Worley

Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing knowledge or a lesson. This innate human capability can vary from a simple, literal, and linear approach to sometimes include improvisation, theatrics, or embellishments. Every culture, family, and group has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or for instilling moral values. In safety leadership, we can use the power of storytelling to share experiences and influence behaviours in the safety space.

Elements of storytelling can be non-fictional, fictional, or a combination of both. The value of sharing knowledge or a lesson through storytelling can be very powerful in establishing safe behavior and safe condition expectations. It can sensitize the work family members to risk vs reward in the safety risk tolerance space, and to identify the personal and collective accountability system matrix.

Non-fictional stories in safety should be relevant to the type of safety risk the work family are exposed to. Sharing how a massive mining truck turned over due to poor maintenance would not be applicable to scuba divers who specialize in gathering data to understand the impact of climate change on aquatic life. However, sharing the leading events that caused the Texas City BP Refinery explosion would be very impactful to work family members who work in a refinery.

Fictional stories in safety should have a connection to what could happen. There is a famous safety poem written by Don Merrell ‘I Chose to Look the Other Way’, that tells a fictional story about a work family member choosing not to challenge his peer on an unsafe act that eventually leads to death. While that poem and stories like it may not be real in history, they can create a lot of impact by teaching a lesson in what is right and what is wrong in safety leadership. Consider the impact of this poem, which generates immediate connection and emotion vis a vis the same message delivered in a drier, direct dos and don’ts poster.

Combining fictional stories as an engagement and training tool in safety leadership is not uncommon – this approach has long been used to share knowledge or to teach a safety lesson to the work family. Basing a story on non-fiction and adding exciting details or embellishing the facts can help work family members actively listen and remember the meaning of the story like movies that are based on a true story.

I have used all the storytelling elements listed above to share safety knowledge and to teach safety lessons:

My non-fictional stories include my experience of:

• Helping my father roof homes without utilizing appropriate PPE because we did not know better.
• Challenging a company executive on the costly provision of scaffolding instead of requiring the work family members to use fall arrest to mitigate the 20-foot fall hazard.
• Being challenged as a professional fire fighter where I responded to terrible incidents that included fatalities, which could have been prevented.

"Combining fictional stories as an engagement and training tool in safety leadership is not uncommon – this approach has long been used to share knowledge or to teach a safety lesson to the work family."

My fictional stories include my experience of:

• Being called out to the parking lot to fight because a work family member did not like the company lockout – tagout rules (he did get mad, but he did not challenge me to a fight).
• My description of why I am a safety professional is based on my feelings and not a life changing moment.

My combination of real and fictional story elements include:

• My experience in St Lucia, where I shared safety training with a group of work family members that were not interested because I had not prayed before the classes. The work family preferred that I prayed before the class each day, but they were not as resistant as I make them out to be when I tell the story.
• Supervisors in the professional fire department who I served alongside that did not like me, but most did (telling an underdog story helps gain empathy).
• I have been exposed to many religious leaders in my life who have taken facts and creatively made them more interesting to tell a story of how faith in a higher power works. Storytelling by religious leaders can be very powerful in sending a message to enhance the faith of the followers.

As a safety leader for more than 32 years in heavy industry, I have plenty of my own and others’ stories to share on many subjects with the goal of sharing knowledge and teaching lessons to my work family and others to prevent injury, environmental disturbances, and property damaging events.

Maya Angelou’s quote, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” resonates with me wholeheartedly. Storytelling for me helps to capture the attention, minds, and hearts of those I am trying to reach in the safety space.