Hello everyone. Today is Moodle's birthday August 20th and this year when I'm saying this it's 2017 which means Moodle is 15 years old. So a bit of a special birthday. It's a good time to reflect on where we've come since I first released Moodle 1.0 on August the 20th in 2002. It seems like a long time ago but it's gone really quickly. The project's grown steadily over that time and it's truly become a community project. It's still led by the company here in Perth in Western Australia. This past year in particular has seen quite a lot of major changes in the project. Moodle Cloud really got going. The Moodle users association has now really started to find its stride as well. We gained a UX team and also a new education team which is exciting. Some new things coming from them soon. We've got our Moodle mobile app finally reaching 100% functionality with the web interface for students and we now offer branded versions of that as well so you can get your own version of it with your own look and feel. And notably we reached 100 million registered users. Now those are just sites that have registered with us. We know there are many out there who haven't so if you haven't press that registration button because we estimate that maybe there's like one in ten of you are registering. Look most importantly though this year we've been doing a lot of planning for the future and there's some exciting things coming. You'll be seeing increased involvement with other open projects from Moodle and we really want to reach out to all of those because we strongly believe that that's important for the future of this planet. We're having new offices in Europe. We're also going to be releasing a new curriculum for learning to teach online called Learn Moodle and you'll be seeing that soon. There are some exciting improvements to Moodle Cloud and also especially Moodle.net and of course many many improvements coming down the pipe for Moodle itself to make it more usable more simple across any device and more powerful and more accessible as well for any type of education situation. Now none of this could have been possible and all the things we're going to do as well without the support of the community and we really want to thank the global community as well as our Moodle partners who are supporting the project financially and especially the educators who are using Moodle and those who believe in our mission and in the open source movement in general. So thank you very very much. In the meantime we are going to celebrate with a Moodle party. I think maybe you might want to as well. If you do send us some photos or some messages on hashtag MoodleParty on any social media channel that you like and we'll see you there. We'll see you later. Stay in touch. Thanks.


Hey guys, I got a couple more of these empty metal palettes in just today. These are the 12 half pan palettes from Jackson's Art. They look very much like the Prima palette. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised, we'll open the Prima box here, I wouldn't be surprised if they're from the same manufacturer. Because if you look at them, they look the same. This part's a little bit different, but they're very, very similar and they're the same size. Anyway, this one's from Jackson's Art and I want to put my Holbein watercolors in it so they're not in the tubes anymore and I'm really wanting to, I think, put all of the Holbein paints in one palette and what do I mean by that? So all of the watercolors, there's 12 of them, and the gouache, the five gouache colors in one palette. I think for me that would work fine now. These are some standard half pounds. These are ones I got recently from Cheap Joe's. You'll notice right away the Cheap Joe's ones are square and these are rectangular. These are the ones I'm used to. Not that these won't work, these are fine and they both fit in here. These fit in a little, you have to just adjust it a little bit, they both fit, but if what I'm thinking about trying to do, I can actually do, the square ones won't work because what I think I want to do, these rectangular ones are a little bit tighter by the way. I think what I want to do is try to squeeze five into the middle here, if I can, and these square ones there's no way, but I think if I'd use some of these rectangular ones, I think I can squeeze them in if I can. I don't know if it would be easier to put it on a magnet and stick it in there, maybe. So I think I'm going to try to do that. I happen to have five of the rectangular ones, I'm running a little low, I am going out of town soon so I'm thinking that I might see, I'm going to be art shopping with friends so I think I might try to see if I can pick some of these up while I'm out. So let me get some glue together and let me answer the messages that are pinging me right now and I'll be right back. So I played around with the layout of the little half pans and you'll see one full pan played around with it, played around with it and what I sometimes end up doing with these small pallets is just taking that insert out. I don't throw it away, I have actually two of them. One of these is from my travel watercolor kit which I wanted to squeeze as many colors in as I could when I'm traveling and so I took it out and so now we've just taken that one out because of course we're basically doing the same thing. I'll just put it in my drawer of spare parts and you know. So what we'll do is obviously these are going to, they're going to just slide around and they're not going to stick. You could glue them down but what if you ever want to move them around or take them out, maybe you want to wash the pallet out, you want to refill them or something, you don't really want to have them glued down, maybe you want to change your mind later and you want to put this back in. You never know, I never know, I'm constantly changing my mind so I don't glue things down but what we are going to do is glue magnets to the back of our little plastic pans and then put them back in.  Now this magnet sheet of course is sticky but this stickiness that's on here is not meant to get wet. So to ensure that this magnet isn't coming off at all ever, you could of course sit here and peel the magnet off, it's probably the smart thing to do. I don't honestly always do that but let's go ahead and do that. This is old magnet so it's coming off pretty easily. This is also old E6000 so let's get it started here. There we go.   