Matt discusses his (ex?) fear of flying and we drill deeper into the idea of risk normalization. From there, it's on to safety "controls" and the human condition. Do they always play nice?
(Transcript Start)
[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name. What a dumb
[00:00:07] spk_0: name. So stupid.
[00:00:21] spk_1: We are the podcast version of live.
[00:00:25] spk_0: You're listening live to the Hop podcast with no name.
[00:00:33] spk_1: Very specific. We're good at this stuff. Um
[00:00:38] spk_0: They're not listening live, live
[00:00:41] spk_1: is now. Yeah. Don't stop this. You're gonna go off on a tangent. This is so me, uh the podcasts are crazy. So here's where we're at. Um, picking up from last time we gave more homework. Did you do it? I did it because it's, it's a, it was a big part of my life.
[00:01:04] spk_0: What was, what was the
[00:01:05] spk_1: assignment? The assignment was to think about something either in your present life or in your past that you deemed as particularly risky or scary that became normalized over time and you no longer look at in the same
[00:01:21] spk_0: way. Ok? And this could be work stuff. This could be home stuff. This could be any of that,
[00:01:25] spk_1: any of that, any of that. Um, I know I did the homework.
[00:01:29] spk_0: Yeah. Yeah, I think I know what it is if I had to guess because you used to be terrified.
[00:01:36] spk_1: Terrified. Which is so weird to think about it. Um, oh, so I was terribly afraid of flying. Yeah.
[00:01:47] spk_0: And, and like, in an airplane, right, we're talking about,
[00:01:51] spk_1: I mean, any type of flying, I guess, um, like squirrel suit flying, like fizzy lifting, drink from Willy Wonka fly. Um, so I was, I was terrified and to the point where I flew, I, I, I didn't, it's not like I didn't fly at all growing up, I flew every once in a while, usually just to Ohio, which I love my family there. But that is not a place that I would be like, this is the only place I fly to my whole life is Ohio. Um But it was great. I always great. You live in Cincinnati? I love too. I think you get, gets a bad rap. But when you're traveling, if the only place you fly to is Ohio. Well, maybe there's more out there that you want to see anyway. Thank you for derailing this whole branch and go on. I, so I flew as a kid. I didn't have a problem. Um And then at some point we learned about uh mortality and that you could die. And I immediately became petrified of flying and we had to fly. I was on the swim team in college for the first two years that I was there. And every year we did a trip once every four years to Ohio. It just once every year is Ohio. And you live there for four years and come back. So it was, uh, once years to Hawaii, which is great and it's usually somewhat subsidized by the school. You pay a little bit of money but you get a 10 day trip. It's a lot of training, but it's a lot of fun. Uh, the first year, my freshman year we went down to Key West, flew to Miami. I think it was about a three hour flight from New York and I remember it was bad but it's three hours and I can trick myself into being distracted for three hours. Um, a lot of my lifelong best friends that I met there were there. So they comforted me. I felt good. The flight to Hawaii barely made it. And I mean, like this is fun. I'm here now. I'm young. I'm stupid. I was like, I'm here. So don't worry about coming back like it wasn't gonna happen in 10 days. And so then I get back to fly home and it was the first time. I mean, maybe it's taking off into the Pacific Ocean the way that it goes. We had so much turbulence that for the 1st 10 minutes of the flight, I did not think that we left the ground because of how much that like shaking is happening. And then it didn't stop until we got somewhere in the mountain time zone. It it's, I think it's like a 13 hour flight. Um,
[00:04:18] spk_0: and your friends were tired of comforting you at that point. It was,
[00:04:23] spk_1: it was intense. Uh, there were people crying, people screaming, the girl next to me was making the sign of the cross. And so like, it was, it was really scary. So you
[00:04:33] spk_0: were afraid of flying before this incident and then this just sort of like, solidified your shit fear of being like, oh no, I should, I should absolutely be afraid.
