Full Transcript for How Risk Compensation Impacts Safety Results with Craig Martin and Jesus M. de la Garza

as chair of the National Research Council's Board on Infrastructure and Reconstructed Environment, also known as VICE. Safety is of interest to me because as leaders, at the end of the day, we have the responsibility to send home our coworkers. LC. I'm glad to be here. Thanks, Jesus. I'm glad to be here with you both. And and let me echo your thanks to Sue and NAC for giving us the opportunity to ⁓ talk about this. I've been a member of NAC since my election in 2020. My background is engineering and construction, almost mine well, basically my entire career. Most recently, ⁓ before my retirement, I was the CEO of Jacobs Engineering. Safety is in a very important topic to me. And why interventions don't work as we expect has been an area that I've been very interested in for some time now. And I think this ⁓ conversation will be an interesting way to explore that. So with that, I'll give it back to you, Sue. Great. And thank you both for doing this. I know when Craig you and I talked initially, I was a little nervous. I thought, well he's probably gonna say no. But I think that the fact that you you re recognize how what a breakthrough topic this is for those of us who have been sincerely committed. To building safer workplaces and, you know, making a breakthrough and safety performance. I think for me, it really opened up my eyes. And that's why we want it to be very provocative and challenging today. So, in preparing for the podcast, I think it's important for our listeners to hear the story about how this ⁓ risk tolerance and safety executive insight came about and the role that you you each played in that. And I think it really helps. you know, set the stage for the podcast. So, ⁓ Jesus, maybe you can kick it off and then Craig can jump in about, you know, how you guys kind of came together on this to create it. Absolutely. You already know that I spent 31 years in the Genetech. ⁓ 20 of those years, my house was located in a neighborhood that required me to negotiate a double SCR, a chart double S Kern. There was a hill on one side. and a river on the other side. The posted speed limit was 1515 miles per hour. Self-included, it was not uncommon to be doing 35 miles an hour. Given the number of near misses, we asked the Department of Transportation if they could enhance the safety of the road, make it safer. And they did it by adding recess markers and Chevron Road signs on the sides of the road. One night after these safety enhancements were made, I went home and it was like I was landing in Logan International Airport. The visibility was incredible. It was no longer nighttime. Of course it was nighttime, but these elements of chevron research markers make made it so very easy to follow the escort. Well guess what? The speed went easily to 45 miles per hour. So speed is posted at 15, we routinely did 35, and now with the safety enhancements, we went to 45. Why was that the case? Simply because we felt safer by so such road visibility. Since then, an automobile with multiple passengers has rolled over with one fatality. So for 20 years I've been pondering. The this aspect and not being able to explain it, what was happening in this ⁓ escort. Fast forward to 2016, my colleague Craig Martin was delivering a keynote lecture at the CII Annual Conference. And he was pointing out that despite the safety commitment of CII member companies, we still couldn't get to zero every time. By design, not by chance. And he, as he went on through the presentation, he pointed out, and this is a quote because I remember very clearly, he pointed out there has to be something else at play, and this is a quote from Craig Martin's keynote. He went on to cite then from a book published by John Adams, a quote that read as follows. Safety interventions that do not alter people's propensity to take risks will be frustrated by responses that reestablish the level of risk with which people were originally content. That is, risk compensation is the tendency of people to adjust their behavior in response to perceived changes in safety. At that precise instant. I had the feeling that now we had something that could explain why the speeds went from 15 to 45 miles an hour. I left the ballroom without waiting for Craig to finish. I had to go and find Sogan Hassan Sadeh who had just won the CII Best Posted Award. Sogan was finishing her master's degree at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and I asked her if she wanted to get a PhD and she said yes. I share my escort story and Craig Martin's insights. She came to Virginia Tech to test the hypothesis of whether there are side effects of safety interventions. You know, just like an advil can treat a headache, it does it with potential side effects like rashes, blisters, stomach bleeding, and at an increased risk of heart attack. But we still take the advil when we have a headache. That is a great story about your personal experience with increasing safety systems measures and not getting the results. Well, it's al always interesting to hear somebody say they got up and left your presentation without hearing the end. My background here starts with with a superintendent I worked for very early in my career. Great guy, very safety focused, really kept us trying to do our best on the job side. A couple of years after that project finished and we both moved on. He was working at home, put a ladder in a power line and killed himself. And I'd often wondered for years, actually, that why a guy I knew what was safe and what wasn't would do that the way he did. And it wasn't until I started looking into this business of what's acceptable risk that I began to understand that it's more than just the processes and procedures, it's the behaviors. And in fact, it's more than just the behaviors. It's that propensity to take an acceptable level of risk. And that's often weighed against other competing factors. And I concluded in the case of my superintendent friend, it was expeditious not

