Punk Rock Safety

My heart is yearning (yep, it’s a NOFX song) in anticipation. Of what? Well, that’s what the episode is, you jerk. Don’t ruin the surprise. Coming on the heels of the tragic shooting in Sydney, Australia, the boys couldn’t help but notice the commentary about how someone, somewhere, should have anticipated it. What does that have to do with Punk Rock Safety? Well, anticipation is one of what Erik Hollnagel calls the four potentials of resilient systems. Sounds great, but what - and how - are we supposed to anticipate? It doesn’t seem possible to predict every possible failure or event, right? But what about conditions in the system? Instead of trying to 'Magic 8 Ball' everything, Ron, Dave, and Ben suggest that what organizations should anticipate is where systems, processes, or people may be stretched, stressed, or pushed to their limits. Like in the circle pit. Or pretty much any time you’re forced to listen to the Misfits for very long. Or ska. Basically, we should focus on anticipating where there is less capacity to adapt and maneuver. Recognizing these vulnerable spots, organizations can then build their capacity to adapt, respond, and recover, even if it isn’t a specific scenario. So, expecting a single, complex convergence into an unpredictable event is tough. Planning for degraded conditions in parts of the system without a lot of backup? That’s the kind of anticipation that counts (somebody let the sound guys at Punk in the Park know, would ya?).



After the usual BS of “Did anyone invite a guest?” and “Let’s text random people while we're recording,” the boys get down to business: a whole lot of safety plans are the same recycled Word doc with a new company logo slapped on. Sounds almost the same as every ska song does. Turns out, not a lot of people spend time creating real, specific plans, so they just do a “File, Save As” on their way to compliance. By the way, it's still a NOFX song for the episode title. Just saying. Contractor management? Copy-paste, MFers. Workers think half these plans are useless, and even the managers know they’re just hoops to jump through. But don’t worry, checklists and forms will sort it out, because nothing says safety like paperwork! Leadership? Yeah, leaders are supposed to show up and make all this “personal,” except half the time it's just performative nonsense. They debate whether “best practices” exist, eventually agreeing that the best practice is probably making sure people know what the hell a safety plan is even for. The reason every unique, special snowflake job site's plans look exactly like the next is because, deep down, they're lazy (says Dave), too overwhelmed, or just too unbothered to actually change anything about work. Brian Hughes from Sologic was cool enough to answer a last-minute call and hop onto the pod, and because he's a bassist, he's nicer than most people. He takes a better view of how something like a template can actually help, not hurt, especially when people are overwhelmed by other stuff. Like meat at the Brazilian steakhouse where Brian is housing steaks off a meat sword. He looks at a template or copy-paste as a life preserver, but he draws the line at stopping there. And then Brian has to go get dessert. So, maybe it's okay to have a little bit of help, but a wash, rinse, repeat of stuff that sounds the same but doesn't work isn't good. Cool. Now what? Questions, not "insert company name." As a starter kit, you can still get a jump start without just putting 27 people on stage with horns and calling it good. Check it out for all the answers.

This episode dives into the reality of safety management systems; how they often feel disconnected, bloated, and stuck in the past. You know. Like a dinosaur. Maybe worse than being a dinosaur is being a dinosaur just for the sake of having something to show off, even when it's just to call something a "system" or to have something to point at. The boys chase down the idea that safety activities like inductions, audits, and incident investigations rarely talk to each other, leading to a lack of real coordination and feedback loops. They explore how organizations sometimes pile on useless tasks and “bullshit” safety activities, missing the mark on what actually matters. Probably the best part - if there is one - of the conversation touches on the importance of knowledge management, the role of AI in surfacing hidden insights, and the need for systems to be dynamic, not just static documents. There’s also a healthy dose of skepticism about the value of safety professionals and a call to focus on what truly keeps people safe, rather than chasing every minor incident. In a weird twist (not as weird as Dave's pods from Episode 43), the episode wraps up with some mushroom coffee stories, and a reminder that sometimes, the best safety move is knowing when to let go of the small stuff.

If you've never read all the way to the bottom of the episode notes, you won't know what PRSL is. Now you do. It's a good name for an episode, but seriously, go check out punkrocksaveslives.org. They're solid folks doing really kickass work. Not like this podcast. In this episode, the boys start off debating the merits of bacon and egg rolls. Or egg and bacon rolls, because priorities. Pretty quickly, things go headfirst into the world of “wellbeing,” getting glued onto safety job titles. We’re talking about how psychosocial risk has (sometimes) become the new buzzword, and whether that’s actually making work better or just giving us more posters and press releases. We dig into whether safety is the right place for wellbeing, or if it’s just being dumped there because no one else knows where to put it. The real deal? Wellbeing only matters if we fix the work itself. Stop with the mindfulness sessions between 13 meetings and start giving people real control over their jobs. The wellbeing that really works: redesigning the work, not the posters. If “wellness” just means more compliance for the sake of it, we’ll get the same result we got with a lot of efforts around culture - a brand campaign with no change to the conditions of work. And yeah, Ron’s sleep pods might’ve been reasonable, but Dave’s story about an actual Australian office having a “masturbation station” took a turn no one expected. Ben reminds us, if your safety work can’t tie to actual wellbeing, maybe it’s just busy work. But when you fix the work, people get better by default. Or because of the pods. Bottom line: Wellbeing is more than fruit bowls and yoga mats, and if we don’t change the work, we’re just putting lipstick on the same old compliance pig.

First things first, fun without Dave already happened. Ron and Ben saw The Casualties, Adolescents, Adicts, and Dwarves. All of those bands have been around for a long time - like 30-40 years - and that definitely doesn't make us old. It's another Bad Religion episode title. They put on a badass show at Punk in the Park, and they're old like us, too. This episode is sort of a nod to Fletcher. Yep, he broke your guitar. No, he wasn't trying to be a real asshole. Fat Mike knows that's part of punk. Sometimes you have to go to the hospital to live what you say you believe. The circle pit is a fundamental part of a punk show, but you might lose a tooth while you're in there. When you fall down, though, the pit is a family. Everyone has your back, man. Sometimes people are dicks (yeah, us too, even if we try hard not to be), but it seems to be a weakness in safety that there's not a lot of room for defending our process of belief. We've talked about dogma in safety before, but this is different. This is a conversation about how we deliver and receive dissent. Contemporary safety has grown a lot in terms of talking about empathy and understanding context, and that bails on it completely at the first sign of skepticism. Let's talk about the fundamental attribution error as something we need to be aware of and minimize, and then just assume the worst of people at work or in life. Is it just us? Stealing (and paraphrasing) from Carsten Busch a little bit, shouldn't the "New View" be asking why things made sense to Heinrich - or others - instead of judging it based on the standards of today? It's not a consequence-free world, though. Swapping skepticism for assholery might mean living with the knock-on effects of a decision. But starting with the assumption that everyone wants a safe company, we're just sorting out the details. That means that learning about rules, biases, and beliefs isn't just learning about others - we have to apply the same standards to ourselves. Context, intent, care, and system design aren't just things that shape others; we own them too. Way back in Episode 1, we promised to try and avoid corruption between process and intent. It's sometimes uncomfortable to have to explain our beliefs, but that's a feature, not a bug. "Don't hear what I didn't say" might be a good way to start.