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b.SAFE Reenactment Workshops: transforming safety culture through storytelling

‘Systems that value stories and storytelling are potentially more reliable …. people know more about the system, know more of the potential errors that might occur, and…are more confident that they can handle those errors that do occur’’
‘Organisational Culture as a source of High Reliability’ Karl E Weick*

On January 24^th 2018 a serious incident took place in a cinema in Dusseldorf. Similar incidents took place on power plants across Europe from 2019 to 2024. The bad news is that in all cases the unexpected release of latent energy resulted in what could have been life changing injuries. The good news is each of these incidents were simulated, part of a b.SAFE Reenactment Workshop. These workshops were run by Beehive for Uniper. Called ‘change the conversation, change the culture’, Uniper was using the workshops to enhance their safety culture with the transformative power of storytelling and reenactment.

Intentional error

After each incident was played out scene by scene the groups held a debrief to discuss how the interpersonal relationships and behaviours of the characters contributed to the end result. This was followed by key skills development which Beehive designed to meet the specific needs of the client. Then a clear plan to avoid a similar incident was discussed and agreed. Finally, the participants had the chance to change the ending; to work with the actors to change the conversations and behaviours and prevent the accident from happening again. Because humans engage with stories more than facts all participants, whatever their level of experience or understanding, became engrossed in the action. In all cases the participants left with better skills and more motivated and inspired to make changes back at work. This is why reenactment workshops are so powerful. They reach the parts of the workforce other types of development just don’t reach. As one participant commented:

The activities that made you stop and think differently. They made you reflect and dig deeper into why

Uniper b.SAFE Reenactment Workshop participant

Scenario reenactment

Scenario re-enactment is widely used in safety critical industries where trial and error is simply not an option for learning. Event rehearsal and contingency planning are both situations in which role play is a powerful tool.

But how does storytelling and reenactment enhance your organisational safety culture? And what sets the b.SAFE reenactment workshops apart? It’s their focus. They hone in on interpersonal relationships, lack of trust and immature safety culture. They explore how these latent conditions make accident and injury so much more likely. And having an in-house script writer, co-director of Beehive and b.SAFE Sara Lodge, means the scripts and workshops can be tailored directly to the client’s needs.

Beehive’s research partnership with Bangor University

Mark Sykes, co-director of Beehive and b.SAFE, and Sara have spent the last fifteen years providing high quality behavioural training to safety critical industries. Originally an organisational development consultancy specialising in behaviour change, the shift in focus to safety culture took place after Sara partnered with Bangor University’s Wales Centre for Behaviour Change, part of the Psychology Department, in 2013.

She worked with client Alstom Power Services and neuropsychologist Paul Carter to conduct research into the Bradley Curve, in particular the key interpersonal factors that most contribute to Interdependent safety culture. This is the culture associated with the lowest levels of accident, injury and defect. From this Sara developed a model of trust-based safety culture and what is now Beehive’s flagship safety leadership programme, the b.SAFE D2iP (Dependency to Interdependency) programme. b.SAFE, Beehive’s safety culture brand, was born.

‘b.SAFE Reenactments’

The shift to reenactment workshops for Beehive was a by-product of this work. Sara and Mark designed the first workshop to address a lack of compliance in Alstom’s workforce in relation to Permits to Work. Bringing an on-site incident resulting from a PtW violation into the training room created immediate impact. Participants were given the chance to use their new skills immediately to change the outcome of the scenario. Because of this, the impact of individual behaviours on safety was brought to life in a way that no other form of training had done before. The effects were dramatic. Incidents involving permits dropped by half in the next year. That’s why Beehive developed the b.SAFE Reenactment Workshops – because they work. As another participant comments:

The acting adds a fun and practical twist to the education. This is one of the best courses I have ever attended.
Uniper b.SAFE Reenactment Workshop participant

Trust-based safety culture

The trust-based safety culture model that Sara developed as a result of the research partnership has informed Beehive’s unique approach to psychological safety and safety behaviours ever since. Because of this, since 2014 Beehive has worked with clients across the power sector, delivering reenactment workshops in UK and Europe. This is alongside their flagship 12 month safety leadership programme, the b.SAFE D2iP. The D2iP is designed to help people move along the Bradley Curve. Part of it is delivered at the Brathay Trust in Cumbria, an organisation that Beehive has a long collaborative relationship with. Brathay is a specialist in experiential learning, and its unique learning environment is another way Beehive makes its safety training high impact. To hear the power of the combination of Beehive’s expertise and Brathay’s resources, listen to Geoff Livingstone, a participant on the b.SAFE D2iP Safety leadership programme.

Geoff Livingstone describes the impact of the residential module at Brathay on Beehive’s b.SAFE D2iP Safety Leadership Programme

Creating a workshop – script writing and design

‘Writing a script for a client is a complex task’, said Sara, Beehive director. ‘The scenarios are often based on one or more real incidents. I can’t write them too close to the real action. But I have to write them close enough to it to be recognised and credible to the audience! I need to make the characters and events believable. The task and incident have to be credible and staged to create genuine shock and impact. Like any drama there has to be a convincing dilemma to drive the behaviours. Then I have to include variety, humour and tension across different scenes to keep the audience interested. This is while incorporating the specific client safety management system and correct terminology. Then the workshop content has to be developed and designed around this. It’s a bit like putting a jigsaw together!’