to do the things that he knew he needed to do in order to get whatever was on the roof done. And it cost him his life. And I think that's a a mini example of what we've subsequently learned through research like Jesus and practical experiences. Is this problem of what is acceptable risk and how does safety intervention affect or modify perceptions about risk? So that's what brings us to this topic. ⁓ and I think you see interesting examples as you look around. I'm sure I'll get an opportunity to talk about some of those as this discussion unfolds. That's great. That's a great 2016 was almost 10 years ago from where we are today. And obviously there's steps in there that we're not gonna. share the details in the podcast you all summarize very well in the executive insight and people can get that from the NAC website. But what we want to do is look at this from more of a practitioner point of view. We're gonna move to this core theory that you talked about, Jesus, when you mentioned Craig making the quote from John Adams' book about risk that at the conference that really piqued your interest. And it really underpins our theme. You know, safer does not always mean safer, and that people's perceptions are more important than what objectively exists as far as risk, i.e., your signs around your curve. I think we should just talk about this core theory for a few minutes. And I know this might be a majority of the podcast, but I think it's not an opinion, it's fact, it's data, it's research that that founds a lot of what we're talking about. So, hey Zeus, maybe starting with you, could you Provide a little foundation on this risk theory? Absolutely. I I will take a minute first to summarize really the experiment that we did to test this hypothesis. ⁓ we we stimulated in a mixed reality immersive environment the installation of roofs roof shingles. So we we created a twenty-seven degree slope that was twenty feet above the ground level. And to determine whether safe always been safer or not, we tested three different safety interventions. One basically hard hats, eyeglasses, knee pads, gloves, not much of a safety intervention. That was the entry level. Then we added an injury reducing intervention, basically a restraining harness. And then we added to the highest level, an injury prevention intervention. That is we added a guard rail around the roof. What we found is explained by the fact that the safer the subjects felt, their perception of risk decreased, and hence their risk taking behavior increased. This risk taking behavior can be explained by a temperature thermostat metaphor. If the inside temperature falls be below a given target, the heat pump kicks in to restore the temperature to the Target that makes the inhabitants comfortable. It then follows that if the perception of risk decreases below that target that makes an individual comfortable, then the risk taking behaviour kicks in to restore the individual's risk tolerance target. And so this

notion of we humans carry within us ⁓ a thermostat of sorts that regulates a risk taking behaviour. is very, very real. Don't they call it risk homeostasis or something like that in the book? Yes indeed. Yes indeed. That the terminology is is very risk homeostasis and risk compensation are used interchangeably. Exactly. Craig, what are your thoughts on Adam's book and the impact it had and any key thoughts? Well Adam's book had had a significant impact, you know, on the industry. He cites lots of examples to support his argument that people adjust their risk thermostat to match the level of risk that they're comfortable with and that interventions don't necessarily result in safer outcomes. And and we see that in in real life. I mean, just take following distances on the freeway. Cars have better brake systems today than they once did, so we follow closer. ⁓ there's no reason for that. Other than we don't get there faster by following closer. But the fact of the matter is, you know, our wrist thermostat has moved up because we feel less danger of a rear-end collision because we have greater confidence in the vehicle, and so we follow closer. I think that's a a good example of of what we're talking about here. And you see that in in a number of different aspects of of life. If you just step back and think about it, whether it's your your personal situation like driving a car, or it's a business situation like guardrails on a roof, both those things can actually increase your willingness to get in the danger zone because you don't feel as at risk. And I think that's really a a very powerful conclusion from Adams and Jesus' research is clearly supporting Adams' conclusions. So I think we've got a There's there's a theme here that that really needs exploration by the industry. Absolutely. I I just wanted to add another everyday example to what Craig just discussed. ⁓ my office is in a university campus, so students walk left and right, cross sidewalks, cross streets. And what's interesting h in a campus like Clemson's and others, probably very similar, is that when students jaywalk, their their head turns left and right to see if there are if there is incoming traffic because they have no protection, they take less risk. When the students cross at at the intersection on the crosswalk, somehow they feel artificially protected by the crosswalk and invariably they are looking down, looking at their cell phones. They're taking more risks because they feel more protected by the crosswalk. So I just wanted to add another example of everyday life to the conversation here. It's a great point. Jaywalking is one my favorite examples. And in fact, the last time I looked at the data, about sixty percent of fatalities welling people on roadsides occur at crosswalks. And you would think the opposite, right? Jaywalking ought to be more dangerous, but the behaviors are different. Those those are some great examples. I I live near a university and I drive through their campus a lot, and even with the flashing lights and things like similar to your S curve. I've seen so many cars just blow through a crosswalk that's supposed to be safer. And I can see why that might happen. So let's touch on the balance between ⁓ human behavior and safety systems and controls, because now that we know that we're gonna