Page 66 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

TRAINING
the angle of sight changed. Now I saw the rocks and the bloody snow. He was trying to cover up all the blood that was around the rocks. Instantly, I knew what had hap- pened. The cool guy skier I saw earlier, the one who took the sharp left turn, had skied right into a “rock garden.” I kind of knew the rock garden was there when I saw him, and that’s why I had that funny feeling even though I couldn’t see it for the fog.
As I watched the old gray-haired ski pa- troller turn the bloody snow over, my heart sank. I knew I was probably the last guy to see him alive. I thought about his parents,
probably only worried about the risk of competing in an extreme ski competition. Not likely thinking about the risk of ski- ing in the fog on an unfamiliar mountain. I thought about how many falls I had taken where I was thrown forward head-first: too many to count. So many thoughts flashed through my head in such a short time.
Well, that night I went to the store and surprisingly enough, there was a helmet that fit right and was just the right color. But that’s not the point. I told this story to all my other “legend in their own mind” skier friends. Next year, I was skiing with Jim,
who is a great skier and has little kids who also ski. We don’t ski together all that much, but he’s a nice guy and, as I said, a really good skier, so it’s always enjoyable. We were on the chairlift and he asked me, “So how do you like my helmet?” I said, “It’s nice,” but I doubt if I hid my disinterested tone.
“Do you know why I bought it?”
“No,” I said, equally disinterested. He picked up on the tone and I realized I was being a bit rude, so I said, “Because you have kids?”
“No.”
“Because of the statistics?” (More than 40 percent of skier fatalities are from head injuries.)
“No.”
Now I was getting a bit annoyed, I al- most wanted to say, “Why don’t you just tell me instead of going on with the 20 ques- tions?” But before I could say anything, he said, “Because of that story you told me.”
As it turned out, almost all my friends had bought helmets that year. We all had kids. We all knew the statistics. We all had come up with excuses. Now, we all had helmets.
So the actual experience did it for me, but it was the story that did it for them. And it’s the stories in AA and NA that do it for most of them, too. Parables instead of lec- tures, a group of people who mean some- thing to you and something that makes sense, enough time, so they can decide for themselves and, obviously, the ability to do it in the first place.
It would be nice if you could get people to change their decisions and habits by tak- ing an online course, but as far as I know, the only person who has ever changed be- havior with media alone was Steven Spiel- berg and the movie “Jaws.” And unless you’ve got a spare hundred million dollars and his talent, don’t overestimate the ability of your online training to change habitual behavior.
Larry Wilson is a pioneer in the area of Hu- man Factors in safety. He has been a behav- ior-based safety consultant for more than 25 years and has worked with thousands of companies worldwide. He is also the author of SafeStart, an advanced safety and per- formance awareness program, successfully implemented in more than 3,000 companies, in over 60 countries, with more than 3 mil- lion people trained.
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