave with them. And they wonder why incidents are happening for the first time that have never happened before, right?

And they don’t understand. And it was always inherently in process. But because people knew how to, what things to do to protect themselves and maybe it wasn’t reported into our system so that we could see it. They think it’s a brand new risk. 

Todd Hohn: Right. It’s not a brand new risk, Hilary. But I think the way you need to think about it is different than how we may have traditionally thought about it. So if you think about it from the traditional lens of safety, one of the things that we’re going to want to do is double, triple, quadruple down on training. And we’re going to do more and more training thinking we’ll have better results.

The reality is that workforce in a lot of cases doesn’t stay with us very long, right? That’s another element of this that we don’t talk about. We’ll never get them fully trained up, right? And so what I really think the opportunity here for safety professionals is how do you engage with our HR groups and look at the onboarding elements that we have related to the selection of employees, right?

How do we attract and retain employees? There’s an element there that we can impact, but then there’s an element of how we create mentorships for success. And I don’t like the word mentorship, but it’s the only word I can come up with, to help drive that success. But then you think about it from an operational perspective.

I can’t really take Hilary, who’s got a full time job and now burden her with this mentorship process, right? And does she have the skill sets and capability to do that? But on the flip side, if we don’t make that sort of investment, then we are missing the opportunity. So it’s an HR process.

It’s an operations process. Cause we’re gonna have to increase head count to achieve that. If we go back to 9/11, this is going way back, right? Over 20 years ago. And I think about the airline industry as an example, they furloughed a lot of pilots post that because of what had occurred.

People weren’t flying. And I don’t want to call on any one airline, but I know of one airline specifically, that took and sat down with their pilots and started to capture that tribal knowledge. They made that investment because even though it’s an extremely regulated industry, they understood that there was a lot of knowledge that wasn’t in the procedure books.

And how did they capture that? How did they memorialize that knowledge? So if we think about the safety professional today, you can play a much greater role in your organization if you can position how you can leverage the trends that are happening to drive better outcomes. And this all results in a lot more investment by the organization, but it also creates return on investment, which you can quantify. And it also helps solidify and get you a seat at the table to have these more strategic conversations.

So that’s how I would think about that issue, Hilary. I’m not a very traditionalist.

Cary knows this. I don’t think very traditionally about some of the elements of safety. But traditional thinking would be we got to do more training, right? We got double down, triple down, quadruple down on training, and we’re gonna train harder and we’ll have better people. And as a result, that doesn’t always equate to success. You gotta create success, and that requires you to do different things to achieve that.

Hilary Framke: Totally agree. I am also a non traditionalist. I say a lot of things that are disruptive. And I think what you’ve laid out is where we’re missing the competency based analysis of the work that’s being done.

And in order to know where you should bolster your program. You have to first understand the data, right? And what trends are existing. I’m continually shocked at how many organizations don’t even have their risk profiles documented. These are the biggest risks in our organization. And why?

Where they exist and what controls we currently have in place to work those down and then looking inside there for engagement opportunities to build out those mentorship programs with things like Lockout Tagout. Every new Lockout Tagout authorized employee should have a mentor. An experienced person who knows Lockout Tagout in and out, who is on the job training them for a time before they’re a fully fledged authorized employee, right?

And this on the job training doesn’t get built in, baked into the process enough. We think, oh do a classroom training and they’re just magically going to know what to do. 

Todd Hohn: Yeah, those are all valid points. I think that’s how we can start as a safety profession, start to engage differently to drive better results. So it’s point on. 

Cary Usrey: I think going back to let’s bash on traditional approaches to safety and that juniorosity thing is you put those junior people in and most organizations are frontline defense before you start a job to make sure it’s done safe is a JHA, right?

I’m junior. I don’t have that tribal experience. I don’t know what I don’t know. And now I’m doing some paper exercise to say, yes, I’m going to do it safely because this forum gives me the knowledge that I need and it doesn’t. So we have to approach those things differently. Which is the essential controls and making sure that they understand don’t proceed unless these things are in place, but that takes time and that takes effort.

And it certainly is non traditional in our current approach. So we have to really think about how that impacts across the board. And not just, hey, it’s the worker. We have to train them up kind of thing. 

