John Wilson 0:00

Kevin, I can't thank you enough for being on the CEO Global Network podcast. And uh and and by the way, I'd like to welcome you and everyone else. Uh everybody listening and or watching, uh, welcome to the CEO Global Network Podcast. And today's guest is Kevin Brown. Kevin is the founder and CEO of Cobalt Safety Consulting Inc., he's also Chief Safety Officer and Associate Director at TRACS Transit and Rail Association. Uh, he's on the board of directors of World Safety Organization Canada. He spent many years uh as a Ministry of Labor inspector investigating major workplace incidents. He then started his own company, Cobalt Safety, uh, to dedicate his career to fixing the systems behind safety failures. And he's a leading voice in safety systems thinking. He's an ISO 45001 system expert. He's much in demand as a keynote speaker at a number of functions, and he helps organizations turn safety into a true business advantage, a competitive advantage. Kevin, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Kevin Brown 1:06

John, thank you very much for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you, sir, and be part of this podcast.

John Wilson 1:12

Thank you. And so I've got six questions for you, and uh, why don't we just get started with the questions? Really looking forward to your answers to these questions, Kevin. You've investigated hundreds of serious work serious workplace incidents. What's the biggest misconception that leaders have about why accidents actually happen?

Kevin Brown 1:31

That's a big question. I think the biggest misconception is they think it's a per people problem, right? Uh the workers made mistakes. And really, after many, many years of of investigating and and studying safety, it's usually a system problem. Somewhere in the system, something was allowed to continue. We forgot we didn't pick it up as it was coming along, and if the system throws off a signal, sometimes we call them near misses. And sometimes the signals that throws off are fatalities where we actually see the failures, right? Um So I always say, yes, people are involved, but we can build better systems. It's hard for us to build better people and train the perfect worker, but we can definitely build a better system.

John Wilson 2:11

Yeah, no, I I'm sure that's right. And you've said that enforcement is not the solution to safety. What is the shift organizations need to make instead?

Kevin Brown 2:21

I don't think enforcement's the ultimate solution. I I think that we do require some accountability in the system, but the biggest shift has to be in the mental model of the organization. Uh it has to come down to safety is not something that's a nuisance to our business, but is actually integral in the actual cycle of production. If we're just doing production and we're not doing safety, actually, then we're not doing quality very well either. And then uh we start to get into this vicious cycle loop that I draw for people. It's not safety versus production, John. It's safety with production, it's production with good quality. When we get those three horses lining in the same direction, a company can actually thrive very well. But when we start to not feed one of the horses or not think one of the horses of the three are important, what we end up with is two horses trying to pull the carriage and the carriage and the wheels start to fall off the system. Yeah, yeah. Not a good thing for sure.

John Wilson 3:12

How does system thinking change the way a CEO should approach safety compared to the traditional compliance models?

Kevin Brown 3:20

Well, systems thinking itself is actually it's a very old thought process, but it's been around for quite a while. And I'm actually studying with Dr. Derek Cabrera out of uh the United States, Sarah, and Dr. Cabrera's work is on what is actually thinking and how do we structure our thinking better than just the information that we keep putting into our thinking. So the thought process is the structuring of cognition in amongst this the thought of working with systems. Everything is a system of some sort, but can we see those systems? Any human system is what's called a complex adaptive system. And it's very interesting in a complex adaptive system because it's made with humans and agents that all have their own thinking. And you can't actually solve a complex adaptive system, but you can actually influence it. So safety or any human system is actually called a complex adaptive system. So instead of trying to always try to solve a problem, what we need to do is can we better influence the system so we get better emergent outcomes?

John Wilson 4:14

Yeah, no, that that that makes a lot of sense. You've seen safety failures up close. What does real due diligence look like in practice, not just on paper? What's it look like in reality?

Kevin Brown 4:25

It's I would say I've seen some of the biggest, shiniest binders you could think of, John, that were written by Shakespeare himself, who would make you cry when you read the policy. And then they sit on a shelf and they never become actually implemented with the company. And I call this game Boots and Suits. It's uh the easiest way to remember safety. Boots is what we're doing on the ground, and suits is the game the regulators are playing across North America. So when we're telling people to do things and we're not backing that up or we're not showing that we've done that diligence part, the company's liability starts to increase. And what's even worse is when we actually don't take into account what we actually do as a business or what we call the context of our organization. And we're just doing a little bit of safety just to make it look like we've done something, but we're not actually getting it down to the workers who need the information to operate safely. So there's a big disconnect between safety on paper and safety as actual. Work is imagined, work is done, John. They're they're getting imagined and done.

John Wilson 5:20

You would have seen that firsthand. If a company wants to turn safety into a competitive advantage, this is what you recommend, where should they start? Like if they want to start tomorrow, what what what comes first, what comes second for them?

