We discuss safety controls we defeat (or totally ignore) because they lack operational fidelity. Next it's onto audits / observations and the parent-child dynamic that is frequently present in our lives.

(Transcript Start)


[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to

[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name. What a dumb

[00:00:07] spk_0: names. So stupid.

[00:00:21] spk_1: Let's do it right. We're on uh, welcome back. If you are returning, which seeing episode four, I hope you've heard something before this. We're happy to have you. Um And we're going to get into sort of, we'll recap the homework from last week.

[00:00:39] spk_0: The, the, the small optional experiment,

[00:00:43] spk_1: mandatory homework that you didn't do it. Go back and listen, redo it.

[00:00:48] spk_0: You're not even allowed to listen to this. If you didn't

[00:00:50] spk_1: do it, won't make any sense to you now. Uh So we'll talk about that and we have a pretty good idea of where we're going to go. So last week's homework was to think about the controls that we have in our everyday life that we defeat. And I gave an example towards the end, that was the coffee pot that we use every day. Has a built-in timer on how long it will keep the coffee warm for. And we are always going back and turning it back on every time because we are too lazy to make another pot of coffee.

[00:01:25] spk_0: Yes. And so the reason we want to be thinking about controls that we defeat is because if we're thinking about this, from a work perspective, oftentimes when we put in a control that we're really hoping is actually could do something as dramatic as save somebody's life that we want to make sure that it actually has what we would call operational fidelity. Meaning does it work in real life for the people that have to use it or does it do things like cry wolf? Meaning like it, it works when we don't want it to work or is it constraining behavior so much that the person uh is going to naturally want to defeat it? Because what they think is the right thing to do, um it's preventing them from doing the right thing to do and so the better,

[00:02:10] spk_1: the better we get at finding them

[00:02:12] spk_0: or yeah, finding them or, or even just like even recognizing that they exist so that we're willing to have conversation about them, even recognizing, like in, in our like best case scenario of designing something we're still inadvertently gonna design in an unintended consequence and that those types of things exist in our personal life. And we should not be surprised when we find them in the work world. And we want to work with the folks that have to actually engage with those controls or defenses in order to improve

[00:02:43] spk_1: them. And it feels like historically the higher the consequence of the activity, the less likely we were to even, except that people have to bypass. Right. It's like, no, you don't, you don't get to bypass them. You have to follow it, you have to do it and it, and operational fidelity just kicks in. It doesn't make sense and real life and real work. So, what did we find?

[00:03:06] spk_0: Well, so, so coffee maker is still up there because I, I dealt with it this, this week of saying I just, I'd get there and my coffee would be cold because it automatically turned itself off. Um, but we've got a couple other kitchen options. Um, one of, one of my pet peeves is the door alarm on the refrigerator. I don't know if that's the same in, in your refrigerator world or not, but my alarm tends to alarm when I'm doing things like putting the groceries away where I, I know, I know it's open, I'm there. I'm, I'm hanging out with the open refrigerator door and it's beeping at me. But unfortunately, I think there's like a design flaw with my alarm because the one time where I do need it to work, like if it's slightly a jar, like the refrigerator is slightly a jar and I'm unaware that it is slightly a jar. Uh, the alarm actually doesn't work when that's true. And I've left the refrigerator open all night twice.

[00:04:11] spk_1: That sounds healthy. Not concerning at all for the food that was inside of there. Uh My, so maybe this is just a fridge issue because mine, well, as soon as you open it, I feel like I'm in there and, you know, as soon as you want to browse what's available in your fridge, you forget and then you close it and you open it back up again, 30 seconds later, expecting it to be different. I feel like as soon as I open mine, it starts raining and there's, and people may think like, we'll just turn off. I don't even know how. And I've tried, I'm not, I'm fairly technically like savvy and I can't, and it just beeps all the time and now I just don't even hear it. So I think even if it was beeping while it was like a jar, but this thing is just crazy. I just don't even listen to it anymore. It's just the ultimate cry wolf control I've ever heard. Um And it's every day.

