Episode 162: It Can Happen

Dr. Mark French discusses a personal injury incident as a way to illustrate how even experienced safety professionals can momentarily lose focus and get hurt. French describes how, during yard work, he accidentally burned and cut his leg with a chainsaw after finishing his task and thinking the danger was over. He reflects on the psychological factors that led to his lapse in judgment, such as fatigue and the desire to finish the job quickly. The incident highlights the importance of always staying vigilant, even when tasks seem complete.

French uses his story to emphasize a broader lesson: safety cannot be assumed, and leaders must continually remind their teams of its importance. He draws parallels between his experience and workplace safety, noting how easily accidents can happen when people are tired or distracted. French also explores the concept of psychological safety, wondering if his family hesitated to point out his risky behavior because he’s a safety professional.

He concludes by reflecting on the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, acknowledging that multiple layers of protection—personal protective equipment (PPE), engineering controls, and administrative measures—failed him in this case. French encourages safety leaders to build a culture where people feel comfortable calling out unsafe behavior and stresses the need for constant vigilance in both personal and professional settings.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the podcast, I'm using a very personal example of how easy it is to lose your mindset and to have an incident this coming up and more this week on the podcast,

Unknown: 0:22

you welcome

Announcer: 0:33

to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French,

Mark French: 1:25

Mark, hello and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Dr, Mark French, and I am always honored that you've chosen to join me on this journey of leadership, this journey of safety. Combining those two one of the most powerful things we can do to engage our team in a very fundamental, very primal level. And so let's get started. I have a story to tell you, and it's still very recent in my mind, because I am still having to take care of myself for it. Fortunately, it wasn't too bad. It could have been worse, and it went to show me very easily, even someone like me in the safety profession, teaching safety, doing safety, I try my best to do it in home. I try my best to do it all the time. That even I can lose my focus and have an injury. Isn't that wild. And let's now think about others. This is my life. I have dedicated my gosh, 20 years, almost half my life, to doing safety, to helping people not get hurt at work, to helping to trying my best to avoid human harm in the workplace. And yet, I at home, myself, had an accident, and I can pinpoint it. I know exactly what I did, and I feel foolish, and I feel like that. I need to share it, because there's a learning here. There's a very powerful learning about that. We can't just assume that our team knows. We can't just assume that they have their mind focused. I'd rather someone hear about that we care about them and hear about safety 400 times. I'm making up a number than than us to assume that they know that they they can do it. So let me just tell you the story, and let's get started. So about a week ago, and from this point of the recording, yeah, about a week ago, on the weekend, finally had some good weather where I live. Finally it wasn't crazy hot, decent weather, and it was time to start doing some of the fall cleanup around what I will call my farm, not really farm, but it grows a lot of stuff that I don't want. And one of it was near the edge of my driveway. There was a large bush that was just like growing out into the driveway. It actually had a couple of different trees in it. It had some prickly bushes. It had the bush that we originally wanted. And so it was time for me. I was going to cut the whole thing down and basically dig everything out except the the one item that we actually wanted. I start clipping around with clippers, clip, clip, clip, realizing that there's some big stuff in here. So what do I do? It's time for a chainsaw. Oh yeah, I'm bringing it out. So using it. Get done cutting everything down, getting ready to start cleaning up everything. This is so I have already completed the cutting. I'm done. I'm done. And so it's, it's getting warm, and guess what? I decide to during my pickup program. I'm like, I'm gonna start taking some things off that are hot and just be like, in my shorts and T. Sure, picking up, cleaning up those things. And I go over, and I pick up the chainsaw to go put it away, and as I'm picking it up, I'm just focused on about everything else that I'm going to have to do to finish this cleanup