Page 64 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

TRAINING
ing with what people have been doing for years. They may not want to change. If they have to spend some money, like buy a bike hel- met or ski helmet, this gets even harder. Now, the really interesting thing is that a lecture or statistics are almost totally ineffective—but a story, well told, from a convincing person (live usually, but on screen if delivered well) usually does work. Even better is a real experience, but that gets right to learning the hard way, or as Ben- jamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school but a fool will learn in no other.”
Learning from the Experiences of Others
We can’t afford to have everyone learn the hard way. It’s too painful and too expensive. But we can learn from the experiences of others as long as there is enough “voltage and current.” Meaning that a lot of stories from a lot of people will work, and if there is a lot of emo- tion in the story or it provokes a lot of emotion, then you might not need quite as many. Let me give you an example: Ski helmets came along after some people died of head injuries. When they became readily available, most people made their children wear them. Some parents who weren’t good skiers also wore them, but most good skiers didn’t. I was one of those parents.
My kids bought me a helmet for Christmas. But it didn’t fit quite right, and I didn’t like the color. And since they had bought it with my money, I took it back. But I couldn’t find one that fit right when I went to the store and they didn’t have the right color, so I just took
the refund. Next year for my birthday, they bought me another one, but it didn’t fit right, and it wasn’t the right color. Same thing hap- pened at Christmas.
Then there was an extreme ski competition at the mountain. A lot of really good skiers were out practicing and warming up for the competition the next day. I was going up the chairlift when I saw one of these guys coming down. It was really foggy, though, and just as the chairlift was going over his head, he turned left sharply. I got a funny feeling like, “Dude, you shouldn’t be doing that,” but as I said, it was foggy, so I couldn’t really see where he was going. But I knew the hill really well. It was a sixth sense sort of thing.
When I got to the top I skied down the other side, did a couple of runs and then went in for lunch. That was when I heard that someone had died on the mountain. But that’s all. No details were provided. Later that afternoon it cleared up. I was back over at the hill where I saw the really good skier go under the chair, and I was on that same chairlift again when I saw one of the ski patrollers, an old gray-haired guy I’d seen for years, ski down and stop. He planted both his ski poles with force. Then he kicked his skies off and sort of threw them aside. Then he grabbed his shovel out of his pack and threw it down. He was obviously really mad. I figured he had probably just had an argument with his boss or something. Then, as the chairlift got closer, he knelt down and started shovel- ling snow and turning it over. As I got closer, I still couldn’t really see what he was doing. But as the chairlift continued up the hill,
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