John Dony: 0:03

What I see on the bleeding edge to me in that domain feels like the monolith. And we feel like the two apes, knocking together rocks at the beginning of 2001 trying to figure out how to better prompt and not get hallucinations and data in the, commercial facing tools we're using.

Tom Raftery: 0:21

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 110 of the Resilient Supply Chain podcast. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. If your safety metrics are improving, you'd assume your people are safer. But what if the dashboard looks better while serious injuries and fatalities barely move? What if the numbers are measuring performance, not risk? That's the question at the heart of this week's episode. We dig into why serious injuries and fatalities remain stubbornly hard to reduce, why traditional metrics often miss the real drivers of risk and where AI may help if the data, governance, and trust are in place. To explore that, I'm joined by John Dony, CEO, and co-founder of the What Works Institute and Mike Swain, Technical enablement manager at Evotix. John. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourselves?

John Dony: 1:27

Thanks Tom. Very happy to be here. I'm John Dony. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the What Works Institute, which is a research to practice think tank that's member driven and really focused on practical insight. Have about a 20 year career before that in EHS and quality safety oriented work. Most recently spent a large chunk of that career, 16 years at the National Safety Council here in the United States leading a variety of research, advocacy, grant, thought leadership, best practice type work including the Campbell Institute and a few other projects that came up under my, tenure. Moved into What Works November of 2024. Things have been going wonderfully and we've been partnered with Mike and Evotix for a while now on some, some really interesting work. So excited to talk to you about it today.

Tom Raftery: 2:10

Great and Mike.

Mike Swain: 2:11

So, hi, I'm Mike. I'm Technical Enablement Manager at Evotix. And Evotix is a provider of EHS SaaS software to organisations globally. My background's also in health and safety and, and being more involved in advocating for technology in health and safety. I worked in operational health and safety for a number of years in the UK. I'm a chartered member of, IOSH. And, I very much keep myself at the sharp end of health and safety It's a primary passion of mine. The segue into technology was always one of those natural progressions for me but also because it helps us make sure that our products and our services actually align with what the market needs and, and, drives value for organisations in the sense of helping companies be more safe and leveraging technology to do that. My day to day these days is, getting under the hood of what our systems do and ensuring that translates to what the market needs and ensuring that our customers get the best out of our systems.

Tom Raftery: 3:09

And. John, for listeners who might not know the What Works Institute, what problem were you trying to solve when you started it?

John Dony: 3:18

What problems wasn't I trying to solve might be an easier conversation. What we've been seeing for a long time and where my background is, is in helping senior leaders in organisations who run, complex operating environments across usually multinational global organisations of a pretty big scale and complexity. The tough problems that they have to solve time over time tend to look fairly similar or at least be cyclical. Right now we're in a bit of a circular moment where a lot of the things that I was working on in maybe mid 2010s are back to the forefront now because we have a bit more time, space, and energy to deal with them. These are, to me, the big 10,000, a hundred thousand dollars million dollar questions. How should we be tracking risk and exposure and metrics and getting at the things that are causing our people harm and getting our people killed. How do we build a culture around that? And have it real and sustainable. How do we deal with this complexity where, you have to have a system that absorbs the risk and the failures as opposed to you trying to, smash out the risk through, blame and, and shame. For each organisation, it looks a little different, right? They're at a different point on their journey. They have different leadership teams, they have different systems in place, or none at all. I've worked with folks who, a decade ago I was talking to them, they were at the peak of the size of the group that they were running. They had all the support in the world. They, had a centralised team and man, they were scaling mountains of, really cool, innovative stuff. And since then, we've had a pandemic, we've had some macroeconomic chaos, we've had, all sorts of things. And here we are with reduced resources and, less, attention, more to do, speed is faster. No one's asking us and no one's giving us more time, right? So then translated to action that looks like how do I, build an instrument that will tell me if my culture is real and not just have it be a signal that I get once a year that means nothing. How do I take a really cool idea that I know I need to go after? What someone brings to the job impacts what they do on the job, and turn that into something we can see and touch and feel, and do something about. Rather than just bemoaning the fact that we can't get inside people's heads or that we're not qualified to do it or these other things. So that's the nature of, the work we do. That plays out through conversations every day with our members in different learning communities. It plays out through research we do. We didn't intend to be a consultancy, but folks who came to us and asked for things that folks we've known have been engaging us in a number of different things. We'll, we'll go where the problems are. I think that's the, that's the thing I've learned over the years. you gotta listen to the folks doing the work and build what they need.