Todd Hohn: And if I could just add a little bit to that, Cary I think again, spot on is you think about that new worker, right?

Coming into a workforce and you’re giving them tools that again, maybe in the past where they were successful. Exactly. Does your organization have the psychological safety that individual can say hey, time out. It doesn’t make sense to me or what happens if they do those things, how are they looked at by their peers?

How they looked at by their leadership when they do those aspects and where I think you were going with that is, is there’s another dynamic that has to change in organizations, which connects with psychological safety. 

It’s just something that happened. And how do we change that dynamic and how do we drive a different outcome? So it’s an element of controls, right? The right controls in place. And honestly, it’s my opinion that should be done in a combination of frontline employees, safety, leadership, defining what that looks like versus some of the things that are being pushed out there today or put out in the marketplace back to a JHA or a pre job safety checklist as an example.

It’s really burdening the frontline employees to make those decisions. What are the controls that we need? Are they the right controls? We still haven’t changed the dynamic and starting when safe, we’re just saying, go through this process. 

And I’m a safety professional. You guys are safety professionals. We want to find the magic bullet, not to say that we know that it exists. We know it doesn’t exist. But there’s a lot of organizations that will take the easy way, try to do it harder. We’ve done this before. It’s been successful.

Let’s just apply it here and we’ll have better success or better outcomes. The reality is to do this right you need to do it at a task level, not a hazard level, right? 

And actually put it in place. A lot of people don’t want to take that time or don’t have that time. And what we end up having is what we’ve always had. And that’s why we see our fatality rates increasing across the board because we’re just trying to do what we’ve done before harder and thinking we’ll get better results.

Cary Usrey: So Todd, let’s talk about a few of the HOP principles so far, which is human and organizational performance, right?

So was there a particular event or experience that led you to explore HOP as a framework approach and how is that different than some of the more traditional approaches? 

Todd Hohn: I would say that I’m a non traditionalist when I think about safety perspective but I was always interested as to how things were working right. And this isn’t where it started, but this certainly was foundational to how I landed into the HOP space. So I go back to the late nineties where I used to deliver a lot of causal analysis training, right?

Root cause analysis was out there and I’m like root cause just makes it seem like I only need to fix one thing. In reality, there’s a lot of things that need to be fixed when an event happens. And I would always go in and part of my process was to ask organizations, send me all of your investigation reports.

This was back before anybody cared about privacy or anything like that. So I’d get 50, 60 maybe more accident investigation reports and almost every one of them, when you looked at the cause, it was listed as an unsafe act. Okay, I get it. But when I would get into the training before we got into the causal analysis components, it was the burning platform question and I would ask the leadership, so we identified it as an unsafe act, right?

But what we’re also saying that when we say it’s an unsafe act. Was that the first time that person ever did that? Because I don’t believe that to be the first time, I believe that there’s been history here. And when we have the event, our response is we want to blame the employee.

When in reality, from a leadership perspective, when we think about systems and processes, what were you doing? Or what could you have been doing? So that wasn’t the cause that we identified. Now that would sometimes upset the group, right? The reality was to make them uncomfortable and understand that unsafe act makes it seem like we identified the problem, but in reality, what have we actually fixed?

So I was doing a lot of that at the time and where that evolved to was looking at behavior based safety, right? That’s the next evolution and that was the hot thing, the hot ticket at the time. Yeah, it was all the problems. I read all the books. I read all the offers.

I talked to a lot of them. And the antecedent behavior consequence thing made sense and resonated, but it never was able to make the connection to what I was telling leadership related to system process observe, oversight, things that you’re doing, and how did that drive a different outcome.

And while that was the hot thing going on and got into that. I was never really sold that was the answer. And that was the thing that was going to solve all these problems again, just based on the way I was thinking about it. And I don’t know, 2006 timeframe, I got introduced to Todd Conklin 2007, right in that timeframe, he and I became friends.

We hit it off immediately. And that whole idea made, it made the connection for me around system process. HOP principles resonated, but it really got down to what I was really focusing on and everything I was trying to do was system process improvement. What that provided was the story behind it.