So I'm going to do that to all of them and I'll be right back. So now we've got magnets on the backs of all of our watercolor pans and I filled in the space between the pans on the edge of the pallet with some spongy stuff. I usually keep a sheet of sponge or something around just for doing this sort of thing and then I have some place to wipe my brush off if I'm out and about and I'm painting with this pallet. I can do this and I don't have to worry about having paper towel or something with me. So that's really handy and it's not glued down so I can pull it out and wash the sponge out. Now, and I also cut a piece of watercolor paper and did a grid on it to match the pans in the pallet so that we can make it color key. Now we just have to figure out what colors we're going to put where, which is sometimes the hardest part for me. So let's get all the tubes out of their boxes and these tubes are big. These are really big tubes I've got to tell you. So I think you get a good value for your money. Now we have our two yellows, orange, red, green, violet, brown, oh this is a reddish brown, so let's put it here. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, well maybe I'll put too many pans, see. I still need it, I still didn't have enough so that's fine. And then we have the gouache and I have a little bit extra, which is fine, actually I might be able to take one of those pans out and put a bigger one in but that's fine. I have to figure out what order I'm going to put these in so let me do that and I'll do that. I went from not enough to way too many so I rearranged it one more time and now we've got it worked out and I know what colors are going to go where. So before I put any colors in the pan I'm going to write on my color key which colors are where and I'm going to put a W in front of the color name for watercolor and a G in front of the color name for the gouache so that I know which colors in the palette are which ones. So like for this first one, I need my reading glasses, we'll do a W and then it's permanent yellow lemon and then the next one is a W and it's permanent yellow light. So I'm going to do that for the whole color key and then we'll fill our pan and we'll make our swatches. I've got my palette all completely full and I've given certain colors a larger pan than others because I know from experience with the way I paint that those are colors I'm going to use more of like the yellows, the one blue when I did the swatches I just fell in love with the peacock blue which is very much like a Prussian blue and then I gave the black kind of a larger pan because I think I might be using that a lot when I paint with this particular palette. So now we're going to take our brush out, we got it wet, the paints are still very wet and juicy so you won't need too much of them to do your swatches but you definitely want to go ahead and you don't have to wait for them to dry to create your color key and I like to have my colors sort of darker at the top and lighter at the bottom so I can get some sort of idea of what they're going to look like in varying tones when I'm painting with them. That was a lot of the orange so I'm going to put a little bit on there and then I'm going to just get just water and pull it down so the top of that is darker than the bottom. I'm going to do that with each color, I like this carmine color. This is a good reason why you want to really swatch your colors because the outside of the tube if you look at the color stripe on the tube on the packaging it looks like a brownish red but when you paint with it it's very magenta-y so this is why you want to do this because they're going to look different on paper than they do in the tube packaging or even just straight out of the tube because even straight out of the tube that looks really darker, much darker than it is when you put it on paper. This is a peacock blue, I just love this color. And then what I'll do is I'll let the color key dry and the paints in the pan dry, I'll leave it open. These paints are very fresh and juicy so it's probably going to take two days or so depending on where you live and how damp it is for this to dry. If you're in a drier climate they might dry faster. You can see where I put some white out on the paper but that's fine. As long as I have some kind of an idea of what the paint looks like on the paper I'm good. I almost never get that grid on these color keys right the first time. So these are the gouaches. So here's the magenta gouache and compared to the car mines a little bit more on the yellow side but it's pretty comparable. I like both of these, I could see definitely using these together in some floral paintings. Here's the cyan which I love, a little different than the peacock blue in color. So there you go, that is how you put together a palette. Don't limit yourself when you buy these palettes to the way that they come from the factory meaning this holds 12 half pans or 6 full pans but if that's not enough space for you you can take it out. You aren't stuck using this. So think about that when you're setting it up. I'm going to just leave this out and set it aside and after the paints are dry it can be closed up. When the color key is dry, I have a few of them now, I will laminate it so that when I'm playing with my paints and I'm spritzing it with water I don't get the color key wet. So I usually laminate them or make a plastic sleeve for them or something like that so that they don't get damaged in the painting process. And that's it. So I hope you have fun setting up your custom palette and I have more color keys to do. Alright, that's it for today. Don't forget to support me if you can and are able to by shopping in my Etsy store. I'd appreciate it. I have four new stamp sets that came out today. I am filming this on Monday, February 22nd and they just literally the pre-order listings just went up today. The designs were just finalized a few minutes ago. So if you can go over there and take a look at them and buy some. If you don't want to do that then you can also click that little blue support button on my YouTube channel's main page and support me that way. That would be great and I'll keep the free tutorials and everything, the live broadcast coming. That's it for right now. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself like make yourself a custom paint palette. That's it for today. I'll see you later. Bye.


Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. So as you can see, I have a level 1 hair emergency and you're probably wondering how I let this happen. But the thing is, 4 days ago when I last made a Vlogbrothers video, my hair looked fine, like I had at most a level 8 or level 10 situation. You know, like some kind of intervention would eventually be required, but there was no immediate threat, and then 4 days later, hair emergency! This happens every single time, right after a haircut my hair is great, and then for a long time it is good enough, and then one morning I wake up with a critical situation. And then I have to call my hairstylist and be like, no, it cannot wait until Thursday, I look like an elderly porcupine. Now, Hank, I am aware that I could prevent this cycle by just saying yes when the receptionist at the hair salon asks me immediately after my haircut if I would like to schedule another appointment. But I always say no. Why? Because I've just gotten a haircut. I look great! I'm bulletproof! The last thing I need to do is schedule another haircut. Every single time I am so weirdly confident that this haircut will end up differently from all of the past ones. Oh, and then 10 weeks later I wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and there's Doc Brown. So Hank, this is not only a problem for me when it comes to haircuts, I experience the same issue with burnout. Like, I start to think to myself, I would like to do another thing. I have time. I know that I have time, because I have time to think about this new thing I want to do. It might be that I'd like to start a weird new podcast where I review different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. It might be that I'd like to start a book club or that I'd like to write a new novel, and I will tell myself, this won't be like those other haircuts. This one will end differently. Now, I know what I'm about to say is like a standard acknowledgement in the genre of YouTube burnout videos, but I really like all my jobs. In fact, I'm in the ridiculously privileged position of being absolutely sure that I like my jobs because I don't need to work. I choose to work, and I really love my work, and I want it to have value. Not because I'm like altruistic or whatever, but because it's very useful to me to pay attention to the world outside myself. The problem is that as I add stuff, it all feels totally and completely doable in precisely the same way that the hair situation is entirely under control. Until one day, quite suddenly, it is not under control, and I have a level one burnout emergency. And the unfortunate thing is that once that starts, fixing it is not usually as easy as getting a haircut. Because once I start to feel really overwhelmed, I don't like magically become more productive. I become less productive because being overwhelmed is super time consuming. Burnout does not inspire me toward productivity. It inspires me toward a kind of exhausted fatalism. Also, I forget to schedule haircuts. Anyway, I have an exceptional inability to see burnout coming, and so when it arrived recently, I was completely gobsmacked. Why was there suddenly so much to do and so little time to do it in? The answer, of course, being that I had scheduled it that way. I think this happens to a lot of people. Current you imagines that future you will be slightly more productive and energetic than current you is, which is great. That's the kind of optimism that has fueled the human story. Like, forget about my level of overwhelmedness. Imagine the overwhelmness of the humans who were like, we should get into this ocean we can't see the end of and sail over the edge of the world in these tiny wooden boats. Future us will have no problem figuring out the challenges involved. So what am I going to do about feeling overwhelmed? Well, I'm not going sailing, that's for sure. I do think it helps just to acknowledge it. I also think it helps to prioritize the most important relationships in your life and remember what actually matters, which is not whether the Anthropocene Review comes out on time. But also, when the receptionist asks me if I want to schedule my next hair appointment, I'm going to say yes, and I'm going to try to pay better attention in the hopes of being able to intervene earlier so that fewer level 8 situations become level 1 hair emergencies. Hank, I am going to go get a haircut. I will see you on Friday.