Delivering the workshop

‘This becomes more complicated when we are delivering to different countries and in different languages and cultures.’ Mark continues. ‘On the Uniper project we have delivered native language workshops in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and Hungary. Not everything translates across languages. But we’re talking about human dilemmas and they are the same across continents. There are logistical challenges in taking the workshops onto site too. However, having been on the road with our teams delivering in Sweden, France, The Netherlands and Germany as well as UK I’ve seen how the different national as well as site cultures respond to the concept. It’s always the same, they always engage. That’s why we use reenactment and storytelling in our safety education.’

Showcase event

On October 23^rd 2024 Beehive will be showcasing their reenactment workshops at a seminar at Brathay Hall in Cumbria. We want participants to experience one of the workshops, as well as explore Brathay’s unique learning environment. Beehive and Brathay have a close collaborative relationship, sharing the same values and methodologies, and their partnership is a long and productive one. To see if you are eligible for an invitation to the seminar and to find out more about the b.SAFE Reenactment Workshops please contact info@beecld.co.uk.

To find out more about people development at Brathay Trust please go to https://www.brathay.org.uk/people-development/

*Weick, Karl E., ‘Organisational Culture as a source of High Reliability’,California Management Review, Volume XXIX, Number 2, Winter 1987 – p113

Coaching and ‘Individual Commitment to Nuclear Safety’

How coaching can develop ‘Individual Commitment to Safety’, the first of the WANO ‘Categories of a Healthy Nuclear Safety Culture’

This is the second podcast in which I explain how coaching supports a healthy nuclear safety culture by using WANO’s Traits of a Healthy Nuclear Safety Culture. I explain that because coaching training develops the mindset and skills required to build ‘Individual Commitment to Safety’, introducing coaching can play an important role in the development of a healthy nuclear safety culture.

The PAC or Ego States Model is a model of personality that we use in our coaching training. We use it because it describes the mindset – Adult – that develops when you learn to coach, and that you invite in the people you coach. I show how it’s also the mindset needed to ensure people take personal responsibility for safety, one of the traits in this category. If you’d like to see the model see below. If you want to read further, please go to ‘How coaching supports ‘Individual Commitment to Safety’. If you actually want to test out your own personality, and find out how strong each ego state is for you, download the PAC Questionnaire here.

PAC Model Personal Questionnaire Download

PAC Model

How coaching can support a healthy nuclear safety culture

b.SAFE Bitesize – a series of short training, webinars, blogs, podcasts and videos on all things health and safety

b.SAFE Bitesize – ‘How Safety Can Support a Healthy Nuclear Safety Culture’

In this podcast, the first of a series of four, Sara Lodge describes how coaching supports the development of a healthy nuclear safety culture.

Coaching

As both an activity and a management style, coaching has, over the last 20 years, become a mainstay of organisational development. This is because it:

increases accountability,
improves morale,
increases productivity
and increases well being, among other advantages, in both coaches and those they coach.

The benefits of coaching to the world of health and safety are also being more widely recognised. Because of this, IOSH, among other bodies, is promoting ‘Coaching for Safety’ programmes to support safety practitioners in their roles.

Nuclear sector

The nuclear sector has fallen behind in this. While much has been made of the need for a safety culture specific to the needs of the nuclear sector, there seems to be little recognition that development of these traits require a different set of skills to technical. This is something that we’ve noticed in our work in highly regulated sectors. While cultural or behavioural change initiatives may be outlined in detail, the skills required to achieve them aren’t. Therefore, while money may be spent on change programmes, because little money or effort is put into developing the skills essential to their success, the programmes fail, or are not as successful as they could be.

Coaching skills

I argue that coaching skills, which incorporate:

goal- and outcome setting
active listening
questioning skills including open, interrogative, exploratory, probing, confirmatory and challenging questioning
summarising and consensus building
collaborative problem solving and action learning
empathy and relationship building
constructive challenge
feedback and appraisal
reflective practice

Nuclear safety culture

Are all vital to building the kind of nuclear safety culture traits which evidence shows are needed to avoid major events, and I’d argue to investigate them.

Listen to hear the first part of my explanation why.

Suicide watch – why mental health matters both to business and safety

You may expect the answer to the question, ‘what’s the biggest killer of men under 5o’, to be an accident or cancer. But the shocking answer is – themselves. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50, and particularly between 40 and 44 yrs. It’s also the leading cause of death for all genders between 24 and 30, but the male statistic is particularly poignant. And the reason?

“One reason that men are more likely to complete suicide may be because they are less likely than women to ask for help or talk about depressive or suicidal feelings.³ ” Recent statistics show that only 27% of people who died by suicide between 2005 and 2015 had been in contact with mental health services in the year before they died.⁴
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/suicide

It’s a sobering thought and perhaps particularly worth reflecting on for male-dominated industries where the culture may be especially, for the want of a better word, ‘macho’. In the same way that any discussion of safety needs to include psychological safety, the health in HSE needs to include mental health too.