And it, it just made so much sense to me and that’s where I’ve been ever since. And the great thing about safety is. Is everything we do is additive to what’s going on, right? We’re not replacing or throwing stuff out. We’re adding on to the success that we’ve had. But that to me was probably the journey that led me to HOP.

And the whole idea of safety too, and those aspects, but it was always in the back of my mind. I just didn’t have, I couldn’t connect the dots until I heard. Until I connected with Todd, honestly and then it all made sense. And it’s really set the, set me on the path that I’ve been on. 

Cary Usrey: I shared a similar journey. So in my previous organization, we focus a lot about, like you said, accidents or safety is not the absence of injuries. It’s a presence of control. So my big focus throughout a lot of my later career has been that verification and validation of controls in place. But it was interesting in that organization.

We would have companies that would collect that information. And I started to see some really interesting metrics. One of the biggest ones being a lot of pencil whipping, a hundred percent safe inspections, for example, or they would find and fix things and not necessarily report them. And they would focus on the minor stuff and not, the stuff that would really hurt people.

And this whole theme came up around kind of appearance based safety, which is, 

Todd Hohn: yes, 

Cary Usrey: I want to look good. I don’t necessarily want to be good. And then it was the find and fix mentality, which is I would find a hazard or find, something wrong. I would address it, but I wouldn’t look back. I wouldn’t connect the dots.

From a training standpoint, is this something we keep doing over and over? So really it was the trying to learn through work, and successful work, because I can work on safely and not have an injury, right? So it takes away that definition of what is safe. So the HOP principles to me finally connected those dots of what I was seeing and what I was trying to say, and it just put it more eloquently than I could ever do.

For example, we had an organization, they used to average a lot of immediately dangerous to the life and health findings. But then they started communicating them out to everybody when they found them. And this is again, nobody’s heard. But when that happened the messenger, the person who submitted it was getting these phone calls going, what are you doing?

Don’t make us look bad. I can’t believe, what kind of job are you running? So they went from forty to four a month, not because it got better, but because the messaging was like, just. Don’t make a

Hilary Framke: Psychological safety went down. 

Cary Usrey: Yeah, exactly. And it was like everybody’s saying, don’t ever put that in. You’ll regret it. So that’s one of my war stories I use now when we teach that, some of the HOP training and SIF prevention, you can’t manage risk if you don’t know where your risk is and HOP principles really bring that into. You can either blame or you can learn, you can’t do both.

Todd Hohn: I was just gonna pull on that find and fix piece, right? Yeah. Yeah. You guys are a software company, so I’ll plug this a little bit. Just in terms of that piece. So the example of software going back to find and fix and if you go back in time before, let’s just say we’re using paper checklists as an example, right?

And so I’m gonna use something very simple. I’m gonna find Cary not wearing safety glasses, right? So I’ve coached Cary. Cary wears his safety glasses, but the advantage of having a software solution as an example is I can now see how many times a day people are finding the element of safety glasses not being utilized, and I can get that in real time.

Yeah. Now you could say safety glasses aren’t a big issue. It’s not a big problem. But the reality is if individuals aren’t wearing safety glasses, it could be a leading indicator of something bigger in the organization. Could be a cultural indicator. And so we fixed all of those issues.

So we’re 100% compliant, right? But the reality is we haven’t fixed why it’s happening. And so that’s the system process approach. And you take it a little bit further and you think about the elements of learning and HOP. And I call this the BST model, right? The blame shame train model, right? So we find something wrong. We fix it. We retrain everybody. We call Cary out by name but we haven’t really fixed the problem. And so by applying a methodology, and it goes back to the causal analysis, all these other techniques that people have already in their toolkit. Is we start to explore, what are we fixing the, what, versus the who, and that’s an element of operational learning.

That’s an element that comes out of the safety too and HOP principle concept, but that starts to drive the system and process improvement that you need to have to achieve the results that you want to achieve, right? That’s how you start to break through that plateau. And you can start with that process when you have something bad happen, right?

Fix what versus who, but once you get really good at it or you have a software application that can show you that information in real time, I can now take those 500 events that happened yesterday of people not wearing safety glasses and apply that methodology to figure out why that was happening, right?

