The Safety Superpower Sitting in Your Team

True story: A supervisor was working late in the warehouse, getting everything in order for the next day.

Doing what he normally did.

The next day, nobody could find him, so they filed a missing person’s report.

People went through the CCTV footage, looking for something. Anything. They found nothing.

He didn’t look distressed, sad or agitated and wasnt behaving strangely.

He simply packed up and left.

Everyone who watched saw the same thing.

Except one person.

This person had spent a lifetime developing what I can only describe as a pattern-recognition superpower. He didn’t think it was a superpower, he just thought he was observant.

He noticed the supervisor who normally left the rope ready for the next day, had put it away differently.

He normally put his laptop somewhere secure, but this time left it out on the table.

Then there were his keys.

They had simply been left beside the laptop.

But he noticed, they’d been deliberately placed there.

And he noticed something else.

The supervisor looked unusually calm. At peace.

The footage was shown to police.

They agreed. They were no longer looking at a man who was simply packing up for the day.

They were looking at a man who was packing up his life.

The difference wasn’t the CCTV.

Everyone had the same footage.

The difference was what one person was capable of seeing in it.

This is one of the things that interests me most about human capability at work.

We tend to think safety knowledge is what people have been taught – procedures, inductions, risk assessments, training, rules.

But some of the most valuable safety knowledge isn’t written down at all.

It comes from thousands of hours of watching, doing, listening and noticing.

• An experienced operator knows what a machine normally sounds like.
• How long a job normally takes.
• What a process normally looks like.
• How their colleague normally behaves.
• What happens when the temperature changes, when a different operator is on the machine, when the load is different.

They build a mental picture of normal. And when something doesn’t fit that picture, they notice.

They may not be able to explain it immediately.

They may not even be right.

But the deviation is there.

That’s a safety sensor.

There is a perfectly good reason not to act on every hunch.

You can’t shut down a factory every time someone says, “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Good safety systems need evidence, judgement and proportionate action.

Not every observation needs action. But people need to know that noticing it was still valuable.

If someone repeatedly notices things and nothing happens, they learn.

• The machine that sounded different becomes “normal”.
• The process that takes longer becomes “just how long it takes”.
• The colleague who behaves differently becomes “having a bad day”.

Eventually, the person stops noticing.

The sensor hasn’t failed. We have stopped using it.

This is where leaders have a role.

• Ask the new employee what looked strange during their first month.
• Ask experienced workers what has changed.
• Ask operators what sounds different, feels different or takes longer than it used to.
• Ask people what they know that isn’t written down.

Alan Mulally understood this at Ford.

His weekly Business Plan Review required leaders to report their areas as green, yellow or red. The value wasn’t the colour. It was that every leader had to bring their particular view of what was happening in their part of the business to the room.

When one leader put up red, Mulally wanted to understand what that leader was seeing that others couldn’t.

More yellow and red began to appear.

The important thing wasn’t the traffic lights.

He made people’s unique view of the business part of the job.

That’s the lesson.

You don’t need your people to be right every time. You need them to keep looking.

We spend enormous amounts of time building better systems to identify risk – more technology, more dashboards, more reporting, more data.

All of those things have their place.

But don’t overlook the human being standing next to the machine, the operator who knows that sound, the worker who knows that process, the new employee who hasn’t yet learned that “that’s just how we do it”.

They may notice the first sign of change long before it becomes an obvious problem.

The capability is already there.

Are you seeing it?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

By Amanda Anderson, Keynote Speaker | Broadcaster | Author 

Amanda, a mental health ambassador, trauma-informed practitioner, and lived experience advocate, empowers individuals to navigate adversity and build well-being. Her role in L’Occitane’s mental health initiatives, coupled with her personal journey through trauma, fuels her uniquely empathetic understanding of workplace pressures and personal healing. With 20+ years of expertise in NLP and mental health, Amanda offers a multifaceted perspective marked by unparalleled empathy and authenticity. Her core message: Adversity doesn’t have to break you; it can make you.

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/amandakanderson/