[00:05:03] spk_0: Yeah. Yeah. Even beeping noise. So I'm thinking back to the work world, beeping noises of ways, like administratively that we tried to, to have some level of transparency to a system. Like, um when people were on forklifts in our organization, you're supposed to honk at every intersection to warn other people that you were around because some of the intersections didn't have great line of sight, great visibility. But even in that environment, the honking became so normalized, you didn't hear it anymore. Like there was just, it was a cacophony of noise in general and there was just like the beeping honking blends into the background and it, it becomes an ineffective way of warning anyone of anything because you, you just tune it out. You don't hear it.

[00:05:47] spk_1: Cacophony. Um, I'm not letting that go. People listening probably about one or two things. Wow. What a great word. Or who did she think

[00:05:56] spk_0: she is? It's one of my favorite. I know you

[00:06:00] spk_1: use it all the time and always correctly, but somehow way too often.

[00:06:07] spk_0: Uh Yeah. Yeah, that's probably accurate.

[00:06:11] spk_1: Let's, let's keep it going. What else? Um, on the work side in terms of these controls that are defeated.

[00:06:19] spk_0: Oh, lots of them. Um, lots of them. And it's interesting because it depends, even if we're talking about things on the prevention side of like a loss of control or on the mitigation side of a loss of control. And obviously, depending upon how you define your loss of control that, that changes on the prevention side, there's lots and lots of times that you see guarding being bypassed because it, it, it truly gets in the way of somebody trying to execute a job. Whether it be like physically you can't execute the job that way or you just can't see what you're doing.

[00:06:48] spk_1: Um And is that, I mean, this is coming from the ignorant nonindustrial safety person. So, is, is that you know, I was a business guy. Yeah. Um, business. So, if I, if I have a, you know, if I'm doing a task it has to be, to a certain parameters. I'm incapable of accomplishing that with the garden because I can't see the piece well enough. Is that what's happening

[00:07:12] spk_0: in a lot of you? So, there's many, many different things that can be happening. But in my world, a lot of the time we were making parts to an aircraft engine that actually had to be with an incredible tolerance and you had fingers crossed, fingers crossed, right? And um if there was any aspect of that, that was manual, you absolutely had to see what was going on and the guarding made it very hard to do so. Right? And in, if you're sitting in an office somewhere and the idea of guarding being difficult to like see through your first thought as well and just clean it, right? But as you, as, as you're actually making this part, it is actively getting dirty and you are not able to see to the point that you're not confident you can actually create the part that your job is to create that part with the guarding in place. And so just to say like if I went and had a conversation with folks and found out that this was true, just saying, well, I'm sorry, you still have to put the guarding in place doesn't alleviate that conflict. Right. So we can't leave it broken. It's, you know, we can't just say, well, you know, I guess you can't use the guarding. Um, but we do have to get creative with how we're going to come up with a solution set so the person can be protected and can actually meet a lot of regulatory requirements as well. Um, and, and, and production requirements. Right. And, and actually be able to do their job. So that's on the prevention side. And then there's um a control that actually did a learning team and it came up in the learning team, it was um an organization that they uh they use nail guns a lot. They did a lot of work with um with fabricating and putting together wood pieces which required nailing them. And there is a safety on some nail guns. Um And the safety is in a position like the, the reason it exists is if you've made a mistake of uh either touching the trigger when you didn't want to or um you don't have the nail gun lined up properly. So you could accidentally sort of shoot a nail across the room. What the safety is designed to do is that you have to make sure that the nail gun is perpendicular to the surface that you are trying to nail. And it in doing that once you've pushed the nail gun against that surface, it pushes down a safety and then that releases the trigger so that you couldn't accidentally trigger it without having that safety pushed down and,

[00:09:39] spk_1: and I imagine we're going to get to part two, which is that safety is long gone.