Mental Health Awareness Week

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and all media is bursting with valuable information about the importance of good mental health to quality of life and well-being. But good mental health is also an important part of organisational safeguarding of employees . The good news for organisations is it’s good for business. The New Economics Foundation (NEF) identifies two elements to well-being. These are ‘feeling good and functioning well’. It’s not rocket science that if your staff feel good and function well they’re going to be more productive. https://neweconomics.org/2008/10/five-ways-to-wellbeing-the-evidence

Good mental health contributes to safety

But well-being and good mental health are also crucial to reducing risk and errors. As an experiment try this. Take a look at the two lists below. Do you recognise either of them? Can you see any relationship between the two?

List One comprises the factors that impact most positively on workplace well-being, based on NEF’s 2014 literature review https://neweconomics.org/2014/03/wellbeing-at-work. List Two comprises the Dirty Dozen Error Traps, a list of the preconditions that most contribute to errors and accidents taken from human factors literature. Can you see a relationship between the two lists?

High levels of well-being reduce error pre-cursors

The more there is of list one, the less there will be of list two, for example:

If someone is in good health, mental and physical, and has a healthy work/life balance, the error trap of fatigue is likely to be reduced.
If role expectations are realistic and a person has more control over their work the error traps of time pressure and resource allocation, for example, may well be reduced. And their mental health is also likely to be better
Certain management styles – particularly a coaching style which is both engaging and collaborative – are conducive to good teamwork, good communications, high morale and positive social norms. All of which contribute to good mental health and well being
Development opportunities can not just reduce complacency, but also lack of knowledge or lack of assertiveness (but only if it is the right kind of development). This can also reduce stress, and improve mental health and well being.
And fairness and job security make a big contribution to stress reduction, and therefore improves well-being and mental health.

But how do you improve the mental health of your workforce?

1. Improve the culture

Improving the culture of your organisation – in Ihttps://bsafebuzz.com/2019/02/14/transitioning-to-iso-45001-four-things-you-need-to-know-about-organisational-culture/ I give a snapshot of what organisational culture is all about. It takes time to change, but one way of doing so is through training such as

2. Training*

Ensuring there are trained mental health first aiders in the organisation – an informal resource of colleagues rather than relying for initial contact on formal or external resources – might improve the chances of someone opening up about issues.

3. Raise awareness*

Raising people’s awareness of mental health as an issue and establishing mental health champions in the business can normalise talking about it. This week has been so important in this.

4. Change the management style in the organisation**

Certain management styles and activities are more conducive to the well-being of workers than others. Coaching in particular, because it involves good communication skills like listening and asking open questions, is particularly powerful in improving morale and well-being

5. Get more women in leadership positions!**

Women are more likely to display transformational leadership skills than men, who are more associated with a transactional leadership aproach. Nurturing female talent in areas other than HR, learning and development and HSE can help to change the culture in organisations and on site.

6. Change how we define health and safety

Take a look at these two definitions of safety:

‘The condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable.’
‘The control of recognised hazards to achieve an acceptable level of risk.’

The first definition is a wide and all-encompassing definition of safety. It includes protection against a range of hazards and risks, not just physical, and includes the well-being factors in list one.

The second I would argue is more aligned to how health and safety is often perceived and practised – focused more on physical health, hazards and risks than on any other kind. The result can be a focus on reducing risk through compliance, regulation, process and physical defences. This has the potential to miss the wider factors that impact on accidents and errors such as improving workplace well-being and mental health of workers.

A change in attitude is needed

Of course, compliance, regulation, process and physical defences are vital and have resulted in the massive reductions in accidents seen over the last few decades. But they are not the whole story. The next step change in reducing error and accidents requires recognition that:

low workplace well-being and poor mental health are error preconditions and therefore require measurement and action
low workplace well-being is a cultural factor and improving it requires systemic change
spending money on improving workplace well-being and on measures to support good mental health in the workforce makes good business sense

Share with us your experiences and please feel free to subscribe to the blog if you like what you’ve read, or pass this on to colleagues

Beehive can offer:

*MHFA Programmes

The MHFA England is the only body licensed to provide accredited mental health first aid programmes. Beehive can now offer :

Two day Mental Health First Aider courses which train ‘first responders’ in the organisation as a resource for employees to talk to
One day Mental Health Awareness workshops for all staff to raise awareness
Half day Mental Health Champions workshops for senior managers and HR

Through our latest associate Mark Bussell. For more details contact info@beecld.co.uk

**Accredited coaching programmes

Beehive is an ILM approved centre and offer:
In-house ILM-accredited Coaching and Mentoring Certificate and Diploma programmes at levels 3, 5 and 7
ILM-accredited ‘Coaching for Safety’ Certificate programmes at levels 3 and 5
Bespoke coaching and mentoring programmes
Our exclusive ‘Coaching for a Healthy Nuclear Safety Culture’ introductory workshop through NSAN, which can be delivered in-house.

For more details contact info@beecld.co.uk or go to https://www.beecld.co.uk/ILM-Coaching-Mentoring