The piece you might be missing as you try to build new things and all your efforts for making change, might actually be deliberately blowing things up.
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.
“Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world”
The song Closing Time by Semisonic is one of those classic tunes of my transition into adulthood.
“Closing time, one last call for alcohol
So, finish your whiskey or beer
Closing time, you don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here”
After it was released in 1998 it was pretty common that this song was the very last song played in the bar or pub before the lights got turned back on and everyone had to leave.
“So gather up your jackets, move into the exits,
I hope you have found your friends
Closing time, every new beginning
comes from some other beginnings end”
It turns out that this anthem of the very late night party people had nothing to do with going out of drinking, or even going home.
The whole song is a metaphor for the birth of a child. Lead singer Dan Wilson was soon to become a father as he was writing this song, and the literal meaning of the last song in fact came to be a much deeper insight into the realities of getting bounced from the womb into the world.
Check out his explanation here:
Not long ago, I kind of started a messy conversation with my wife. It wasn’t a fight, but it was pretty affronting.
You might not know that we have 6 kids. We are amazingly blessed in so many ways, despite all the usual hullabaloo of having kids of any age.
We believe that routines and habits are important for kids, not to be strict or inflexible, but to offer a level of predictability, expectation and comfort. One of those routines is that at bedtime, apart from the usual teeth brushing and book reading, we turn out the light and sing them a bedtime song. It’s evolved to be pretty eclectic, we have traditional Dutch songs from my heritage, flavours of the month like Thomas the Tank Engine, seasonal ones that have hung around like Away in a Manger, and even throw in some Billy Joel and the Beetles every now and again.
The thing I said to Bec, is that it is guaranteed, that one of these times we sing to this particular child, will be the last time, and we will not know it at the time.
Bec wasn’t impressed by my insight here, it was pretty confronting and a little sad. But it contains a silver lining, a deep truth about what it means for us to change and grow.
It’s been said that one of the problems we face in our social society is the decline in rites of passage. I won’t get into the multitude of things that might be contributing to this, but there is a lot we can learn from ancient, and more recent rites of passage.
Many tribal cultures use isolation and survival rites of passage. These necessitate a practical and emotional resilience, of being your own person and not relying on the help or comfort of a parent or sibling or friend.
Catholic marriage includes a part of the ceremony where a single candle, representing the union of two people, is lit from the two flames of the baptismal candles held by each of the couple, which was used in their own individual rites of passage when they were baptised as very young people.
In the military there are heaps of rites of passage, for example new trainees effectively have no rank, so the assignment of rank at graduation in the form of patches or badges, signifies that they are now ‘one of us’, and importantly no longer a civilian.
Even criminals have rites of passage, with various blooding rites which are design to test and confront people, but equally to separate the person you are after committing the blooding from the person who you were before.
For most of human history, we have been engaging in rites of passage that mark us becoming, but also mark us leaving, finishing, rejecting, the person who used to be us.
“every new beginning
comes from some other beginnings end”
By now, you know that I spend most of my time working directly with health and safety leaders and their teams to enable them to become more relevant to their organisation, more valued by their stakeholders, and more effective in shaping the actual health and safety of work.
So the word ‘growth’ has become synonymous with my work. I mean for 200 and something episodes, you have heard me say “This is Safety on Tap…for leaders who want to grow themselves and drastically improve health and safety along the way”
With the amount of exposure I have to the messy realities of the day to day work of people like you, I have also gained a phenomenal insight into the evolution of practice in individuals and in teams.
Health and safety as a professional category of work, is fundamentally based on change. There is change we need to dance with in the world around us, and there is the change that we are seeking to make. They are very different but related things. To not enable change makes us ineffective, to fail to dance with change around us makes us irrelevant.
And the greatest irony of this truth, and I will call it a truth because I am prepared to support it with evidence, is that we engage with change almost as if by accident, as opposed to with intent. We don’t learn about change in our education, we rarely engage with approaches to change in our professional development, and I have asked the question to hundreds of people at events I have spoken at, so I can say confidentiality, that almost none of us can articulate how we go about enabling or responding to change.
That’s one of the reasons why my 1:1 and group coaching work focusses so much on change.
And one important part that most people miss, is that in order to try something new, or build something, or spend more time doing something, we have to destroy, or reject or leave behind other things.
“Closing time, you don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here”
As health and safety professionals, the mountain of things we refuse to leave behind, to reject, or to destroy, is huge.
We are often stuck on doing things in ways that were invented 10, or 50, or 100 years ago. We continue to defend things like the proceduralisation of so many tasks and processes, at the same time that we know they don’t work, don’t reflect reality, and can’t possibly achieve the objective we continue to say they have, which is to standardise work, to define risks and controls, and to teach people about these.
We develop training that assumes everyone is the same when we know that everyone is not the same, so experienced hands feel like idiots and inexperienced greenies are thrown into the wild underprepared.
We know that technology is racing around every facet of our lives and we persist with paper, or word documents, or SharePoint, even though these are old, inflexible, and often categorically worse than using other forms of communication and documentation that are available, if only we decided to let go of the old and embrace the new.
We start new jobs, excited to bring all the stuff we did at the old job to the new one, without reflecting on how much of that we need to reject, or ignore, or leave behind.
There are a million reasons why we can’t full break from the past, that’s an impossible goal and I’m not suggesting some kind of crazy severing from everything.
The thing is, a young tribal teenager left in the wilderness for a few days still gets to come back and see his family, they are not gone, what is gone is the person he used to be.
My kid who decides that they don’t want a bed time song, they are not rejecting us as parents, they are making a decision to grow into a different kind of person tomorrow, one who has appreciate bedtime songs since birth, but who won’t have one tomorrow.
The birth of a child means the end of pregnancy. It also means the end of your individual adult existence, as your life forever after will be intertwined with this new human being you have created.
The young adult who wants to chase an education or a job or a dream will break down their nuclear family, deliberately, by moving across the country or across the world.
There are people rejecting industry-common performance indicators in order to create the space and attention on other kinds of more useful data for health and safety reporting.
There are people deciding that we will no longer do a certain work practice this way, because we know a better and safer way to work.
There are people who are introducing new concepts and language, things like learning, care, diligence, curiosity, openness, which means they are also leaving behind investigations, interviews, root cause, blame, and simple explanations.
There are people who are even playing around with what it means to do health and safety better by removing the words health and safety from their job titles, from their systems, and their vernacular. Now that’s a brave, and exciting idea – that we reject the very label of our identity in order to do our work better.
As a health and safety professional, it’s vital that you are approaching change deliberately. And one of the most healthy, and useful things to do, is to work out what you need to reject, destroy, or leave behind in the past, in order to fully explore that future you seek to create.
Thanks so much for listening. 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!
Transcript – Ep220 What you are missing from new beginnings
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