In 2007, ExxonMobil's Drillers asked if they could call a halt on drilling the Blackbeard West well, just 2,000 feet short of their 32,000 foot target that promised to be massively profitable. Those on the spot felt it was just too dangerous for them to continue any deeper. At the same time, the geologists wanted to go deeper to reap expected massive rewards, especially in the light of the investment already made in drilling that deep. The decision whether to halt or proceed was passed right up to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Rex decided to go for safety, saying it's only cost $170 million. Since then, Tillerson and his company have been accused of not having the guts by the financial markets, but no lives were lost. He could easily have given in to the Wall Street analysts, but that would not have been safety leadership. He did have the guts just because he stuck out for the safety of his people, whatever the analysts were going to think. In contrast, BP's similar Macondo well, also in the Gulf of Mexico, was drilled on to disaster in 2010. No one at BP called a halt. 11 lives were lost, the Gulf massively polluted and BP was nearly ruined. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, admitted he had known nothing about the well and its increasing difficulties leading to the explosion. ExxonMobil's drillers knew they both should and could signal their unease. ExxonMobil's management knew they had to listen and take them seriously despite the costs and the potential for criticism from a risk hungry market. While some of BP's contractors voiced their unease on the Deepwater Horizon, BP's own staff carried on regardless. Leaving their superiors in the state of ignorance, they took the lead, but clearly this was not safety leadership. What made the difference? Deep down, the two companies had very different cultures and very different leaders. One took safety seriously as well as making money. ExxonMobil has never been shy about making a profit, but has held safety and care for the environment high ever since the ExxonMobil disaster. The other company also took making money seriously, but had behind it a track record of disasters such as at the Grangemouth in Texas City refineries and the Alaskan oil field. My name is Patrick Hudson. I was Professor of the Human Factory and Safety at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I want to examine leadership in the context of the culture of safety that an organisation has. Unlike other forms of leadership, safety leadership is for everyone and involves publicly reaching for one level higher on the culture ladder than the organisation is currently placed. So what do we mean by leadership? What is a safety culture? Can you become a safety leader? Can you engineer a safety culture? Numerous academic studies of safety culture have found culture hard to capture, but all agree on one dimension, the importance of leadership and safety leadership in particular. Let's start with leadership. One common idea people have is of the autocratic charismatic leader making fine speeches, exhorting the workforce to move forward while always finishing with and be safe. This sounds good, but leaves a lot to be desired, especially when we know who will be blamed if there is an incident. Another approach to leadership is transactional, where we all agree about what the workforce is going to do, often in great detail, to make sure they don't have accidents. We still know who will be blamed when there is one, and it's not usually the managers who lead by setting tasks and targets for others. A better style is called transformational, where leaders work to engage people and create consciousness for safety, often by appealing to their better selves and using emotionally loaded examples to get the message home. Blame is much less of an issue with transformational leaders, but the result of such appeals is often to improve the safety climate and the workforce's perception of the leader not necessarily to actually make them work more safely. What do good leaders do? Why would people want to follow them and make extra effort? There is a list most people, when asked, would agree about leadership in general and safety leadership in particular. Leaders have a clear vision, they know what they want. Leaders communicate, making their vision and expectations public. Leaders set a personal example of how to behave. Leaders have integrity, they can be trusted. Leaders apply clear consequences for those who meet or fail to meet expectations. This type of model works well in describing leadership practice, such as in politics, business or the military. Usually we add some leadership styles. The influential study in the 30s by an American scientist called Kurt Lewin distinguished three styles. The first was autocratic, do what I say. The second was democratic, let's decide together what to do. And the third was laissez faire, do what you like. In the hearts of minds program, we use a version of Hersey and Blanchard's model to identify four styles that leaders might adopt. We added their associated failure styles, telling and yelling, teaching and patronising, participating and do it all, delegating and abdicating. All of these map onto Lewin styles, you can do the same and pretty much any other division of styles and activities. The crucial question here goes beyond style to what is the substance? So what is a leader to tell or teach? What are leaders participating for and in? What are leaders delegating? Our model taught me that there is not just one preferred style for those following a leader and any style can go astray. If people believe there is one style of perfect leadership that fits all sizes, they are wrong. Sometimes people in the situation are best met by an