Wade Needham has been immensely influential as a mentor. We are peers in age, we are diverse in experience, and the way his brain works is out of this world!
Wade challenges and critiques my thinking, assumptions, and limiting beliefs. It’s unusual to have a conversation with him in which I don’t get a little uncomfortable, which is a sign of learning and growth.
Wade is also a superb role model of professional practice: I learn even more from how he thinks – and researches, influences, communicates, strategises, joins dots together – than from the excellent content of his words and insights.
He is also phenomenally generous.
The wider world
In the wider health and safety world, Dave Provan takes the cake.
I've been lucky to spend a lot of informal time with Dave, through his journey as a PhD researcher, building his consulting business and Safety Futures programmes, and collaborating together on the Safety Clutter Scorecard.
His communication, research discipline and passion are important inputs for my own work. We share a common passion for better understanding and drastically improving H&S professional practice, which makes sense – because at the core, we are both H&S professionals who are trying to solve our own problems and help others in the same boat.
I would be nowhere as good a professional without Dave and his work.
In hindsight
I wish at the start I’d realised that it really is all about people: safety is a social construct. This challenges the objectified, standardised, simplified and linear approaches which dominate well-intentioned H&S practice.
Seeing the world this way caused me enormous personal and professional grief, including the ethical conflicts it created early on:
- Is it fair to fire someone who made a mistake that we only judge in hindsight?
- Is it logical to reward adaptive behaviour when outcomes are good, only to punish the same adaptive behaviour when the odd thing goes wrong?
- Is it professional of us to do stuff that we confidently know has no connection with actual safety outcomes?
I also wish I had realised earlier that to improve health and safety, far more insight and inspiration comes from outside the H&S field.
My greatest impact on the H&S of work happens when I draw on sources, content and thinking from outside H&S. These inputs can be as varied as organisational development, psychology, ecology, complexity science, philosophy, sociology, marketing, and even comedy!
When starting out
Treat everything you know as a hypothesis that needs testing (and test it).
It’s almost never black and white so don’t pretend it is.
Continually know your assumptions, and check them.
You are peripheral, discretionary and replaceable until you make yourself otherwise.
Ask more questions, always more questions.
Be a human first, as your #1 ethical principle.
Understand that it always makes sense for some reason, you just don’t know it until you start sense-making yourself.
Context is a million times more important than content.
We are in the game of change, so if you are not changing yourself, attending to change around you, and leading change, you are in trouble.
Andrew Barrett is chief connector, coach and host of Safety on Tap.
