I’ve had people ask me why I am so publically supportive of people who have their own podcasts, like Kevin Jones, Dr Drew Rae, Mark Stipic, friend of the show but not yet guest Sally McMahon from the Fit for Work podcast and now today’s guest Todd Conklin who hosts the Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast. Now I think when I get asked that question, these people are asking the wrong question, or at least a question which has some specific assumptions.
They might think I am eroding my own audience by sharing other people with you, or maybe they might think it’s collaborating with the competition. I’m not sure, so I’ll share with you why I do what I do based on first principles.
Abundance: There is more than enough attention and time and focus and money to go around, so instead of feeling protective or competitive, my mission is to encourage you to open your mind to abundant thinking. Also, there is no shortage of information out there, and Google makes it somewhat easier to find. But often in the face of abundant information (which is also called overwhelm) we like a higher-value or higher-trust source of referral – I hope I offer that to you, to cut through all the noise out there.
Diversity: We all have something different to offer, every single one of us, which is why I LOVE hearing from you and your individual story. So when it comes to my guests, I need to keep the sources diverse, but somewhat logical. So the way I came to chat with Todd is two-fold, first he has plenty of great insights and content around what he calls the ‘new-view’ of safety, which some people call Safety II or Safety Differently. They are all related. You’ve expressed an interest in that based on my interview with John Green on episode 35. Plus, Todd brings in two different perspectives, firstly as an org psych which seems to be an area you are keen to know more about plus Todd has an angle around resilience engineering and high reliability, which Dave Provan mentioned in episodes 41 and 42 when talking about the current and future role of the health and safety professional. So I’m encouraging diverse ideas, whilst triangulating based on previous guests and feedback from you.
Specificity: Whilst diversity opens our minds, specificity for me is all about mastery – what is it that we excel at. It’s the opposite of being a generalist. So these other podcasters all have a different specificity – Kevin is a commentator, sort of like current affairs for health and safety. Mark is a RTW and workers compensation guru, Sally is all about health and wellness, and Todd as you’ll hear enables the largest of companies to adopt the ‘new view’ in the face of significant discomfort, usually after an incident. My mastery is about developing health and safety professionals to be more effective, using smart learning principles and techniques, such as the private coaching I offer through Safety on Tap Connected membership. I don’t have a safety theory or new model or special software – I just help you be better, and I do that through some very smart approaches. That’s my specificity, that’s my mastery.
So I’m not worried if you like other stuff out there, because if there is something more interesting or helpful for you, I want you to chase that down because that’s what’s best for you. If you find what we do here helpful, I hope you will continue to listen and take action to improve yourself. An example of that is I still speak at and attend conferences, but I firmly believe that we can get more value from our professional development if we get smarter about how we invest our time and money – like the way we support members of Safety on Tap Connected, versus attending the same old training and conferences. I wouldn’t have invested so much of my own time and money in developing a platform and community like that if it didn’t deliver a better result than the conventional status quo. Anyhow
So on that note, I’d love to hear from you – send me an email or a review of iTunes to tell me what you think – honestly – so I have a feedback loop from you, to continue what’s working and improve what’s not. If only a fraction of you pressed pause right now and did that, I would have an overwhelming amount of info to help guide me in serving you.
So that’s probably the longest introduction I’ve ever done, I hope it helps you know me better anyway. Here’s my chat with Todd Conklin:
You can check out Todd and his work over at the Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast.
I’ll also send you the links to all the available back-catalogue of reflection templates so you can access these at any time.
Here’s my two takeaways from that chat with Todd:
- Go with the flow! Todd and I have slightly different approaches to our interviews, hence his comment about it being a conversation after I talked about reverse interview. Being structured and planned has it’s place, but so does just letting things flow, like today’s chat. I find that usually safety people are far more structured, so usually can do with a good dose of going with the flow.
- Where have you come from? Todd and I discussed our respective beginnings into safety, and how we’ve come to think about it based on our original field of study, or experiences and what information we consume. Understanding where you’ve come from, and those around us, helps us understand the different perspectives and even biases we bring. Like Stephen Covey said seek first to understand, then be understood, which might help you build trust with others, and enable change, a lot quicker.
Until next time, what’s the one thing you’ll do to take positive, effective or rewarding action, to grow yourself, and drastically improve health and safety along the way? Seeya!
Is the imposter syndrome a function of the requirement to consult and that often we are observers of the work system and not experts in the doing of a task rather the one that asks the questions about how the task is done?
Hi Martin, what a great question. I think your hypothesis has merit, but I actually think the opposite is the case.
The nub of this comes down to how we perceive what is expected of us. If we expect we can/should be an expert in everyone else’s work, then falling short of this goal would logically cause us to feel like imposters, that we will be caught out. But this goes beyond mere imposter syndrome (which is characterised by an irrational fear of being ‘caught out’) – this really could happen! What you describe (being the person who doesn’t expect to be an expert but to be a curious, deferential learner), actually has lots of benefits to challenge impostor syndrome. Some of the specific behaviours which help me tackle my impostor syndrome include acting before being ready, keeping up momentum, treat failure as learning, and ASK (for help, for information). Where impostor syndrome does rear its ugly head are the situations when we truly are expert (hazard knowledge, expert assessment, etc) and we don’t exercise that expertise because of impostor syndrome.