autocratic telling style, emergency and crisis situations that have not been trained for. Sometimes a laissez faire style is most appropriate when the group is highly competent and anything other than leaving them alone would become interference, especially when a leader may know less than the followers. Lewin had data favouring the democratic style, but that may be an artifact of averaging studies. Like so many experiments Lewin used students and the results are projected onto real people facing real dangers. A friend of mine was appointed a shift supervisor at an aluminium smelting plant in South Africa. As a white man, although young and inexperienced, he was put in charge of a highly competent local team. He quickly spotted that what they needed to be highly productive and safe was for him to be a participating leader, setting an example from within the shift. One day there was a major incident involving flowing molten aluminium and he instantly realised that this was new to all of them with highly dangerous molten metal. This was a crisis and he changed an authoritarian telling style as he stood back to ensure he could oversee everyone and keep them all out of harm's way. Once the crisis was over he reverted to the friendly guy he always was. What we learned is that real leaders have to know what their followers need, not what they can give them. What is appropriate for them at that particular moment and specific conditions. But there is a big difference between the standard notion of leadership outside of the safety arena and what we can call safety leadership. Whereas we can usually recognise leaders and followers, bosses lead, workers follow, in safety everyone can have a clear idea of what it means to be safe and act upon it in public. So anyone can lead, everyone can follow in safety. Managers lead workers but workers can also lead their managers and their colleagues by their example as well. I pointed out in the last talk what most studies had identified as the components of a safety culture were really an ideal end state requiring a number of intermediate states to help people attain the high level cultures. The same applies to the substance of what a leader means by safety. Rex Tillerson set a shining example but safety leadership is far more than doing the right thing when such a critical moment arises. Tony Hayward failed not just because he didn't make the right speech at the right time, he certainly failed there but because he'd failed to have his workforce wherever in the world and no matter how lowly know exactly what he would have wanted them to do. He made some fine speeches and like his predecessor and his successor promised that BP gets it. But that was about as far as it went. So, what I've learnt about leadership and safety leadership in particular is that it is not just about the style but more about the substance. The most glaring gap the bit people find hardest to do is substance. What do we as individuals and as an organisation actually mean by safety? This really has to be a lot more than just the emotional call to be safe. If you have that articulated idea in your head, then you can create the clear vision. You know what you want and you can communicate it much more easily. Integrity and trust become simpler to develop and maintain. You know what kind of example you have to set and to whom. But surely all that's required is to say the vision is safety first. Well, no. That's a pretty meaningless vision for someone faced with a choice at 3am. When production beckons and we feel we can get away with it just once. A personal and smaller Tillerson moment that's still called for real guts in the face of temptation. Saying safety first seems pretty simple to the outsider. Someone operating the 2020 hindsight often sitting in an office on the other side of the world. Reality requires more than a slogan at 3am you need to know what to do how to do it and why. What people understand by safety? What people understand messages about safety and how they understand the risks they face is not absolute. It's determined by the culture the common set of values, beliefs attitudes and working practices that determine people's behaviors. This collection is what we call the safety culture and can be distinguished into a number of different cultures that are increasingly better in terms of the safety culture ladder from pathological through calculative to generative. In previous talk I discussed how we can become a better safety culture moving up the ladder towards the proactive and even generative cultures. I mentioned leadership in passing as essential if you want to move up the ladder while a lack of leadership is one of the best ways to slip down. I've come to realise that safety leadership at least its content rather than its style can be framed in terms of going one step higher than those around you. So if the culture is reactive then leadership involves setting out a calculative vision and behaving in ways that make that come about. If the culture is already calculative then the leader has to be dragging everyone else up towards the proactive stage and if the culture is still predominantly pathological and many unfortunately are then reactive is where you have to be. Shooting for proactive is doomed to fail. No one will understand what you say and they lack the skills to build on. An example of early safety leadership one simple enough for the organisational safety culture of the time 1984 was given by a member of Shells committee managing directors. Simply he said we are killing too many people and instituted a reactive process kept up to this day whereby his top colleagues personally reviewed every fatal accident with the top manager of the country where the accident happened. This instituted a