Tom Raftery: 5:49

And Michael, you, you work, as you said, at the intersection of safety and technology, and so what pulled you into that field in the first place?

Mike Swain: 5:56

One thing that always struck me when I got into health and safety originally was how far behind a lot of organisations are, in terms of technology adoption. And I know there's always been this very, very self historical cultural perception that health and safety, is a cost and not a value add. that perception's changing a lot, but because of that, you've got this legacy where a lot of organisations don't invest into adequate systems for health and safety. Which means that a lot of health and safety managers historically have had to manage with manual, paper based systems, spreadsheets and things that don't really translate to how modern businesses operate. One of the things that I was always really passionate about was trying to find ways to innovate and bring technology to the forefront in a cost effective way. Starting with small pilots, using things like, the Microsoft office realm and, and sort 365 and that type of stuff. And then eventually progressing to sort of more point-based solutions and, and, and systems like Evotix. And I actually became a customer of Evotix. I think probably my third round at trying to get a system in like an actual system. We actually got Evotix and the transformation was huge in terms of how we were able to operate as a safety team, but also within the business. At the time I was working in an organisation that operated nationally across the UK. We had multiple office locations. We operated across multiple transient workforces. So were essentially managing property portfolios for housing associations, for councils, local authorities in the UK. We were managing about 120,000 properties. Everywhere from Scotland down to, Penzance. So a very, very vast workforce. And the way we did things just wasn't working. We had no visibility of risk. We had no oversight of when things went wrong. Processes were very manual and clunky, which meant that people didn't engage with 'em. So if something happened, we only really heard about it if it had to be reported. So if somebody was injured, we'd definitely hear about it. If there was a near miss, forget about it. We didn't have any information whatsoever. So we had a really poor reporting culture because of that. And then when we brought the system in and we had the mobile device and we got everyone engaged and involved. And we found that that reporting, basically it went up like hundreds and hundreds by, I think it was about 800% ridiculously. It, it was something crazy. To the point where we had to sit down with the, the senior management team and actually tell 'em, this is a really good thing, this isn't negative. This shows that we've actually got engagement in the business and we can now see where the patterns are and where the risks emerging within the organisation. So as a team, we can now be more proactive and make sure that, you know, when it comes to investment into what we do as a safety team, the business is getting a bigger bang for the buck, but also we're more effective in what we deliver. That for me is always being my passionate looking at what are the problems we can solve and how can technology help us to get there. A short while after that then got an opportunity to come to Evotix, and I thought, well, I've managed to do this in a couple of organisations. Going to Evotix was really more about me trying to become more scalable in that endeavor that I could go from helping a couple of organisations that I worked for personally to actually now working with an organisation that helps hundreds of organisations across the globe. and that's really the main pull for me, and that, that's the passion. And, and the reason why I do what I do, because of the effect that we have, the ripple effects across, you know. Not just in the UK but in the US, in Australia, you know, across the globe we have hundreds of companies which transcend into hundreds of thousands of users and customers that really get value from the system and it helps to drive safer work places for them.

Tom Raftery: 9:39

And both John and Mike, your two organisations came together to produce a report recently called Risk Recalibrated, the 2026 Executive Leadership report on AI, SIF and human-centric, EHS. So we'll dig a little bit into that. The report makes a striking point though, John despite decades of safety improvements, serious injuries and fatalities haven't declined nearly as much as we'd expect. So why has progress stalled at the most serious end of the spectrum?