And fix the what behind that. So I can minimize that. And then I take the software solution and then next week, we’re going to go out and do focused observations. Yeah. So for the next, three weeks or three days, whatever it is, we’re going to go out and observe that we are, have we solved the safety glasses issue?

It doesn’t mean we’ve completely solved it, it just means we have some validation verification. So all of this becomes full circle, but really what I want to emphasize is all the things that we’re talking about are things that are in your toolkit. But what you’re doing is applying them differently based on the circumstances and having the ability to understand the data and how that data is telling you something that you can now go do something with.

And in the absence of that, we’re going to look at our TRIR rate. That’s, 1.2 and last month it was 1.2 and last year it was 1.2 and we’re good. Doesn’t mean we can’t get better. And how do we start to drive those things?

Hilary Framke: No, absolutely. And it doesn’t give us any proof that we’re going to be 1.2 next year. Yeah. And I think that’s where this becomes so pivotal. And HOP totally blows my mind, by the way. I’m brand new to HOP. I’m not afraid to admit it. I have been living HOP principles my entire EHS career with no knowledge that it was a formulated principle in science behind the scenes.

No, I keep finding this out. I’m like, Oh, I used to survey employees who were told they were doing something unsafe, I would survey the other employees in the same department or on different shifts. And I just learned recently that’s called the substitution test. I’ve just been logically doing these things to prove, as you said, Todd, to prove that it was a system process error versus an individual’s unsafe act to say to my business.

This is a larger, deeper problem than John just wanted to get hurt today. John is very unsafe and puts his safety at risk and John needs to be retrained. No, we have forced John to feel that this is the only decision that he can make in this circumstance because of a process design and a system choice or a leadership gap.

And once you start to see that, those system process errors, and you don’t get distracted by the human error pieces, that’s when you really drive change that prevents reoccurrence. 

Todd Hohn: And I think where you’re ultimately going with that, Hilary, and back to where we started this conversation and the safety professional in general, right?

The things that we’re doing today, let’s just say you’re on the HOP journey. You’re on the, I call it operational learning journey. If you’re on that journey what you’re doing is not only addressing and working to improve the safety outcomes, right? For the oragnization. But what you’re also doing. And it could be directly or indirectly is helping the enterprise be better at continuous improvement.

Yeah. Because these concepts, this thinking goes across the enterprise, right? Cary knows this. Yeah, I’ve been doing this a long time. And other than calling it operational learning or safety differently, what I’m really looking for is cues within the organization. Are we seeing or understanding this? And are we doing something different? And one of the things, or a couple of things that I really, that are verbal cues to me, that we’re moving in the right direction.

And that’s the element of learning. There’s never an end point with learning. Let’s be clear, if you stop learning, you’re dying, right? That’s the reality of this. So when you think about the operational learning journey, whether you think about it from a people’s safety perspective or an enterprise perspective, what you want to be doing is vectoring towards the learning, right?

You’re never going to be perfect at this, but you want to be vectoring towards learning versus the opposite, which would be blaming. And so where you’re going with this is, were you trying to listen for, within the organization, outside the space of safety, right?

The people that you work with every day on your team on the safety side is how are other leaders leveraging those words, right? And so things I listened for, it’s not if, but when, and what they’re thinking about is it’s going to happen, right? How do we make sure we have the right things in place so that when that happens, we don’t have a negative outcome.

That’s your building your resiliency your capacity, I’m calling it capacity. I call it safely, right? I listened for those words, not if, but when. The other thing that I listened for, especially when something happens, is the fixing what versus the who, right? And if our solutions are fixing the who, like if Hilary was just cared more, worked hard, or we’d have better outcomes.

Then we haven’t really achieved what we need to achieve. So those are the things that I look forward to understand is the organization vectoring towards learning. Yeah. Or are they stuck where they’re at? And when I start to hear those things. Then I know we’re on the right path. I’m not going to spend. There’s a lot of people and a lot of organizations that claim to have, this is the way you implement HOP.