company-wide habit setting seriously to accidents no longer accepting them as the price of doing business. Another example of the same transition when much of the company indeed the industry at the time was pretty pathological or early reactive was Dick then production director for a major oil and gas company for the whole North Sea. Normally such a person would have a stack of reports on his desk which were then delegated for processing even someone professing to be passionate about safety as Dick was not him. He had the cleanest desk you ever saw he was hard to meet in his office as he was always offshore people knew he was coming and lined up to tell him about problems and issues that he did his best to have fixed before he flew back on the last flight when I could meet him in his office. He showed the problems were worth identifying and would get fixed by responding directly to workforce concerns Dick moved safety reporting way up the agenda creating trust by actually taking reports seriously. Nowadays these examples might not be regarded as particularly unusual but at the time they formed powerful messages appropriate for what people could understand given their culture at the time. Articulating a more advanced vision would frankly have gone over people's heads and been a waste of time making for fine speeches but little if any impact. Safety leadership is also not just repeating the message of the day knowing what the script is because that will never be enough to shift people the culture towards a better place. Two people I've both known well again in the same oil company I'll call them Coase and Richard who showed safety leadership by first devising and then implementing safety management systems. Coase although an engineer felt that the next step in safety management had to take account of the people and had a group of us including myself and Jim Reason even before the Piper Alpha disaster. This led to Swiss cheese as well as SMS that was still in the same department. Coase was and still is unremittingly focused on HRC and made sure that his top management knew what was going on. He left them with a clear understanding that this was where the company was going and they had to be part of it. They in turn supported him and left him as group head of upstream HRC to get the job done. What we all put in place was essentially early calculative an approach to safety that transcended responding to the immediate events but started to look at the underlying factors and collect data. Richard was his successor and he took up the next task getting the system into operation worldwide whether required by regulators or not. This involved managing the transition from in place to in operation. Many of your problems arose from locations where they frankly didn't wish to change their ways but again with the support of even more senior managers he got it done. Moving from design to operation is not always straightforward and when our clever ideas on safety management didn't work as expected he yet again showed leadership by giving us the possibility to go over and get things right. At the time their boss, an Australian I'll call Rob, showed his leadership by backing them up even though it meant he had to change his own habits and show publicly he truly believed in safety. Crucial to all these individuals was their emphasis on reaching out to all levels. I remember a safety conference in Melbourne where Rob and I shared a dinner table with an aviation refueller from Sydney who could hardly believe his ears when Rob was showing his workforce members where he wanted them to go next and start doing it themselves proactively a senior management started to take a step back out of the limelight this was exactly what my next example did Michael Abreshoff was not the brightest and the best in the US Navy he graduated from naval college in the bottom half and when he got command of a destroyer he didn't get the best he got the worst the USS Benfold re-enlistment on the Benfold was 0% presumably the crew hated the ship and the Navy Mike Abreshoff selected re-enlistment rate as his measure of success and started to create what we now recognise as a proactive culture building on and past the culture that is the US Navy he documented his efforts and how successful he was in a book called It's Your Ship with the following set of chapter titles that reads almost like a description of the proactive culture for leaders Take command Lead by example Listen aggressively Communicate purpose and meaning Create a climate of trust Look for results not salutes Effective not just operational Take calculated risks Go beyond standard procedures Effectiveness again Build up your people This is where you have to give power back Generate unity The move from I to we Improve your people's quality of life Mike made his crew members work to make themselves better and then recognise their successes in public One thing he did to win the trust of his crew members was to insist that the ship bought its food supplies from better suppliers rather than take the easy way out and accept what they were normally given This both saved the US Navy a lot of money and led to a well nourished crew for a change He only had one autocratic demand No country music when they parted in harbour This kind of non-standard thinking is related to both engendring trust but also in moving processes and procedures and making them effective Not merely requiring strict compliance but making things work Reenlustment shot up to nearly 100% His crew's competence scores became stellar but he discovered that he had missed one vital component He never communicated what and why he was doing to his fleet peers who became jealous leading to problems he documented in the second book, It's Our Ship Another