Decentring changemakers
We supply so much in the name of safety. Critical rules. Posters about values, desired behaviours and standards. Things to sign and commit to. Procedures for every foreseeable situation. Controls. Campaigns. Safety observations. Checklists. Training modules. Inductions. Toolbox talks.
Behind every one is an intention. Someone has thought about what might make work safer and designed something in response. And mostly, that's how we think about change. The change maker sits at the centre. We identify the problem. We decide what good looks like. We work out what needs to change. We design the intervention. We take it to the people doing the work.
Sometimes it's a control. Sometimes a procedure. Sometimes training. Sometimes a campaign. Sometimes a conversation. The form changes. But often, the relationship doesn't. We are the ones doing the changing. They are the ones being changed.
Not all supply is equal. A procedure developed with the people who use it is different from one written in an office and handed down. A campaign built from frontline stories is different from one designed by a marketing team. A conversation that genuinely listens is different from one that delivers a predetermined message.
But even the best-designed supply can retain the same basic architecture. Someone, somewhere, has decided what is needed. Someone has designed the response. Someone has taken it to the people doing the work.
And that relationship, however well-intentioned, however carefully designed, still communicates something over time. It still signals whose knowledge counts. It still positions workers as recipients. It still bypasses the question of what's already there.
The questions we ask when things go wrong reveal the model we're actually working from. Why don't they follow the control? Why don't they engage? Why don't they speak up? Why don't they care enough? How do we get workers to care more about safety?
We need controls. We need standards. We need training. Organisations have responsibilities. The problem is what happens when this becomes our primary way of thinking about change and about people. Their role is to understand, accept, implement and comply with what has been designed elsewhere.
This way, something gets lost. When we consistently arrive with answers before we've understood the situation, we communicate something, whether we intend to or not:
Your knowledge is not the knowledge that counts here.
And I think people learn that. They learn which answers are wanted. They learn which concerns actually lead to change and which disappear into a system. They learn whether their judgement is trusted. They learn whether speaking honestly is useful.
And slowly, we can begin to erode the very things we need most from people doing the work: local knowledge, initiative, ownership, judgement, mutual care and the motivation to make things better.
The most dangerous thing about an intervention may therefore be what it quietly dismantles. The Transpower tower painters are a case in point. For years, the response to a struggling programme had been to add things: tighter controls, redesigned equipment, more oversight, more accountability. Each intervention was well-intentioned. Nothing fundamentally changed.
What finally shifted things was a genuinely open conversation about the work between the client and the contractors. The painters knew things. They had ideas about what was making the work difficult. They had things they wanted changed. But none of that could become consequential while the relationship remained one of supplier and recipient.
What the supply couldn't reach was already there. Capacity that existed before the intervention arrived. Motivation that was present before the campaign launched. Knowledge and relationships that were already helping people do good work.
What if the change maker wasn't at the centre?
What if we started with the people doing the work?
That moves us from focusing on what's wrong to building on what's strong. An idea I first encountered in Cormac Russell's work on asset-based community development, where it has been reshaping how communities think about change for decades. The same move is available to us in safety.
They already know things. They already care about things. They already adapt, coordinate, solve problems and look after one another. They already have ideas about what makes good work possible and what gets in its way. This is not to ignore weaknesses or threats, but to incorporate and harness existing strengths in addressing them.
So instead of beginning with “How do we change people?”
we might begin with:
What is already here?
What matters to the people doing the work?
What do they know that I don't?
What gets in the way of doing good work?
What might they want to change?
Those questions move the centre of the change effort. This is what I think a genuine safety conversation can make possible: a way of entering the work without already knowing what the answer should be. To understand before intervening. To discover rather than prescribe. To work with what is already present rather than assuming we need to supply what's missing.
The supply-side model asks: what should we put into this system?
The better question is: what is already alive in this system, and what would help it flourish?
We supply so much. Perhaps what we need to do more often is make space for what is already there.
/Daniel