I’ve been doing this a long time. There’s not one exact model. Cause if there was one exact model, we would all be using it. Reality is, every organization is different. Every leadership team is different. Every culture is different. What you need to anchor to is the process and the principles. And then really help the organization to know that they’re adding to what they’re doing, not replacing what they’re doing, and help them understand what this looks like as we move forward with that.

And this aspect of not if but when, I always start off with every meeting is asking three questions. Do we have perfect people? Do we have perfect processes? Do we have perfect assets? And when you ask those questions, it sets the stage that we don’t have perfection. So that just brings in the element that there’s always going to be errors being made, right?

Yeah. So that clears the slate for how do we move that forward? There’s other techniques that I use, but the idea I’m trying to keep it simple, stupid, the KISS method and really simplify the process and then really listen for, is the language changing in the organization? And if that’s happening, then we can build on that.

And there’s always going to be outliers. That’s the reality of this. There’s going to be people that don’t buy into this, no matter how good you are at what you do and you’ll have to work more with them, but you’re looking for the larger trends or the mega trends within the organization that are changing.

Cary Usrey: So it’s always easier to destroy than to create, right? So it’s always easier, to blame than to learn from an event, right? So it’s easy to say. 

Hilary Framke: Because it’s just the individual. So if we just correct this individual’s behavior, okay, we can get back to work. The system process changes are so much deeper and require more resources, more time, more effort.

And so that most of the time they just want it wrapped. So blaming the individual is so comforting. I think in that way. 

Cary Usrey: Yeah. It almost feels like a race after an incident or an event to say how quickly can we jump to a solution, roll it out. And then we never, oftentimes we never even look back to see, was it implemented or did it even have an impact on prevention?

Todd Hohn: Yeah. And so that part of that, again, I think it’s disciplined from a safety professional perspective. You got to be comfortable in where you’re at in the organization, but you got to be very disciplined. And Cary knows this from past experiences, but we had a process at another organization.

Where within 24 hours, you’re communicating just facts. Fact based report. Here’s what happened. Not drawing any conclusions. And the reason we created that is because everybody wants to jump to corrective actions. What do we need to do differently? Yep. Yep. And by at least providing some level of insight to what happened from a factual basis, you alleviate some of that. And then you create the process for how you’re going to walk through the event review, the learning event, and how you’re going to create the corrective actions post that. And you really need to be disciplined in that process and be organized around it.

But you also need to reinforce with leadership. Back to Cary’s point. If we do a corrective action today and we’re wrong, we just wasted how much time on this corrective action. We understand what happened. Let’s focus on what we can do differently, but base that in the analysis that we performed and the extent of condition that exists in the organization on where we need to apply that so that when we put the corrective actions in place, we know what that they are going to address the issue, and then we can verify validate focus inspections afterwards to make sure that they were effective, right?

If they weren’t, then we can go back and tweak. But that process takes a little bit longer, but it saves time and effort and wasted time if you’re focused on the wrong things, because everybody thinks they have the answer, right? In reality, they hardly ever have the right answer. 

Hilary Framke: Absolutely. Let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s talk about the role that technology can play in supporting HOP principles and something that I always lean on right away. The reason I’ve always been a proponent of tech. Standardization on our investigation practices. The questions that we ask, having not free text fill in, drop down menus so we can start to bucketize things and understand them, but also creating finally a process on the back end for just even evaluating current state.

Something that we don’t do. If you don’t know where to go focus, at least collect information about how you’re solving for problems today and grading them. I always said something in my business that shocked me is how often we’re only doing the hierarchy of controls has been around for how long.

Yet all of our corrective actions are either PPE or administrative control, but we all know safety professionals. Those are the least effective, but we’re constantly going backwards. 

Todd Hohn: Yeah we could spend time on leading metrics. I worked on a metric that actually drove better outcomes from leveraging the hierarchy controls, but again, required discipline and you would not get credit for anything administrative, right?

So the idea was focused on the hierarchy, the higher level of items. So you mentioned something around standardization of software. And for transparency, I spent time in the software space. So I was in a similar role to you guys, the subject matter expert. I was responsible for thought leadership.

The group I had was called strategic resources group in the company that, that I was involved with. And one of the things that was eye opening maybe that’s the wrong word for it was eye opening to me when I would engage with peers, potential clients or existing clients. Is how they thought or how they think software is going to solve their problems.