example I've worked with was Vice President of part of a major South East Asian airline maintenance company He decided that his staff should go on a hazard hunt but they had to fix any problems they found as part of our program to improve the safety culture This is proactive behaviour where power and responsibility are beginning to be handed back from management to the workforce One group identified a major risk but they also knew it would be expensive to fix so they held back The VP and I went to look at what they'd found We suggested some extra possibilities that reduced the price tag to only a million and a half dollars Then he said, do it and walked away As far as he was concerned it was cheap at the price and lucky enough to find a generative organisation a coal mine of all things and learn about how they got there Yet again, safety leadership by the general manager, who I'll call Peter involved Peter developing a vision of what a truly advanced safety and production culture might look like and then driving the whole mine in that direction The miners were not necessarily comfortable at least to start with as he devolved power over production planning, training operations to the teams stepping back over two years One of his intentions was to deliberately counter the prevailing mining culture in which miners took out their brains and left them in a box at the start of the shift He took away their boxes metaphorically to make them take responsibility for their actions and develop mutual trust The result of this and many other actions was that the mine had both the best safety and production performance and stayed open and profitable long after it was originally planned to be closed down In all these cases, safety leadership appears to have involved the leader identifying and publicly pushing a vision that represented one step higher on the safety culture louder than the organisation was at the time The advantage of using this knowledge is that a safety leader can articulate for themselves a much more detailed vision of what they aspire to being safe or safety first Anyone armed with a clear and more detailed vision what, how and why will find it much easier to communicate to know how to behave whatever their personal leadership style These three what we do, how we do and why differ at the different levels of the safety ladder changing as we learn to get better in progress Learning a style without this kind of substance doesn't really get you very far In fact, if the vision being developed is of a really advanced generative culture then this will only work for a culture that is already proactive because only then will what someone does and says make sense I've said that everyone could be a safety leader because anyone can show their colleagues where to go next Nevertheless there is still a special role laid out for those higher up in the organisation especially those right at the top those like Rex Tillerson and Tony Hayward If those at the top do not develop their own vision and seek out and actively support those who share this below them then no matter how much transformation the workforce might attempt they will always be shot down if those at the top are not leading in the first place The inverse however does not need apply it's just harder for senior safety leaders to find ways of getting everyone on board with their vision like Peter when he no longer allowed his miners to take their shifts Senior safety leaders have to search out and publicly support those below them right to the bottom who are trying to be safety leaders as well I've covered what the vision might consist of an articulated view of what safety means for everyone on the next step of the ladder I've also stressed the importance of communication because leadership is a public activity setting a personal example showing integrity and developing trust to take a lot of effort a simple tool I like to give people is the idea of a walk-talk ratio whenever someone is communicating a vision how much are they backing it up with deeds as well as words you can use this to rate your bosses your colleagues even your reports although doing it to yourself is harder someone with a ratio of one is walking the talk someone a bit lower is probably pushing the talk and has to follow up someone with a low ratio is really full of hot air I once met someone in Houston who I raced well above one because he was doing great things but was weak on the talk part which is also so vital in leadership this was Mike Abrishoff's lesson with his peers a bit lower than one is probably where I would like people to be when that extra is where they want to get to and everyone else which is what I've been equating with safety leadership one may be fantastic but is also easy to get when you don't push past the envelope of your own comfort zone one last lesson I've learnt over the years when we started out after Piper Alpha to define and implement the concept of a safety management system we discovered that although you could generalise management systems to anything such as environment, quality occupational health early efforts that did this fell flat we realised that organisations have to start simply and then can generalise how they have acquired the managerial skills safety formed the point of the wedge as accidents are immediate salient and hard to repair unlike some of the rest leadership is often taught as if you can learn to be a leader and then apply it to safety but the lesson applies here too learn to lead in one area I suggest safety and get the hang of it integrating safety culture and safety leadership gets us around the style substance divide even if you're not too good on style you can always be good on substance and honestly if you can't lead on safety what can you lead?