before it gets dark and I let the motor of it come into contact with just above my knee. Well, guess what? That thing was still hot. It hadn't been that long ago that I just finished up like getting and then cut down for me to pick up and clean up. And after it touched my leg, I jerked it up because it's hot, and the chain hits me on the side of the leg. It opens up the side of my leg. Blood's running down my leg. It's not bad. It's deep enough. Let's put it that way. It's enough that my son, who was outside helping, was like, Uh oh, my wife, who was up on the porch working on her stuff, was like, heard me go, Hey, I'm gonna basically, I yelled her name and said, I'm going to need some help. We go inside. I immediately go into the tub, take off my shoe and my sock, because might as well be standing in the tub, because I'm going to have to clean a lot of blood, because it's just it looks horrible because it's just running down my leg. I irrigate it real good, clean it up, take a look at it, and I end up zippering it shut. Now, on a whole separate note, there are some really cool first aid tools out there right now. Steri strips used to be the thing like glue and steri strips, you could do a lot with those. There's now these things called zips, or zipper bandages. And you you put the little stickies on each side of your wound, and then it has a zip tie, like a whole little bit of tiny zip types. You pull them tight, and it pulls the skin back together and holds it, and then you slap a non adherent pad over the top, wrap it up, of course, put some antibiotic ointment on, on and on the inside. You know it's healing very well. I'm surprised it could have looking at it. I went either way. Could have maybe needed a couple stitches more than a couple, or I could have gotten away with just the bandage. The bandage worked. Very happy to know that the bandage worked, that it wasn't that that terrible, that I needed more. It was a little scary, because, one, it wasn't even on. I thought the danger was over, because I had finished up my work. The chainsaw was off. I wasn't going to be cranking it again, and I end up cutting myself. And it could have been worse, there's no doubt, a little deeper, a little harder, maybe even a worse, like Luckily, the burn wasn't much. It was very much like a little sunburn. So it wasn't bad at all there, but it was enough to make me jump and to catch it. So I mean, good news is my I know that my chain, after all that work, is still very sharp. It is still ready for more work after what I have done in my yard. Good news there. Bad news is that's not something my family is going to let me forget, nor should they. Because I thought the risk was over, or I assumed, let's put it that way. I didn't calculate that I was hot, I was tired, and I figured, shoot, I'm done for the day. Let's just get comfortable, and let's pick this mess up, and let's get let's take a break. How about that? So, one, I'm tired, fatigue. Two, I want to take a break. Three, I'm getting hot, getting a little bit like done, but I want to finish the job. A lot of psychological principles there. How many of those apply to the workplace near the end of a shift, near the end of a week, near the end of a series of of times where, yeah, if I had still been wearing pants my work pants, would it have burnt me that bad? No, I might have felt a little bit warm and be like, Ah, I need to be careful. Wouldn't have burnt me. Wouldn't have had that little sunburn. Would I have gotten such a deep of a cut, even if it had been a shocking hot I pulled it away, I don't think it would have been. Would I have pulled it up and cut my numb? Probably would have maybe cut my pants, maybe a tiny scratch, nothing like what it looked like, even beyond that, if I had been more aware and just notice, like, don't put that against your leg as you're walking to put it away, wow, what an ideal thought there. Or leave it to cool longer, or it comes with a guard that covers the chain when it's not in use. What if I had put that on it before picking it up to go put it away? PPE, engineering, administrative, I've got three reasons right there. My Swiss cheese model fell apart. Us in a moment of seconds, and there it was. I was hurt. Let's talk more about that psychology, how it'll play us to the workplace, and how, how, man, that was embarrassing. Let's be honest, super duper embarrassing that the safety dude himself out there working in the yard, Mr. Safety himself, cuts his leg so bad that he's hollering for help. More of the leading and learning through safety podcast. In just a moment, you

Stinger: 10:30

are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French,

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dsda Consulting. Learn you lead others. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com