John Dony: 10:16

That is the biggest question that, we need to answer here amongst them certainly. And, maybe using what Mike just shared as a lens to reflect on that a bit. I, I feel a great kinship with, Mike, with your experience and having come up in the field a little bit and understanding, what we didn't have and what we had and what it led to. And the number of times I've been sat in a room with a, senior leader or a plant manager trying to help them understand that when they get more reporting, when they see higher numbers, sometimes it's the truth coming to light. It has to happen. You have to know what reality is before you can solve anything, right? So it's a conversation we're gonna have to have a million more times, but maybe through this, we get that scale and that impact. And I think that our, mission there is similar. We both are working for organisations are. nonprofit in ethos or NGO in ethos in terms of wanting to bring solutions to the world. And that's what I spent my whole life doing so far. So, to your question, Tom, ' We just had this news release this week. Our Bureau of Labor Statistics here in the States reported 5,070 fatalities in 2024. So there's always a two year lapse in the data. But that was actually a 4% decrease from 23. About a 3.3 per 100,000 full-time worker number, which is about, par for where it's been. It's a little bit down. What I've been hearing and seeing and talking to people about makes me feel that the, trend or the risk is certainly back on the rise. The big reason was a 16.2% reduction in deaths from exposure to harmful substances or environment. A lot of overdose related fatalities in the states from opioids. So there's been a lot of legislation and work done on that, and that's been a big driver. Sometimes it's a little bit of whack-a-mole, right? Sometimes there's new trends and risks in the environment that we're having to chase. Sometimes we run on this sort of hamster wheel cycle of getting a leadership and team engaged and getting a culture built and buy-in, and then it gets sold off to private equity. Or we merge with another organisation or the CEO leaves and someone who doesn't believe in safety comes in. And we are in this constant position of reselling, rebuilding. It's never, we build the perfect engine, the perfect system, and then we're good. We wish it were that way. It's, it's just, it's chronically not. We need to pay more attention to the human dimension. I'm a sociologist by education. I think about human and system interaction and supply chain. Is a one of the most complex and amazing examples of that. And we just had woefully under developed our ability to treat that because it's harder to see, it's less proximate most of the time to why someone is hurt or killed. We need to ask why we need to investigate things that are sometimes hard to do or sometimes take a lot of energy or resourcing to get done right. And so in a nutshell. That's, the reason why I think this number hasn't budged.

Tom Raftery: 13:08

But I mean it's counterintuitive because historically smaller incidents have reduced hugely. Why haven't those improvements reduced serious harm?

Mike Swain: 13:22

In my personal experience, when you speak to a lot of safety people and this might be specific to the UK that people sort of anchor on like the safety triangle. The concept of, what leads to those fatal incidence or what leads to a significant incidence, and it's not black, white. So, having a hundred reports that, people have tripped over a cable doesn't then predict we're gonna have a fire fatality. Do you know what I mean? So it's understanding that the numbers aren't everything. You need to see the context behind the numbers for a start. Also it's easy to fix the problems that are visible. The challenges that I typically see and, and in the UK so if you look at the UK statistics, the last round of statistics we had, we had like 124 fatalities. And I think that's for the, the 2024 numbers. Predominantly this is in like construction, so the predominant industries like construction, agriculture. And it's typically the leading cause is like falls from heights. and then the next one down is like being struck typically by machinery or, vehicles or, or whatever that might be. But if you sort of dig into those industries I think one of the challenges you've got is that those industries are very heavily propped up with contractor bases and subcontractor base. And, and if you think like agriculture, in the UK you have vast seasonal workers that will come in. They'll work for a number of months and, and then they're gone. Next season it is a whole new bunch of people. And in construction obviously that, then transcends. In fact, if you're thinking about a project, you've got different skills and different risks evolving as a project evolves and progresses. And I think one of the biggest challenges we have, I, is actually the risk management element and the communication element that goes through the supply chain as well. And I think one of the things that you see is that sort of your, your tier one contractors and your big organisations impose their safety rules and, their safety approaches down to these smaller tiers that maybe don't have the resources or the capabilities to, to actually live up to those expectations. And then what happens is you get this disjointed approach of, safety done versus safety in reality or, or work done versus work imagined, if you like where the people at the lower end, the information that they're given is not relevant or in context to what they need. And I think that creates a massive risk in, in terms of people understanding where the dangers are, in what they're doing. I in the context of, of the wider project or, or the workplace that they're actually in. So there's a big challenge definitely in the UK and I don't know if you have similar issues John in the US that, that sort of resonate with that, but they're, some of the things that, have been discussed recently around sort of where we need to move the needle.