[00:04:41] spk_1: The, the, the guy who runs the phobia is behind the scene was like, oh, watch this. I'm going to double down on this guy. Um, so that haunted me for a long time. Uh And I didn't have to fly again. I wasn't avoiding it necessarily, but I didn't have any reasons to fly for a long time. So then it just
[00:05:00] spk_0: grew. No, no, you just, you just decided that you really liked long road trips. I was like, it was
[00:05:05] spk_1: really fun driving to Ohio. So that's what I started doing. But I quickly transitioned from, uh I had to fly to never had to fly and just never, never thought about it. And then the thought of it would come in and like, oh my goodness, this is ho horrifying. So my last flight, uh where it was all triggered to be terrified of flying was in 2008. I didn't fly again until I went to visit you in 2017 in Italy. Um, and then it was, I was still terrified. I would, uh, you know, consume some alcoholic beverages. I won't say how many, uh, to be able to fly
[00:05:45] spk_0: to get you
[00:05:46] spk_1: on the plane. Yeah. And I'm not a tiny person so it was a lot. But anyway, long story, five minutes long, uh, to bring it back when I started working with you a year ago, we have flown uh I wanna say probably 10 trips we've taken together. Um And now I'm, I don't even get phased. I don't get, it just became so normal. Even the trips that are bumpy, you know, flying from Denver to Santa Fe and all the small little plane and them telling us, you know, hey, historically, these are always bad places to fly into and yeah, that's, I mean, it's not pleasant but it's not,
[00:06:26] spk_0: you're not ID K, I would
[00:06:29] spk_1: count down the sleeps until I had to fly when I started flying after the Italy trip was I had to fly a couple of times. I would wait. What
[00:06:36] spk_0: is that? A call? A call back to how we tell Penelope how long I'm gonna be gone to count the number of sleeps. No,
[00:06:42] spk_1: pen stole it from me. I'm I count sleep. She's like, oh, that's a good idea.
[00:06:46] spk_0: So my, my three year old Penelope when I, when I have to leave just for, for anyone else's sake. Since we know what we're talking about but nobody else does. Um, I tell her how many, how many long sleeps it's gonna be meaning like not naps, but I'm gonna be gone for, you know, four long sleeps. So you would count down the number of sleeps,
[00:07:03] spk_1: sleeps and now it's normal. So all that, to say, risk, normalization. That was my homework. Um, you just relived all my trauma from flying. But, uh, what about you? Did you do it?
[00:07:18] spk_0: Yeah. Well, did I do my homework? Uh Sort of, I sort of did my homework. I have, I have uh one example that I always lean on even when we're training. It's because it's so aggressively vivid in my mind of how much risk normalization can change just based on exposure to something because I learned how to drive, like at the time that most people learn how to drive as a teenager. And I was originally concerned about driving probably the same amount as most people, but then became really risk normalized to it. Like all of us are risk normalized. And then I lived overseas for about 2.5 years and didn't drive during that time. And when I came back to the US and started to drive again, I remember just the abject terror I felt of actually like thinking how insane this conflict. I, I used to get in the car and I would dread going on the highway because I'd be like, we, we're just, everyone's moving so fast. Like, like how does anyone like no, our reaction time isn't fast enough as humans to be doing this. And I was like, I was upset with the entire concept of driving like the, the thought that that we should allow people to, to be in to be, to be in these, these heavy fast moving vehicles and that we trust people with it, that, that anyone, anyone would trust me with this. And then, and then a week later, I was fine,
[00:08:54] spk_1: just jump right back in you do enough times and you normalize to it, which I mean, we talk about this because I mean, risk normalization is something that we historically thought that we could change four people.