[00:09:44] spk_0: Yeah, a lot of people, um, yeah, a lot of people tape it down because it actually makes it incredibly difficult to use the nail gun in anything but a perfectly perpendicular position. Which in reality, when you're watching people do the work or when they're explaining how they do the work, um they physically can't get their body in that position. So it, in order to allow them to do the work, they have taped down the safety. So I was trying to think of the reason I was pausing there is I don't think it really matters if we're talking about prevention or mitigation in that circumstance. But it is a, yeah, it's a control that I've seen defeated in many different places because it makes it very hard to execute the job that you're trying to execute.

[00:10:29] spk_1: And from an, from an outside, you know, safety or audit perspective, we people see these modifications and they think like, nope, that's unacceptable. You can't do this. Right. And so that's where we find a lot of the issues pop up because we're like these safeties are there to keep you safe and you're not using them. And when there's more context, you find that it's almost impossible to get my job done with these safeties

[00:10:54] spk_0: Yeah. And so like if we go back to when we are talking about fundamental attribution error, I think episode one maybe. Um that's like if you see something like it feels egregious on the surface like I got this, this nail gun that you could, you know, you could seriously injure yourself or somebody else. And the thing that is supposed to be protecting you and protecting other people has been defeated. And so your first impression, right? The very first initial visceral thought that you have is, yeah, this terrible human. How dare this? Terrible, like I would never do that like that you, you shouldn't be lazy about terrible. So getting beyond that is part of what we fight with in this space.

[00:11:42] spk_1: So let's let's bridge this into maybe that interaction, right? Where we are observing someone performing a task and these, these uh controls might that are being defeated might show up in an audit or something like that. So let's talk about audits a little bit because I know it's a place that you've spend a lot of time in your safety, we

[00:12:06] spk_0: wee bit of time. Um So if we're trying to think how we use the idea of controls, having operational fidelity, using that within the work world and sort of integrating that hop thought process into the work world, a good place to do that is in things like observations, things like audits, they are already kind of required any way to be in an interaction, you want to just kind of tweak that interaction to align more in the hop space. If you've already been able to do that, right? If your audits are already very much aligned in the hop space. Fantastic. If you've, you know, replaced observations with things like seeking operator struggle. Fantastic. But if you're kind of stuck in a place where you are mandated to do formal audits, formal observations, then one of the suggestions that, that we have is to add in a bit of conversation around whether the controls that people are interacting with, whether they make sense, right? And so asking those questions instead of just observing whether or not somebody is using a control, right? Or using a specific defense, which is oftentimes what we're sent out to do, um ask people questions about when it's really hard to use it or when it feels like it's not necessary. So something as simple as, hey, I'm going out and I'm doing an audit and we're going to do it around fall protection and I'm observing people and I'm seeing whether they're tied off properly. I'm seeing whether or not, you know, all of the lanyards have been inspected and I'm doing all that and I got my check sheet, what you can add to that discussion to align with this space is talking to some folks around, hey, you know, when you're doing whatever task they're doing whatever job they're doing like, are there times where it's really, really difficult to actually use your fall protection are there times where, you know, you've been told you're supposed to be using it, but it just feels completely impractical to use it. And then in that space, right, that we're having those conversations, our mission is just to learn and we want to very much separate out the idea of correcting someone or coaching someone in that moment. Because if we do that, we shut down all the learning. So we want to be able to just gather information and learn from people about something that perhaps we didn't know before. And in order to create space to do that, we have to then separate it from a coaching discussion. So if I find out that you, there is a space like you're like, hey, yeah, when I'm, you know, specifically when I'm working on this leading edge, it's really hard for me to, to execute this with the full protection. It always feels like it's getting in the way rather than me saying, well, you use it though, right? Like you have to use like I, I need you to understand that you still have to use it. I know it's hard but you rather than engaging in conversation that way, I would just be curious about, hey, show me, show me some more like, tell me more about why that is hard and help me see what you're seeing. So that we can then figure out how to address it maybe at a different point. Right? It doesn't have to be far in the future, but the learning comes first. I think