John Dony: 16:04

Maybe for the past 15 years I've been going to conferences and going to boardrooms and putting up a chart that shows the flat line on fatalities and the decrease in minor injuries. And, we have that data in the US and you can break it down a little bit more in terms of more severe injuries and less severe injuries. But it's not a very sensitive instrument, so to speak. There's some great work being done right now to try to get better sensitivity on some of that data, but it's a tough effort. And, we've been saying this for a long time, that triangle of safety performance, you can draw a line straight through it. There are activities that you do that might never get to that top of that triangle and you could do a million of them and they're never gonna get there. I'm pushing for us to think about it that way.'cause ergonomics, it's typically not seen as a serious injury risk, but, multiple repetitive strain injuries are certainly gonna be life altering, right? In any case, because of that flaw in logic that if we reduce down here, we'll reduce up here, we built a lot of things that helped us get there based on the science and the information we had at the time. And what I would say is the triangles loosely descriptive. if you look at it as a description of what the data said and what emerged. It's not a false thing. Putting assumptions around it are the things that are the problem. And then if you build the context of the global supply chain and everything else, and that risk and liability transfer and, everything that's built into how those things work, from the time that something's thought about to manufactured, to shipped, to put in a retail environment to sold or built or whatever else. The number of systems that touch it, the number of individuals that touch it with different mentalities on safety and health and that theater that kind of emerges around we've gotta present that we do it the right way. From an enforcement and legal perspective, from a, B2B customer expectation perspective, and from a good citizen perspective in our community and those sorts of things. This isn't to say everyone is a bad actor here. It's just that the environment has allowed, the risk transfer and acceptance to happen in this way, and now safety folks are left figuring out how we deal with that in a practical context when it comes to the work done that's under our remit.

Tom Raftery: 18:13

And Mike, another finding in the report that struck me was that 63% of leaders say their safety metrics only partially reflect the real drivers of series injuries. So exactly are companies measuring?