[00:09:11] spk_0: Yeah. So where this kind of becomes seemingly very important in the work world is how we deal with this just reality of risk normalization in my world. We tended to believe that we could kind of adjust people's fear, meaning we might have like a really bad event, um that involved, you know, some sort of process like, um let's just think like lockout tag out process or, or working at heights is something that has the potential to, to kill you. And our go to solution set, at least a part of that go to solution set where I came from was um to just kind of remind people of how dangerous this was like, hey, this is like incredibly dangerous. We need to have mind on task during this. We need to always follow the process and the procedure, these steps are here to protect you. You know, if we don't do these steps, you can die. And so we would bring people together and have those conversations. And I was part of those conversations, I ran those conversations in a lot of, you know, a lot of scenarios and uh I don't know that they nearly had the amount of impact that I thought they were having now that I understand a little bit about like how we even process risk. So all of us have different risk perceptions like each individual for each task that we do. Our risk perception is different from each other. And we, we get that risk perception from our life experience and it's actually quite difficult for a third party to change it like, like a third person party to adjust your risk perception is, I
[00:10:51] spk_1: mean, for me, it was everyone that would send me articles and be like, look how safe flying is. Like
[00:10:56] spk_0: this is the safest form of transportation.
[00:10:59] spk_1: This is, and I'm a logical person and I was like, nah, this is garbage who gave you this pseudoscience that you're sending me.
[00:11:08] spk_0: And it's actually probably a really good thing that our brains are protected, our brains protect us from, from sort of absorbing other people's risk profiles. Because honestly, if we were, if we were objectively terrified about all the things that could kill us. We probably wouldn't be functional. Like, if I had your fear of flying. Right. And you had my fear of the high moving vehicles. And we like, and then you multiply that by all of the people that, you know, and what their fears are, I don't know that any of us would do anything. And so we have to, we have to actually use our own life experience to decide. So whether it's not, it has to be something that affected you very personally. So, and it's usually involved with pain of emotional pain or physical pain. So emotional pain might be that someone extremely close to me that I would like, feel their pain when they are going through something that affected me or, you know, physical pain and fear of my own experience. So to have somebody else come in and be like, you should now be afraid of X. If you're not already afraid of X, that's probably not gonna change anything. Sort of the only way that we know how to address or, or adjust risk perception. And I'm not suggesting that we do this just like, for informational sake is that it's sort of like a brainwashing. Like that's the really that like just being exposed to the same things over and over again in which some of that exposure comes from people that, that you're really close to until it starts to seep in as truth. That's kind of the only way that we have ever been able to adjust a risk. And you can see that
[00:12:48] spk_1: like, yeah, so um it's just me here but maybe
[00:12:53] spk_0: it was like um really good example of risk perception, not only differences but like how you would get, there would be like how folks responded to COVID, like depending upon who you were surrounded by and what, what news media you're consuming and what the thought process was. You either you had your risk perception, even if you did not have exposure to the virus itself, you tended to have the same thought process as those that were close around you and it was reinforced and then we had confirmation bias or it would be reinforced by everything you hear. Um So there's an example is that a good example or a bad example that mediocre example, it's
[00:13:30] spk_1: passable, nothing better than that, it is passed.
[00:13:35] spk_0: Um But back into this like work world, the, the it's not that we like leave things nonfunctional meaning just because somebody's risk normalized to something. What we want to recognize is that we're probably not gonna change that perception, at least, not, not easily that perception, but it doesn't mean that we can't do anything. And I think sometimes in this hop space, we kind of feel like, well, you know, we're, we're tied because we can't, you know, we can't change how people are thinking about this. And so we just kind of throw up our hands and say you can do whatever you want or you know, but in the world of life or death, right? We're talking about super high risk activities and we have risk normalization. We just take that as a given it's gonna happen. Risk normalization is occurring. The thought process in this space is, well, how do we then mitigate for when things go terribly wrong? How do we catch people when they're about to fall or already have fallen to try to reduce the consequence of what is occurring? Recognizing that we're not gonna be able to control how people are thinking or exactly what they do and there's some controls, right? So this idea of con controls or safeguards becomes incredibly important in our work world and in our lives. But what's fascinating is there seems to be a couple of different ways that people think about controls some ways I think probably feed into what we've done in the past that maybe don't have as much positive change as we're hoping. And some of which definitely align with this hop thought process. You want me to go into that matt? Does that sound like a good place to go? All right. So the things that I think would probably feed into sort of the old way, at least that I thought would be controls that are sort of designed to, um to, to dictate somebody's behavior when they're not making an error. Like when they're doing something on purpose, like to try to constrain somebody else's behavior, we tend to call that a control, simple example. Um, if you've got a car that does lane correction, sometimes that works really well. Like when you've made an error, meaning you didn't intend to drift from your lane and it corrects you and you're like, oh, I did not, I didn't mean to do. That's exactly
[00:16:00] spk_1: how I respond.