[00:15:05] spk_1: it was fascinating for me to learn about observations, audits and how they're conducted and it changes kind of organization to organization in my world and in most of the startup world, especially in the sales side, you make observations all the time and you, you give feedback immediately after the call ends and you, and or sometimes there's tools now that you can give it during the call. But when we hear about some observations or audits in these organizations, it's the, the observer goes in and just watches for the whole time. And at the end it's like, let me tell you what you did. Good. Let me tell you what you did bad and let me tell you what you need to stop doing or start doing. Got it great. And

[00:15:44] spk_0: which is not, that's not the case in every organization, but for sure there's a lot of them that like, I mean, they've taught us, hey, this is what it looks like in our world. You kind of like, it's almost, it's a little bit creepy, right? Like somebody's got a clipboard, you know, you kind of go and you ask permission or you just say, hey, I'm here to do an observation or I'm here to do an audit and then, um and then they just kind of watch what you do and then afterwards they give you kind of pointers

[00:16:10] spk_1: tips like, hey, um, and I'm sure there are people who have done the work. It's like, hey, I've never done this, but I have the sheet of paper that says you should have done it this way. And then the person hearing information is like, I, I don't care what you, what you have in your hand. this is, it's impossible and we actually never find out what that sort of that gap is. What's the gap between what's on paper and what I actually have to do to get this job done. And so we, we constantly about sort of the interactions within those observations. It's something that most people do often and by just changing the way we sort of approach it and instead of kind of having them, we're going to segue into that sort of parent child dynamic of, I'm going to tell you what you did, whether it was right or wrong to teach people what it's like to do this job and let's talk about it. So let's, let's talk about that sort of idea of how these observations have done regardless of what the person who's doing it. Uh Their belief is just kind of how they're taught to us to sort of create almost a parent child dynamic in these observations.

[00:17:14] spk_0: Yeah, I, I think maybe just like the function of an observation itself lends itself to us kind of viewing things as a parent child dynamic so that there's is it called transactional analysis. You know, this better than I did from

[00:17:30] spk_1: world. We talk about that a lot in sales because you can imagine, right? Cold calling someone the person you've probably been cold call and you've just immediately stepped into that like parent tone of who do you think you are? What do? Yeah. So we teach a lot about that on the sales side.

[00:17:46] spk_0: So fancy name for a transactional analysis. Uh Less fancy is um when we interact with people, there's a couple of different dynamics that you can be in. 11 of which is an adult, adult conversation and the other is um a parent, child conversation and kind of the nature of audits, the nature of observations lend themselves to kind of push people into a parent child dynamic. Um Meaning that if you're the person holding the clipboard, like out there doing the audit kind of the role that you put yourself in or the role you've been told to be in is one of um a coaching educational. I'm going to tell you what you're doing wrong. I'm going to tell you what you're doing, right? Like like a parent talking to a child about like, hey, I, I know this, I kind of know better. I have, I've got the clipboard, right? And so I'm going to watch you and tell you what you need to do differently than what you are doing. And I'm gonna sort of congratulate you when you've done something. Well,

[00:18:48] spk_1: sometimes we do this sandwich feedback, which is my favorite. Here's what we did. Well, here's what you did terribly, but I got to finish something good and then your shoelace is retired. So that's good.

[00:19:01] spk_0: And so when you are on the receiving end of that, independent of like the tone of voice that we use or like how we try to approach the conversation, you do feel like you're being spoken down to. And when you feel like you're being talked down to, you have very little desire to engage in real meaningful conversation. You just kind of want the interaction to end as quickly as possible. And so if we truly like, if we want to learn about where controls work well, where they don't work well, where they have operational fidelity, where they don't like all of those like very important pieces of how our system is working. Then our mission would be to engage in those conversations as adults, adult, adult fashion and to do that, that means we can't come from a place of authority or judgment. If we're the one with the clipboard, we have to come from a place of um curiosity of trying to understand the person's world, right? So we're there more to ask questions and to learn than we are to coach. Now, that doesn't mean there's never space for coaching. But if we're in a coaching role, I mean, our, our hope is that you're in a position that you actually have the ability to coach, meaning you have done the work before. And it's more of like a teacher apprentice type of relationship in which there's mutual respect there. Because there is recognition that the person who is doing the teaching has uh has expertise, has authority in this space that the person who is doing the who is the student is learning from that teacher sort of apprentice dynamic is often not what's happening when we've set up an audit, right? Or an observation. Unfortunately, like at least, for example, in my world, I was required to do observations and audits around things like uh forklift, driving. But what have, what have I never done in my entire life? Matt,