Mike Swain: 18:28

Yeah, we had a good conversation about this last week myself and John. Historically you've got the tendency for many organisations to focus on the lagging things, so things like your lost time, incident rates, your reportable, incident rates, and all those type of metrics. Because health and safety teams typically didn't have a lot of data to work with. So, when you've got things like incidence that are tangible things you can measure, it's something you can quite easily and confidently track. But also it's become more of like a commercial driver. I think these days A lot of organisations are tracking those incident rates because it helps them get on tenders and it helps them sort of get into the supply chain, through prequalification. In a false sense it's actually sort of showing that, yeah, we're a safe organisation 'cause potentially we've not had as many incidents or significant incidence as the company down the road. The problem with that is, is that we can all probably agree on this call that it, it's not a true indication of risk. And, I think a more balanced approach now is to start looking at how we, bring in the leading measures. So the things that are actually we're doing as an organisation to reduce that risk in the business. And then trying to see how that also reflects on those lagging metrics. Really being able to see if, what we're doing as an organisation or as a safety team is actually having an impact and a reduction on that risk and a reduction on those incidents in the long run. One of the things we were talking about last week was around if you think about safety teams these days and organisations these days, and I think technology's obviously played a massive part in this, but safety teams have access to so much more information and so many more data points than they did say 10, 15 years ago which again, open opens a lot more opportunities to start measuring all of these different areas within the business. Just to draw a bit of experience from myself. So when we implemented Evotix a number of years back within the organisation I was in, we were starting to look at the data more and, and be a little bit more analytical in terms of what was happening and what was coming in. And, and two inferences we, we saw were. Firstly we were getting a lot of issues on site inspections and audits with PPE, non-compliance, particularly around gloves and people wearing gloves on site. The other issue we had was that we're actually getting a lot of hand injuries as well. We could correlate those two things quite easily through the data. What we did as a business was we decided, right, let's understand why this is a problem. We were then able to put out a survey to everybody and was like, right, we will keep this completely anonymous. There's no blame culture or anything going on here. All we wanna know, understand, and know is if you're not wearing gloves, why are you not wearing gloves? So we, we did this sort of research into the business and we got a lot of, feedback from our engineers and, and our site teams. And then what we did from that is we then introduced a new glove system after doing a few trials with the teams. We brought in like a traffic light system based on the risk of the job. So it was basically red, amber, green, depending on the level of risk. And off the back of that, we could then see through the data going forward in a few months time that our PPE compliance has gone up on site inspections because people are wearing the gloves. They like the gloves and they actually suit the job. Also we were reducing those injuries, so from the ability to let the data tell the story, that was a really clear cut example that we could take to the senior leadership team and say, well, actually you've invested this, but this is the output of that. and that was a really powerful thing. You'll hear a lot of people talking about, focusing on leading indicators and it's almost like throwing the baby out the bathwater when it comes to, to lagging indicators. But I think for me, you need both because one informs you for, and that then that's how you're really gonna understand if, if those proactive things you're doing as an organisation are really moving the needle on reducing risk and preventing people getting hurt.

Tom Raftery: 22:47

And John, one phrase in the report stuck with me. Some leaders described traditional metrics as performance theater, managing the optics of injury rates rather than the reality of serious risk. That's a pretty strong accusation. Is that happening more often than companies would like to admit?

John Dony: 23:05

I think it's happening a lot, all the time, everywhere in small and large ways. Maybe put in a broader context that the, the work of doing safety often requires us to massage messages. Wear masks that we probably didn't expect to be wearing in a particular context. And, explaining something, Mike, like you just did, and getting to, here's the action we took, here's the ROI, here's how it played out with the data. That's, bread and butter and everything here for, for leadership because they can see a point A and a point B and how we got there. Sometimes you do some of that in an easy way to build your case and get your wins because you know it's gonna be an obvious A to B. And then you can build an A to B2C, and then you can say, Hey, actually C'S at the center and there are seven a's. And there's seven more B's and they all impact this thing that we're doing. The thing that happens here, whether it succeeds or fails, is not just because of this investment or this program, it's ongoing maintenance. It's the culture around it. It's what you say, it's how you show up. It's how people feel every day. It's are we maintaining it all? All the operating environment pieces and the human pieces and the business pieces, right? So that's really hard. As a sell, when someone's coming into an organisation with a bunch of hand injuries, you're not gonna go and then lead with that. Or if you do, you're probably not gonna be super successful. And so, occasionally you get a senior executive who brings in someone because they see it and they understand it, and they give you the mandate and the resourcing.

Tom Raftery: 24:35

Mm-hmm.