adjust our risk thermostat or risk tolerance based on our perception, then as we add more controls We now I'm assuming, okay, that means everyone's gonna be more risk taking and that's gonna reduce our safety performance. So what about safety controls and that balance? Does it mean they don't matter? I mean, tell me a little bit more about the theory about how human behavior reacts to these controls. Well, I I don't think it means that they don't make a difference. They do make a difference, but behavior's a complex thing. And and people behave in the way that they do for a a large variety of reasons, often including things like ⁓ what they're incentivized to do and and so on in their decision making process for how much risk to take. You know, I found over the years that many, many of the people who got injured on on our projects were injured as a result of taking steps that they thought would improve productivity or outcomes and and that they believed we wanted. So they put themselves, you know, they set the thermostat higher because they felt comfortable that that's the that's the level we wanted. And obviously it isn't and wasn't, but that's a hard lesson to to teach. But interventions make a difference. Getting the thermostat right, keeping it in place, I think that's the challenge of leadership. Well, I I believe that every human being has a different target for risk taking. Intrinsically, we're born risk averse or we're born jumping out of airplanes on parachutes. Speaking for myself, you wouldn't get me in even with three or four parachutes, you wouldn't get me to jump out of an airplane. Just because my target for risk taking behavior is set much lower. However what's evident by your comments, Craig, and other points that John Adams made in his book is that leadership can to some extent move up or move down that target that we carry in our in our brains. And so the target is no longer a hundred percent at our discretion. It can be influenced by the leadership. You mentioned, Craig, the role of incentives. Perhaps my target can be influenced by leadership's emphasis on incentives to finish the project faster. So I think ⁓ when we own the targets, that target can be influenced by the role that leadership plays on a job side. That's great. Well, let's move to more, I guess, examples of leadership implications and applications. You talked a little bit about incentives and leaders have a key role. in influencing the risk thermostat on their job sites. So maybe starting with Craig, ⁓ you could talk a little bit about roles and intentions that leaders can take to adjust the risk thermostat and actually get

better s better results. Well I I think there are a number of of factors. I mean one is just making sure people understand that more safety doesn't mean take more risk, right? But I think equally important are things like what do what do you value? What do put rewards around? Is it is it speed? Is it completion? Is it the hero complex where somebody goes out and does something daring to produce a great outcome? ⁓ incentives, as Jesus mentioned. These things are the things that can cause people to leave their wrist thermostat at a high level, or perhaps even move it up, take more risk. I think the learning process can influence it either way. You know, you certainly see these cases where ⁓ the new employee comes on a job site, there he's been to the safety training, there's a process for doing X. Then he gets on the job site, the old hands say, No, no, we don't do that. That's not necessary. We just do X minus three. And then the young person gets injured or killed because one of those minus three things turned out to be critically important. And just because it hadn't happened didn't mean it wasn't going to. So even the what people learn from their peers can have a pretty profound influence on where the risk thermostat gets set. I think all of us learn from the from putting your finger on the heating element on the stove as a child, right? You learn not to do that anymore. And, you know, jumping out of airplanes, I'm not sure I would jump out of airplanes either at this point in my life. But there was probably a time I might have considered it. So as you age, at least in my case as I've aged, I have found myself to be a little more risk adverse than I probably started out in my twenties. Walking on a beam two hundred feet in the air didn't bother me in my twenties. It would bother me greatly today. You the thermostat does change with experience. But the question is, what experience and and what what feedback is the individual getting? I like I like a quote, I think, out of Adam's book. It said, What risks have been normalized in your organization simply because nothing bad has happened? And, you know, y there's unintended consequences and especially if leaders rely too much on the technical and operational solutions and don't look at the human behavior side of this equation and really become experts in human behavior, ⁓ we'll always fall short. Like you said, we in the speech, you know, it's impossible to get to zero. And speaking of zero, maybe we can elaborate a little bit, because this is a human behavior problem. How would a culture of caring and creating more of a human element to the safety program really make a difference? And why is that important? And I know many of us, all three of us have experience with that. But I do think that is a, I would say, an opportunity for leaders to move the needle on results if they understand more how to create a culture of caring. Well, I can take a crack at that question. So from an academic point of view, and I am an academic, ⁓ I think that the thermostat metaphor needs to be embedded in the curriculum delivered by safety professionals to our colleagues, our co-workers. We all work for each other. And I think that by introducing the metaphor in a metaphor that can be understood by those train taking the the training and the education. And therefore now that they are aware of these side effects They can mitigate them and and manage them much, much better that without knowing what is that something else that may be happening. That's a great point. I would say that having