Ep205: Platinum, Covid, and how ideas spread, with Andrew Barrett

Ep205: Platinum, Covid, and how ideas spread, with Andrew Barrett Full Show Notes: https://safetyontap.com/ep205

I noticed when they started saying 'Welcome back Mr Barrett' when I boarded the plane. But I really took notice, when they stopped saying it. This is a podcast about ideas, and stories, and our opportunity to pay more attention to how they affect our work as health and safety professionals.

Hey, it's Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap.

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

Before Covid I travelled a fair bit, and despite proving time and time again how effective virtual coaching and facilitation can be during Covid, once travel restrictions were eased I found myself being asked to come here and go there more than I would like. Covid saw two automatic extensions of my frequent flyer status, since if you can't fly you can't maintain it. Once travel was permitted again, I found myself dropped from the top tier frequent flyer colour down to the next one. I've always said that frequent flyer status is not exciting nor something to be coveted, all it indicates is that I spend too much time away from my family.

Stick with me, for regular listeners you'll know that my story and metaphor ties into what we do as health and safety professionals, rather than an egotistical rant. There is something small, something human about stepping onto a plane, and someone looking at the colour at the bottom of the pass, looking you in the eye, and saying welcome back. They don't know me, they see data which tells them on this airline, we value loyalty and we welcome people by name.

Until they didn't. It seems that stepping onto a plane, Gold status bumps me down the human respect pecking order, so there is no personal 'welcome back My Barrett' anymore. They changed their idea about what loyalty, status and customer service sounds like. One tiny change made me notice, and changed the way I feel.

Infectious Ideas, Genes and Memes

An idea which I was introduced to me early in my career, and which was reinforced a lot, an idea which I came to believe and would re-tell to others was that safety management systems were the solution to health and safety performance. That idea became so intertwined in my professional identity and practice that it shaped me, and blinded me, and twisted me.

Another idea which was part of my early professional shaping is the story that 'part of our job is to protect the Board of Directors'. That one did a real doozy on me, creating confusion and anger and inconsistency and bad behaviour in the name of a story which I believed at the start because other people handed that idea down to me so became my story. Except when I decided that it wouldn't be my story, that I needed a new story to replace it. Needless to say that one needs an entire lying-on-the-couch podcast session, but ultimately boils down to very important but grammatically minor tweaks I made to the core idea in the story: instead of 'part of our job is to protect the Board of Directors', my new story was 'most of my job is supporting safe and healthy work, which becomes protection for the Board of Directors'. How did those ideas come to be? In part, they were spread, like a virus, from others to me, and they became infective.

You may have heard the word genes, spelled g-e-n-e-s, in reference to the unique DNA coding which animals and plants inherit from their parents in the process of reproduction. Genes contain the information which lead to your height, your eye colour, and many parts of your physical and psychological make-up, including tendency for disease, creativity and intellect.

In the biological wor