John Dony: 24:36

But more often than not, that turns into a turf war that you didn't sign up for, but are gonna get to be a part of. Back to the, the question when you asked Mike, about what metrics people are tracking? I did a lot of work on this in the early 2010s, and we were getting asked a question all the time what metrics should I track? You're studying the metrics, a bunch of people are telling you what they're tracking. And so I got a big cohort of members together and we talked about, what are you looking at? What are you looking at? What are you looking at? And I built a taxonomy out of it because that's what I do. That's how my brain works. I said, okay, we've got systems based metrics. We've got human based metrics and then, the operating and environmental and macro metrics. So the way you're doing safety, the way the people are acting and the the other things that you only have maybe this much control over but you still need to be conversant in. So my suggestion to people at the time, and I still think this holds pretty true, is if you think that taxonomy is feasible, realistic, look within that to see where you're already tracking stuff and what might give you some soft signals. Because some of the best metrics I've ever heard were the gut feeling of a safety manager that got translated into a metric. For instance when we have gaps in plant management across our operating environment where we have more safety incidents, I wonder why. Things like that, that were just, you know, oh, I looked at the data myself and this is pretty obvious. If you take action on 'em and enshrine those and say, Hey, we're gonna use this because it seems right when it's no longer getting us any value. let's have a think every so often and make sure we get rid of the ones that have been squeezed already, because you're always at a different point in time and the metrics need to move with that. And to Mike's point, you need to be tracking the lagging 'cause if you're not, you gotta understand what did happen and go look to those for your learnings. but you asked me for a metric. I'm gonna tell you, there's no silver bullet. I'm gonna get you into real frustrating conversation about what you have to do to figure out what you should be tracking. And some folks like that and some folks don't.

Tom Raftery: 26:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. and Mike, another issue is that companies don't even agree on what counts as a serious injury or a fatality risk. Is that right?

Mike Swain: 26:43

Yeah, no, a hundred, a hundred percent. Companies will have a tendency to look at immediate risks or, somebody getting struck by a vehicle or, or somebody falling from a height. The obvious things. There's a bit of safety in that for them because it, it's easy to think about the things that have an immediate impact. And where we're sort of exploring the report around the human-centric side of safety is that people and risks. We don't operate in silos. We interact and, we need to understand what we're exposing people to, and we need to understand the frame of mind that people might be in or, the cognitive ability that people have when we're expose them to these types of risks. Organisations that are a little bit more mature are understanding that, you know, yeah, we're gonna be looking at the, the immediate risks. The immediate fatality risks, but also what are the chronic exposure risks, you know, so things like exposure to substances, things like exposure to repetitive strain or, or musculoskeletal issues from doing manual handling constantly day after day. And it is funny 'cause in the UK if somebody's off work for more than seven days, typically you report that to the HSE as, as a RIDDOR under the RIDDOR regulations. However, if somebody suffers a strain from a manual handling operation, the HSE's guidance is that we don't report that because there's no physical external accident that's occurred which to me is crazy because we're not learning from the, people. And typically when people get to a point where they're off, for more than seven days. it's gonna then become debilitating down the line, and it's gonna become life altering further down line. So for me that's like a massive, failure in sort of looking at that risk because we we're just sort of brushing up saying, well, we don't really worry about that 'cause he's pulled his back, but he, he didn't get hit by anything while that happened. Which is a little bit insane to me. One thing that's driving a lot of inaction there's a little bit of sort of fear paralysis, I think in people just taking the leap and saying, right, you know, this is our consensus 'cause this is our values as an organisation, what we determine. And then trying to grow a consensus from that. That's the challenge.'cause at the moment, you've got people that focusing one area, people are focusing another, and you've got this huge group of people that are looking to the more mature organisations to give them the answer on what they should be focusing on. And I think that's the biggest challenge we've got at the moment is that nobody wants to leap first.

John Dony: 29:00

The definition is, even if we get there, is just a starting point. I think that there's good utility in the benchmarking around it. Every organisation, as I said, it's, it's the same with the metrics conversation. You set a definition of what we believe a SIF is right now. and I've seen, a 30 year employee get up on a stage at a safety event and list out the 50 different injuries that they've had over their career at a major manufacturing organisation. And then I realised, you're only gonna get at the real issues if you're acknowledging this and saying, Hey, we, this is, these are issues too. It's not just the ones that get in the paper, it's the people who are putting their lives on the line every day still for us. And having them be ambassadors of that and taking ownership of it and the organisation really building that stance into their DNA. Yeah, definition's. Great. But a lot of work to come after and everyone's gonna need to have a bit of a slot in for what their environment is, where they are, the context they live in.

