[MUSIC] Welcome back. So here are the questions that they came up with. You'll see that the first two are again, what we call the best past questions, asking about stories of past experiences. And then the third one is a future or ideal future question. So the first one, tell me about a time when you felt most safe and secure working in this mill. What in particular, helped make you feel safe? The second story, tell me about a time when you did something to prevent an accident from happening. A time when you did or said something to keep yourself and/or others from getting hurt. And then thirdly, now the future, imagine we are truly injury free. We are the safest workplace in entire global system. Everyone goes home after work just as safe as when they came in that day. What does it look like? So again, similar to other cases that we've done in this course. The discovery questions are best past story questions, one, two or three and then an idea future question. So these were the three questions they used. So this conversation, it's one way, in this case. It's not two way like at the summit. So it probably could take as small as 10 minutes, maybe as much as 20, possibly 30, but most of them ended up going about 15 minutes. That happened between September, October, November. They got all the information back on those summery sheets, this team of 20 worked January, February to figure out what it was telling them, what were their common issues, themes, ideas and so forth. They used that to then prepare for the one day summit which was held in March, the end of March in 2007. That summit had 275 participants and the action groups that came out of that are listed here. Very specific and concerned with nuances of safety issues for visitors, for everyday people, for part time people, and so on. Now, what were the results? This graph shows two yearly trackings of accidents reported to OSHA. So the top line going across is 2006, and every dot point there, data point is a month of the year. And then the lower line is 2007. And what you see that, if you compare December to December. So if you compare December 2006 to December 2007, you see a 43% reduction. A dramatic drop in accident reporting on a year to year indicator. If you go chronologically and you compare December 2006 to January 2007, it's a 50% drop. And you can see that the two lines remain relatively separate the same amount throughout the year. So you actually have a quantum drop or improvement in safety. This diagram comes from one division, the finishing division. This is a sheet metal rolling mill, and this division has the nickname of the slicing and dicing division. People have lost digits, they've lost limbs. There's some dangerous cutting machinery in this division. I know you can't read the dates at the bottom, but it begins with January of 06, it goes to 07, and then from 07 all the way through to 08. And you see the different data points, there's a nice regression line there that shows a gradual decrease in reported accidents, and down to this level of less than one on average per month which is a record level performance for that division. But I want to come back to the dates, the timing, because this is where the unusual result is. Where was the summit, you see the summit was in March of 2007. And you can see that the real change in behaviour has already occurred, the big shift down to zero or one has already taken place. And then if you look in a little more detail, when were the interviews going on? And you see September, October, November of 2006. So in fact, the change didn't happen after the summit. We might want to argue that the summit helped to internalize or institutionalize some changes overtime, because they've been able to continue this record level safety performance. But you really can't argue the major change happened after the summit. Remember, we typically thinking management well, we have to give them time and they're going to form action teams, the teams are going to have to take time to implement new things, so you really wouldn't even expect a change maybe until the end of 2007, or at least summer of 2007. But it's not true here. Here the changes are actually starting to occur, the dramatic changes, way before the summit. So here's the question. Why did the real behavioral change happen before the summit? Before any new safety-focused action teams or projects were actually formed? Remember, all these conversations were one on one, prior to the summit. Nobody was forming teams yet. Nobody was changing safety training. Nobody was changing the signage. They were just having these conversations. And that's what's surprising about the outcome. Well, I think the story underlines the key, one of the key ideas we've been talking about throughout the course. Remember the fundamental principle, words create worlds. We move in the direction of what we most frequently and passionately talk about, and particularly what we ask questions about. And I think that's what shown up on this particular story. We had the luxury of having hard outcome measures so that we can go back and actually track when did most of the behavioral change around safety actually happen. And it wasn't after the summit, after teams had been employed, new programs, new changes. It was actually during the time that people were just having these conversations, using the appreciative inquiry questions about safety. So, does it mean we shouldn't have the summit, or we shouldn't have the action teams, no I don't think so. But I think what it does is it tells us from the very get-go, as soon as we change the conversation, the way we're talking about safety. So instead of asking people, why did we have the accidents we reported last month? Or, why has our reporting reached so high, or something like that, if we ask people different questions, they begin thinking about it differently. If we ask people stories and we know that stories connect and we know that stories can create PEA, that positive emotional attractor, then they're oriented to changing behavior differently, than they would have been if they were hammered with, we've got to change these statistics. Or, we have to be safer, what are you going to do about it? You know, that kind of forceful, that a lot of adults just don't like. It may be well intentioned, it is well intentioned, everybody want's to be safe at the end of the day. But the way it's received from the leadership can create that NEA. So, this idea that words create worlds and particularly our questions, the kinds of questions we ask, I think was shown in this case more than I've seen hardly anywhere else. The story in this case still goes on today. They are still the most productive site in the global company in terms of tons per man hour, and now they are in the top quartile of all the North American sites that report, that have to report accidents and injuries to OSHA. They've gone from the lowest quartile to the top and they themselves continue to set record safety performance levels throughout of the history of this reborn steel mill. [MUSIC]