And the reality is software will automate a bad process as well as it will automate a good process. So if you don’t have a really good process or defined process back to standardization, you’re not going to be happy with the outcomes, right? So you gotta really spend a lot of time and make sure you know what you’re trying to accomplish and what does that workflow.

It seems very simple, but it’s complex when you start to think about it. What’s the workflow that has to happen? And then how or what questions do I want to have answered as part of that workflow? That really requires partnership with the software organization that you’re working with. I can pick out of the box stuff that the software company may have.

That means I have to adapt my practices, right? Or it could be they adapt and build what I’m doing today to reduce the change management in my organization. There’s two ways to do that, but there’s a third way where I’d have a bad process, I’d give it to you. It’s confusing for everybody that gets it.

It doesn’t give me what I want. And there’s some time and effort that needs to be spent on the front end to get what you want. But the way I think about software and just from the standpoint of beyond standardization, to me, it’s about better data. It’s about better insights from that data and it’s efficiency, right?

I can do things much quicker. That example of the 500 instances of safety glasses not being worn. If I’m using a paper based solution, fax machines existed. That stuff was faxed in. It wouldn’t get inputted to Excel for 30 days. And then it’d be another two weeks before I would look at that process with software that’s happening instantaneous, right? Yeah. 

And where I’m going with all of that, and it’s really how I would summarize the software play, it’s the right information to the right people at the right time, where they can act. So I got to trust the data. The data has got to be trusted.

There’s integrity around the data. Back to the bad process, right? It’s a bad process. The data is going to get challenged. So those things become really important. But what I want to be in position to do is when I hand that report to Cary, who’s my boss. He knows exactly what he needs to do, right?

Right time, right people, so they can act. That’s how I summarize software. And that’s why I utilize software. So I was an early adopter of software. I actually moved from a risk management role into software. And I still believe. But I thought at the time that was the future and that would change everything.

And that was back in 2007, 2008 timeframe. I would say I was an early adopter to that process. I was on the software side associated with that, but the idea is just like it continues to evolve today. And AI will make things much better if done. Let me qualify it. If done right, will give us better data, better insight, more efficiencies. But it’s still the future, and it’s still got a long ways to go. 

Cary Usrey: I just want to add a little bit onto that too, is back to, the I want to work myself out of a job. You’re not going to eliminate a job. And even AI, to me, these are augmentations of efficiency and effort for the practitioner, not a replacement for.

So Hilary and I we’re big proponents of the practical applications. Whether it’s AI or whether it’s a form or tool or a feature functionality is, we’re looking at it of, is this going to help put the practitioner better in control, gain them time and efficiency, give them better outputs.

And make them better at their job because I want the practitioner to do their job, which is EHS. Not a clerk, not run pivot tables, right? Not have to go chase data. It should be readily and easily available. So they can make decisions. They can share that information and things like that.

So it should be a staff augmentation, right? Not a replacement or anything like that. And back to your bad processes. You can’t expect to take a paper process, put it into electronic format and reap the benefits. You have to look at it is what can software give you that you don’t get from paper and grow in and evolve from that, because I’ve seen paper processes get replaced by an electronic version, but the way it’s being collected, the way it’s being used is not leveraging all of that information rolling up into that transparency and visibility. So I think there’s a lot of benefits to it, and I’m sure we can keep going. I just want to stress that.

Hilary Framke: Technology can take us, which is very exciting is even if you haven’t figured out how to solve for it, the data collection piece that you have brought up, Todd the ability to see and extrapolate.

So if you collect it, it can be viewed. So if we start to collect how many of our controls are administrative, what percentile? If we start to grade our controls as adequate or ineffective by a specific energy source, if we start to make these connections between the risk and the control methodologies and grade them, scale them, do something with classification and then report that data on the back end we have the proof that we need as EHS practitioners to tell a story back to our business to say, this is our current maturity of incident management and control, and don’t take my word for it, it’s here on this report right here for you to see based on what’s been uploaded to the technology.