been in multiple safety training seminars, I've never heard the risk thermosat outlined effectively. I've never really heard it until I read y'all's executive insight and yet I was the CEO of a transformational safety company. So you You understand that this is something I don't think we've really embedded in curriculum yet. You know, I I think to to Hastes' point and yours, peer group intervention and a caring culture can be effective in identifying places where people are out of the envelope, where their risk thermostat is too high. But that culture can also be such that it raises the risk. thermostat if the wrong kinds of behaviors are being rewarded. So, you know, a culture of caring ha has to be one based on safety of the individual, caring about the individual, their families, their lives, or it it doesn't really impact the way we'd like it to. I think for the most part, people who are trying to get that sort of culture are very much trying to get the one that we would all agree with and would in fact, if if when fully established, be one that that would impact positively the outcomes. But if you look at all the effort that our industry has put into ⁓ safety and all the improvements we've made in things like the total recordable rate, we're still killing a thousand people every year. Another five thousand are are committing suicide. Our our intervention, our culture of caring hasn't yet reached to the r to that level. I guess is the best way to say it. Absolutely. And as y'all pointed out, you know, it's a peer to peer thing too. It's not just compliance with what a supervisor says. It's looking out for each other, intervening, building trust and challenging, frankly, if if you see somebody who you don't think is working safe and gotta create that kind of culture. ⁓ I think another point maybe from Adam's book was people comply with supervisors, but they intervene for people they care about. Yeah, I I think that's fundamental to what a culture of caring really means. I it's not a top-down management hierarchy intervention. It's peer-to-peer. So with all this conversation and ⁓ theory and practice, I'd like to end on more of a hopeful positive, you know, what we can do or be different to address this risk tolerance and safety. Any closing thoughts on, you know, what we as leaders can do in the industry? to make a difference now that we know what we know. I have given a

talk on this subject in a few places in a couple of those instances I the message got lost. I was misunderstood ⁓ about well are you implying that we need to stop safety interventions because they have side effects? And it's totally the opposite. Totally the opposite. I want to be very clear ⁓ as we reflect on this topic and we finish this podcast. That notwithstanding the now known side effects of safety interventions, meaning risk compensation, we need to double down on safety interventions. But now we have the knowledge to be able to understand that the behavioral aspects need to be managed and mitigated. Yeah, that's a a great point and a great comment. I I agree with Jesus. We're we're not suggesting that safety interventions are important. They are. We're not suggesting that processes, procedures, all those things don't matter. They do. And and we doubling down is a great way to describe what needs to happen in that area. But the understanding of the behaviors and the culture that supports those behaviors is a critical step toward real success in in safety management and control. in in outcomes where people are safe, psychologically safe, physiologically safe, where they can carry those ideas home. That sort of space is what needs to be created in addition to safe conditions. And I think I think the opportunity is there for all of us to help make that happen. And and I hope that this podcast to again thank you for the invitation to Craig and I will trigger a wider conversation within the National Academy of Construction because basically we we are highlighting the important role of human behavior. And back to ⁓ the quote that I made from Craig Martin's keynote presentation. There's got to this he said this has to be something else. Well the something else is ⁓ human behavior. Clearly it's one component of this something else. And and we need to deal with it. At first. I agree. Great point. Well, that's a great challenge to end on. Thank you both for being involved in this podcast. I feel like we could probably go on for another 30 minutes, but in trying to keep it at a certain pace so that we can keep it in one podcast. I'd just like to close by a few takeaways. ⁓ you've just mentioned safety performance plateaus are often behavioral adaptation problems, not merely technical. systems problems. And I like this one about leaders must shift the risk thermostat towards safer norms and foster a culture of caring, not just technical compliance. And finally for me, realizing that risk is going to exist no matter what happens and we're going to adjust to our own thermostat, the objective is not to eliminate all risk taking, but to achieve zero tolerance for unnecessary and unmanaged risk. So again, thank you both for being on the podcast. ⁓ And we'll look forward to seeing what we can do to follow up in terms of things the National Academy of Construction can do to further this topic and make a difference in the industry to transform our industry to build a better nation, which is our tagline for twenty twenty six. So I'd like to thank our audience for tuning in to this episode of Get the Knack about risk tolerance and safety with Craig Martin and Jesus de la Garza. Please share your comments with us at get the knack at naocon.org and let us know of any other topics it may be of interest to you. And to get more information on this topic, including the a copy of the executive insight, which is nine dot four two, and other insights from the academy, please go to our webpage, naocon.org forward slash insights. We'll be back really soon with more content and have a safe day. Thank you, Sue. Thank you very much, Sue. Thank you for tuning in to Get the Knack because the construction industry needs people like you, leaders and innovators, to build our future.