Mark French: 11:16

Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week, I'm admitting my own faults, embarrassingly, putting it out there, hopefully you can help learn from this. So knowing good and well that I should have done all these things to prevent my injury, it makes me think of just how easy it is for anyone else to lose focus enough to have three seconds. I am saying it couldn't have been more than five seconds that it went from picking it up, ouch, that's hot. Oh, I'm cut. Look, I'm bleeding. Boom, all so quick. And that's most incidents happen that way. Oh so quick. And so many things that could have been done differently, that would have fixed the issue, so many things. And there's a number of this, when I think about an injury, and we talk about these things, when we talk about, how will this affect your family? How will this affect the people who see you and work around you? How will this affect your life if you're hurt, that it's okay to stop work, that it's okay to take an extra moment, it's okay to do these things. We talk about these types of things as safety professionals, as leaders, we we talk about that caring and that compassion. And the most embarrassing thing about what happened to me was not the fact that I got hurt, it was the fact that I did it in front of my son. I'm out there trying to teach him how to clean up, brush, how to pick up the yard. He's almost a teenager. He knows a lot of things, like he's helping me mow the yard. He's doing a lot of more stuff around, helping me around, because he's at that age and he wants to and yet, here I am. He knows what I do for a living. I've shown him safety videos we Yeah, Mark's little geeky passion here is to share safety stuff with his kids. I take them to conferences with me. Occasionally. I talk to them about the cool stuff I'm seeing and the stuff we're doing and what happens at work, and how to avoid getting hurt, and how to think about things. And I set the wrong example. I set the bad example for him. I talk about it. I didn't act it, not at all. And that made me ashamed, because now I have to rebuild that. And I apologized to him. I said I set a bad example for you, and I meant it. It upset me. It really bothered me, fundamentally, that I had done something that contra that that contradicted everything that I had been teaching. My wife knows me well enough. She knew me well before the days of safety. So understandably, she understood he didn't. He didn't know that about me. He didn't know like that. I I mean, as far as since he's been born, he's heard safety, safety, safety, people, people, people. That's what he's heard from me. That bothered me, the fact that I could have done any number of things. And what's interesting, and here's the next point that I've kind of alluded to early on, is I'm in there, washing up my leg, cleaning it up, bandaging it, trying to get everything fixed up, having them fetch stuff for me, so I can do that without tracking blood everywhere until I get it bandaged. Both my wife and my son look at me and go. We were wondering why you were still out there working and not wearing any pants. I was wearing pants as we're. Shorts. But they what they meant was that sounds bad. I was wearing my bought my shorts, not my work pants, my outdoor work pants. They're like, we noticed that you weren't wearing your your work pants. And I was like, Why didn't you say anything? They're like, because you're the safety guy. How are we supposed to tell safety to the safety guy. Oh, have I become unapproachable that way? Have I become too arrogant, too on top of myself to admit that this can happen to anyone? That was a real look in the mirror, wasn't it? It was. And I think about that from a workplace standpoint, is that, what if you as a safety person, as a leader, as someone leading your organization? And let's I'm guessing that if you're listening to my podcast, you probably talk about safety quite a bit. You were probably one of those people who understand, or at least wanting to understand or wanting to appreciate better, the power of talking about simple safety items to your team, to build engagement, to build leadership, to build influence, or if you were making a mistake, Would someone say something to you. Are you the is there a level of comfort there that that they felt that it would be appropriate to say something to someone who they look up to as being like safety, the top level, the echelon, the top echelon of safety, hmm? And so I had that talk of, hey, I appreciate that, but never hesitate to call me out, please. Well, sometimes you get well means my family, yeah, of course, I'm a little bit more comfortable with the interactions of my family, and they know me better than anyone else, and so I can understand there is probably some hesitation to try to question my methods. I wish they had. I wouldn't be hurt and I could give them, I could at least have that story to tell that I was doing something silly. They called me out and I deserved it. Instead, I got hurt, and I have to apologize for setting the bad example. But now I think even deeper about in the workplace, if it was possible for me to make the three second laps, almost need some stitches in my leg. What about your workplace? Yeah, that's why the layers of protection. I messed up three of them. Boom, 123, admin engineering, PPE didn't have any of it. How do we help equip and empower our team to be ready to have some form of protection in place, from the gotcha moments, from the moments that something could jump out and grab them and hurt them. How do we do that? That's that's really where we're heading, is making sure we don't let that affect us to where we're not going to say something that we encourage it. You know what? We're going to continue some more of this conversation of the psychology behind this type of item probably next week on the podcast. So I hope you'll join me for that. But thank you for joining me for this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So happy you've joined me, so happy you're with me, and until next time we chat, stay safe. You

Announcer: 19:00

thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. You This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.