[00:20:51] spk_1: I drive a forklift. I do like to think that secretly though you were like, I gotta figure this out and you have like a little toy one that you would play around with. But no, you've never driven a forklift.

[00:21:00] spk_0: Um Yeah. And so so that's definitely not like as much as I would love to put myself in sort of this uh like teacher role. I, I couldn't be a teacher like all I, all I had at my disposal was a checklist and some safety leader information. Um in that type of interaction, I would be much better off if I was in an adult adult dynamic and I was asking questions about the things that were frustrating to people or, you know, for them to teach me about their world so that I could learn from them where the system brittleness is, are recognizing that I might have access to some resourcing to make some changes that they don't have access to. So that's what I have access to. Not more knowledge, right? Not more expertise, but I have access to some resourcing. So I would love to learn what's happening, what's not working well, what is

[00:21:47] spk_1: working well? And those operators have so much to share. But if they have been doing this for any amount of time, the, you know, if they've been on for 20 years and 20 years of these parent child interactions, they, they, they don't want to entertain the conversation and it's something we talk a lot about how integrating hop H O P new view, whatever you, you you're calling it. Um how it, there's just so many opportunities in your everyday interactions to apply this, that isn't the grand change of post event learning teams, right? Um And this is definitely one of those where we, we are aware that it's happening all the time. And if we just are consciously making the effort, we can make a little change every time, little change every time. And this is where that can definitely show

[00:22:37] spk_0: up. Yeah. So should we try a little experiment or homework, I call it. Um It is really hard sometimes to recognize if we're in a parent, child relationship, in our conversation or for an adult adult relationship. And so we want to sort of actively start to think about how we're interacting. So our mission should you choose to accept it? Um Is to find a conversation that we have in the near future. Um And then sort of retrospectively label it as either, oh yeah, that was an adult, adult interaction or uh I was probably more of a parent, child interaction that was happening and things to kind of think about is in the conversation. Were you treating the person as an equal meaning that you valued their thought process? You were trying to understand things from their perspective. You were um asking clarifying questions to understand their perspective and when they told you their perspective, you didn't um you didn't meet it with judgment, you can still meet it with your opinion, but not with judgment. That would be an adult, adult interaction of like, oh yeah, I hear what you're saying. Let me tell you from my perspective, kind of what I'm seeing, adult, adult interaction. Um parent, child interaction, you would spend more of your time um trying to get the person to see your perspective by convincing them your thought process would be more judgmental. You wouldn't be picturing them as an equal in the conversation. You might think you have more expertise. You'd just be like, if only they understood, if only I could get them to see that they're wrong. Um Most of the time that type of dynamic is going to lead to a parent child interaction. So let's see if we can pick out a couple of adult, adult interactions and a couple parent child interactions.

[00:24:30] spk_1: Yeah, let's do it. So that's the 100% optional nonmandatory homework that you have. Uh And we will talk more about it on the next episode. Thanks for joining. Bye.

[00:24:55] spk_0: Well, that's

[00:24:57] spk_1: it. Yeah, another one in the books we did it

[00:25:01] spk_0: if you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do. So at the website W W W dot hop podcast dot com.

[00:25:14] spk_1: That's H O P P O DC A S T dot com. That's still

[00:25:20] spk_0: such a stupid name.

[00:25:22] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.