Kevin Brown 5:32

I think one of the most important aspects is to really analyze what do we do as a business. Every business is slightly different. Therefore, no two safety programs should really look the same all the time. They should all have some variation because all businesses have a variation. So it's having that honest conversation. What do we actually do here? And then do we actually do it well? And if we don't do it well, how do we make it better? Where the disconnect comes is thinking that we can just hire a person as our safety person and they're going to build us a system. There's very few safety people that can build really good solid systems. Uh, there's no courses for it. We see a lot of copying and pasting, we see a lot of ideas, but there has to be a thought process to the methodology, which is it's got two purposes protect the workers, number one axiom of safety, and then also protect the liability of the corporation. So if you're not building to those two purposes, your safety system will have a failure somewhere along the line. And you know, a lot of what we see nowadays is people building to serve certifications. I'm ISO certified or I'm core certified or I have this certification. If you're building to the certification, you're not doing it correctly. You need to build it to your company, your business, and your operations, and we get certifications as we go. I've always, over the years, when I build systems, I've always sat first thing I ever did was sit down with lawyers first and ask, what should you have uh had in court that I should have had in the system so we wouldn't end up in court. But a lot of the uh the conversation is always around what do you specifically do as a business? And are you getting that information down to the workers who need that information to make the right judgment calls at the work site? 100%.

John Wilson 7:07

Uh one more question for you, Kevin, and then we're gonna wrap up. Okay. So you've called for a more unified safety framework across Canada. Yeah. What would what would that unlock for businesses and workers? What would that what door would that open up?

Kevin Brown 7:22

Canada is very unique in that we are a group of large provinces, but every single province, John, has a different version of safety. We have different laws in every single province, even though gravity is still the same across Canada. So every province that gravity is the same, but we have a different way of approaching fall protection. What we need to do is get down to a standardized method of law so that we're getting a cohesive single thought process, then we can standardize our training on the single thought process. But more importantly, companies have very large burdens. So if I'm a company that works across Canada from province to province to province, every time I reach the border, I may have to actually retrain my workers again in the exact same thing because the laws have gone into differing situations. And then the other barrier we run into is labor. Labor can't travel like we need it to in our country. Labor has to come and then they got to retrain again. So you're seeing workers being retrained or double trained in information, but the information starts to conflict. So if in one province I learn it this way, in the next province it's this way, and then the next province is that way. There's no cohesive. We create a confusion within the system. And the system right now has an opportunity where it can correct itself to get to a better position. Canada needs a better thought process. We need a harmonized thought process for safety. We need to start working together as provinces. I've always said there's one Canadian worker, there's one Canadian employer, but we have 14 ways of regulating that same employer for the exact same hazard. So I I advocate for this stuff. I believe it's the right thing for the workers, I believe it's the right thing for employers. I push government to help them see what's available. Uh we're getting some great traction right now. You're starting to hear the word harmonization being everywhere. And if I can have a little effect on the system in my entire lifetime, John, if if if I can add that part or add a piece where I can add a voice where we can actually increase or make the system better, then I've achieved what I set out to do in the health and safety world.

John Wilson 9:14

Well, absolutely. And I mean you're just doing fantastic work. I mean, you've helped so many companies uh, you know, really kick it up a number of notches in this area. And it's it's ensuring that uh that people aren't being hurt and that people aren't aren't dying through uh accidents in the workplace. So I mean it's it's and I know you're really passionate about the mission because you do want to you want to help people, right?

Kevin Brown 9:36

I look at businesses. When you start a business, you start by yourself, right? You're the entrepreneur, you're there by yourself, and then eventually you grow, so you need somebody to help you. So now you have two of you, and then you have three of you. And eventually along the line, we gotta remember not to lose sight of the fact that all those people in our business are helping us achieve our goals. And it's not just ones and zeros, right? It's people first, profit second. But we make profit when we treat people better, when we make, you know, they leave their families every day. I always say, John, safety is about respect, to be honest. You know, people are leaving their families coming out to help us make profits. So it's respect back from us as organizations to those people to provide a safe workplace. And if we can do that and we can make profits and people go home safe, then I think we're achieving what we we intended to set out to do. It's just sometimes it's hard because the world is driven by dollars.

John Wilson 10:24

Yeah, no, no, that's absolutely right. It's a that's a great message, it's a great mission that you're on. I can't thank you enough for being with us today. You know, it was just great to have you on the CEO Global Network podcast and uh really, really appreciate your insights here. They're very helpful. So thank you very much, Kevin, and we really appreciate it.

Kevin Brown 10:40

And John, thank you to you. CEO Globe has been one of the best things I've ever done for myself and to be part of business and you know, your leadership and and keeping us all of us in the right place at the right time doing the right things. I gotta say thank you for that too. No, thank you so much for saying that, Kevin.

John Wilson 10:55

I really appreciate it.

Kevin Brown 10:56

It's great to have you part of it. Thank you, sir.