Tom Raftery: 29:54

Sure. And another interesting aspect of the report looked at human factors, John. Things like stress, fatigue, cognitive overload, which obviously play a big role in incidents, yet most organisations haven't integrated them into safety systems. It's is that just 'cause they're hard to measure.

John Dony: 30:12

One part of it is harder to measure or people perceive it as hard to measure. There's been a lot of advancement on that and a lot of non-traditional ways that, you know, require us to, not expect necessarily black and white measurements all the time. Another part of it's, there's a lot of liability around it in different operating environments in terms of privacy and things that, you know, maybe folks are fearful of engaging in. And then there's a potential lack of training and capability and fear that you, you may cause more harm than good in doing some of these things. So aside from that, the proximate issues we've all just listed out on the physical harm side, are the things that tend to get the most attention. And it only is when you peel back six layers to get to, the sorts of other harms that might be there, the things that are in the context that we can do something about them. When we talked about the definitions of the fatality numbers, one thing I've I long ago had pointed out to me is, so I, I heard that number Mike, and I said, when I heard it for the first time, those scales of, a hundred versus 5,000, even accounting for the population size difference, there's still something, off here what's going on. And the US counts traffic fatalities that occur on the job in the number, and that accounts for half of it. As far as I'm aware, It's changes year over year, so those definitions. Great. We count it this way. You count it this way. If suicide in construction, another great example that's relevant on both sides of the pond here, right? What do we do about that? How do we count it? I don't care. Count it where you wanna count it. The important part is doing the work. So that's what I think is we feel stuck in this. We don't know how to measure it. We don't know what success looks like. Someone needs to shine that light. Someone needs to build the platform for that conversation. And that's part of what I and a lot of other organisations are trying to do, is just build awareness, talk about it, continue to get the platforms together where we can be in a safe place to talk about it together and not worry that anyone's breathing down our neck to see if we did something wrong. So that's sort of, I think the environment we need to still foster right now for the conversation to progress.

Tom Raftery: 32:06

Okay. And Mike, your research shows that many organisations are experimenting with AI, but very few have rolled it out widely. So where is AI actually useful today in, in safety?

Mike Swain: 32:21

in the broader sense of AI, I mean. there's a lot of great examples of AI being used to drive safer work places and just drive safety in general. So, I was reading a story recently about where I live, close to me there, there's York Minster. They actually use AI robot dogs from Boston robotics as basically like search and rescue and structural. So basically if the building was set on fire or there there's any structural damage that can deploy these AI dogs rather than put in humans. That's been around for a little bit of time now and I, I think yeah, that, that's absolutely great and, and you're gonna see more examples of that. In terms of sort of safety systems and safety management. the key things for me is looking at how we drive predictive analytics with the data we have within an organisation that presents many challenges for many organisations. It's probably one of the leading reasons why a lot of organisations aren't really focused on this right now. A lot of organisations probably won't have the data or have the data structured in a way that's gonna allow them to leverage that and utilise that in a meaningful way. So that's probably the first challenge is how mature an organisation's data is and how much data they have available.'cause as we know, AI relies on data to be able to be used effectively. I think some of the other challenges you have are gonna come around sort of governance that I think people are still trying to work out what governance means when it comes to AI and, what risk that inherently brings an organisation. So I think having strong policies around governance and particularly around how we sort of factor the human in the loop mentality around driving workflows and decisions from AI. But also it's about education. For a lot of organisations there needs to be that education piece and not just sort of executives and leaders to understand where AI's gonna drive value for a business, but actually people on the front end to understand why the AI's being introduced. And to understand that, you know, in a lot of cases, if you think of things like computer vision, where we've got AI hooked up to CCTV systems. Yeah, it is tracking hazards, but you know, it is making sure that people are aware that this isn't big brother taking over and, and you know, we're not using this data to try and instill a blame culture and, get people into trouble. This is about really trying to drive safer work places. So that's a conversation that still needs to be had. But the conversations are happening and, and obviously, you know, the speed that AI's evolving, these conversations are happening quicker and quicker, because they need to, keep up with the pace of the technology. The key areas for being safety is driving predictive analytics and, and that horizon scanning. So to understand where risks are within an organisation, amking sure you've got strong governance around that. So you can facilitate trust within the business and making sure people understand what AI is, is in place for and basically, we're not trying to instill a blame culture and, and use AI to facilitate that. We're trying to sort of learn and improve this organisation. So, that's long story short.