Todd Hohn: Yeah agreed. And I think to sum it up is what you’re really telling them is, are we lucky or good? And if we’re good, great. Do more of that. Continue doing that. If we’re not good, we’ve identified those areas where we have the opportunity to build more robust controls, to drive the outcomes we want to achieve.

But I agree with all of that. The only caveat I would add is, AI will be used for good and AI will be used for bad, right? And I think one of the opportunities is how do we create and align from a professional perspective to define and identify what the good looks like. Cause there’ll be plenty out there trying to position and sell the good.

For example you can go on it right now, chat GPT and if you have an accident, put in the accident and it’s going to give you corrective actions. That’s an example, right? 

Cary Usrey: That’s scary, but yes. 

Todd Hohn: And I know people that are doing it and I’ve warned them about, what are you actually trying to do with that? Yeah. Cause they’ve looked at what traditional event review process looks like and how much more efficient this was like back to the aspect of the corrective action discussion we were having a few minutes ago. If we don’t know truly what the causes were, and the way I think about causes is the aspect of what was the environment that we were in and then what are the conditions and the thought processes that people were having, right?

None of that’s captured through that process. It just looks at here’s the accident that happened. Here’s what you need to do differently. Yeah. Some of those elements might be part of what you do, but the reality is until you capture that mindset. You don’t really understand, and you can’t truly build the context of the event to really get to the right corrective actions.

And that’s again back to where we started this conversation around SIF. If you want to do SIF differently and have better results, you better be willing to put the effort into it. And align your organization around what that actually looks like to achieve. If it’s just doing it harder and doing more checklists and hoping for better results, that’s really what it comes down to is hope.

And that’s not going to help you achieve where you want to be. This is going to require us to do a lot more work than maybe what a lot of people have signed up for, but back to why I got into this space, I’m here to impact people’s lives, there’s nothing larger than that, and it’s worth that investment for me, and it’s important for me to help the people that I work with to understand that’s the level of investment you need to make, because that’s what it’s going to take, right? And it’s no simpler than that. 

Cary Usrey: Love it. 

Hilary Framke: Yeah, seeing through the trees. Is going to be, I think, what’s asked of EHS practitioners as we continue to evolve. And there are going to be no easy answers. All the easy answers were taken. That’s how we came down the level that we came down.

Now it’s the hard ones and it’s the ones that intersect culture with risk. And like you said, psychological safety and environment. It’s going to be very complicated. And a big tree. 

Todd Hohn: I think that’s a really good way to think about it. If it was easy, we would have done it. Cause if you think about our success that we’ve achieved to date on the safety profession and the low TRIR rates we’ve demonstrated, we can fix the things that we need to be fixed. What’s the last part of this journey? Is the hardest part and it’s super complex. And it’s going to require you as a safety professional to be able to work across all parts of your enterprise, to create that engagement and to really get the support to drive the change you need to drive, and you have to be up for that task, right?

And if you’re not up for that task. You need to figure out how you either get yourself up or get equipped so you can start to do that, because that’s really what it’s going to take. And in the absence of that, we’ll have what we have right now, right? And it may seem like it’s a good place to be, but it’s wrought with a lot of potential problems and danger and risks down the road. So it’s going to require that effort. So I like, I just put it in my words. 

Hilary Framke: One day away from a traumatic event, when you see that in an organization you walk around and you see the serious risks that are happening that aren’t getting reported, that aren’t well controlled and that’s when my heart drops.

As a practitioner, because the risk is so out of control that we’re just one distracted person, tired person, away from having a very traumatic event in our business. And until an organization starts to see and drive real change in process to prevent those things from happening that’s what we’re going to have to live with on a daily basis.

Todd Hohn: Absolutely. 

Cary Usrey: So with that, I think we’ll conclude. I know we had a little bit more, but I think we’re running out of time. We’ll have to have you on for another session, Todd. 

Todd Hohn: Yeah, for sure. 

Cary Usrey: So Todd, thank you very much for being a guest on Elevate EHS. It was very entertaining, very thought provoking, and I hope our listeners and viewers get a lot out of it. So thank you very much. 

Todd Hohn: Appreciate it. Thank you guys. 

Hilary Framke: Bye! Till next time.