Ep. 30: First Ditch Effort

First off, every new episode is sort of a surprise, but making it to Episode 30 is about 29 more than the boys expected. And of course the title is from a NOFX album. In celebration of Ron's (new) real job at a bit of a startup, we thought that talking about how you'd build your safety empire from scratch might look. The boys' discussion centers on starting with executive leaders to create a vision for what really good safety would look, sound, and feel like. There's - shockingly - a fair bit of BS in the middle, but the boys eventually get around to a few of the benefits of building things up in a small organization: there's room to do some experimentation, a chance to manage messaging about safety with a small crew, and the opportunity to come up with a solid 30/60/90-day plan (or 100-day if you use the Australian conversion rate). The consensus, if you can call it that, is that agreeing on principles around safety may not be enough. You need some specifics, and in a small group, that might come from consistently having in-person time between leaders and safety people. It might be asking folks what certain approaches to operations might look like to meet acceptable levels of safety risk and then giving people choices. There's more than one way to write a song, too, so it's not the end of the world. Anyway, when you get the chance to start from scratch as a band, there aren't a lot of people at the shows. It's a good time to figure out your tone and get to know your audience. Same in an organization.