Tom Raftery: 35:12

Okay. And John, looking ahead five, 10 years, what do you think workplace safety will look like that's different from today?

John Dony: 35:19

That's a great question. To tee off of Mike, we've been doing so much work on the AI side and with our learning communities and, and some of the, the frameworks we're starting to come out with and what I see on the bleeding edge to me in that domain feels like the monolith. And we feel like the two apes, knocking together rocks at the beginning of 2001 trying to figure out how to better prompt and not get hallucinations and data in the, commercial facing tools we're using. And the macroeconomics of it aside, the logistics of it and the, need to be right as close to 100% of the time as we can manage is a really tough task. And, as we know from self-driving. An autonomous vehicle where it's a theoretical notional thing that an AI is a better driver than a human. The sell, and the culture and the transition around that is not flipping a switch. That's kind of where we are right now. You hear the doomsday predictions, you hear the rejection side of this coin. The cultural mix here is all over the place and I didn't expect it, expect that when we were setting up the, the ideas for this conversation that I'd suddenly find myself talking something that's political now in, in my neck of the woods in terms of human, in the loop and governance and decision making. And from a safety and health perspective, the data, and where the human sits are the two biggest things and the solution is build a time machine. Go back and get your data right. That's where we are. We're doing a lot of chasing to prepare ourselves to use this well. Those who get there fast, those who are the early adopters, it's risk reward. So more mature organisations can place some of those bets. That's where we'll start to see the trickle down of Adoptability and Practicality. That's the work ahead getting our arms around all this stuff and getting it to people without barriers so we can use it and do something with it.

Tom Raftery: 37:07

Final question, one sentence answer to you both. John, you first, if supply chain leaders listening today, remember just one thing about preventing serious harm, what should it be?

John Dony: 37:20

Talk to your workforce and understand what they're experiencing because they are the ones who can tell you how to prevent serious harm in the organisation.

Tom Raftery: 37:30

Okay, Mike.

Mike Swain: 37:31

Focus on the basics. Risk management, understand where the risks are in the organisation and focus where those high potentials are.

Tom Raftery: 37:39

John, Mike, that's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourselves or the report or any of the other things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? John first?

John Dony: 37:50

www.whatworksinstitute.com. We actually have a page with some information on the survey. We're not gonna put you on a mailing list. So go grab that. And there's tons of rich insight in there.

Tom Raftery: 38:02

Okay, and Mike?

Mike Swain: 38:04

If you go to www evotix.com you can find a link to the report. W e've just released a, checklist for EHS leaders on AI implementation, which sort of talks around some of the things you need to be considering around sort of data maturity, governance and education within the workforce. Feel free to jump on there and check that out.

Tom Raftery: 38:26

Fantastic. John, Mike, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million guys for coming on the podcast today.

Mike Swain: 38:32

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Tom Raftery: 38:33

Okay. Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Every week, thousands of senior supply chain and sustainability leaders tune in to learn what's next in resilience, innovation, and transformation. If your organisation wants to reach this influential global audience, the people shaping the future of supply chains, consider partnering with the show. Sponsorship isn't just brand visibility, it's thought leadership, credibility, and direct engagement with the decision makers driving change. To explore how we can spotlight your story or your solutions, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me an email at Tom at tom Raftery dot com. Let's collaborate to build smarter, more resilient, more sustainable supply chains together. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you all in the next episode.