[00:16:01] spk_0: Like that's, that's all I didn't mean to do that. That's nice that the car corrected me. But then there's a lot of cases while driving where we are deviating from our lane for a good reason. And when the car fights you for that, that control now suddenly feels like it is over constraining your behavior and we have a higher likelihood of removing it. It's like it's like a control that cried wolf.
[00:16:28] spk_1: Yeah, I mean, I example I can think of is we always in, in training, talk about um, driving in Boston is gonna be really difficult. Some of the roads, maybe not designed.
[00:16:39] spk_0: They were course paths but then turned into
[00:16:43] spk_1: this thing turned into a, you know, there's been times when I'm driving and, and my car does have the lane assist where I am in the left lane driving safely following social norms and there is a truck in ATM in the middle lane that's taking up a lot of space and maybe I do want to be a little bit on the white lane to my left and away from the truck
[00:17:08] spk_0: and the shoulder. Is that what you mean by the, I
[00:17:09] spk_1: mean, sort of, yes,
[00:17:11] spk_0: like in the tiny, tiny, tiny bit of shoulder that exists on some of these roads, the nonexistent shoulder that is Boston
[00:17:18] spk_1: road and my car is like, nope, you are gonna be in between these white lines. I don't care, the cars, the big trucks next to you. Uh And that is a time where I definitely want to turn it off and I want to never realize it again. But then I remember there are times where maybe sometimes it does help me when I'm uh just sort of drifting and I, I don't realize I'm maybe touching one lane too much.
[00:17:41] spk_0: So those types. And I'm trying to think of a work example. I think like a, a work example of constraining behavior that I historically would have thought was like a fantastic idea. And then now I question like there has to be a very specific circumstance in which it would be helpful. Like one of them are um, like aisle cops
[00:17:59] spk_1: are not humans that police the
[00:18:02] spk_0: aisle. No. Um So aisle cops, if you haven't been exposed to them, they're kind of like railroad crossings except you put them sometimes inside of a building, sometimes out to, to try to separate traffic and there's nothing wrong with the idea of traffic separation. But the places where I had been pushed to put in aisle cops were ones where the intent of the aisle cop would be to like force someone to stop where they weren't stopping. Meaning we'd have like rolling stops happening or maybe people using a stop sign as a yield. And the thought process was, well, let's put in an aisle cop and that'll kind of force people to stop and depending upon how that's done or how many times people have to interact with that aisle cop. Those are the types of places where we see people like disabling or trying to defeat the safety because they're in, there's some contextual reason why it makes sense to roll, why it makes sense to just yield and not stop. There's logic in this place and that logic is something that we would have to understand. Like maybe the vehicle itself is really hard to stop and start. Like if it's, these are real things, Matt, I know you don't believe me, but where I came from we had maintenance tricycles which are tricycles for adults, adult size tricycles with very large um tool boxes on the back of them. So he's just like the facial expression he's giving me right now. I was for
[00:19:26] spk_1: sure that your daughter who's three made that up and convince you it's real. Next thing I know you're like, I was out looking for unicorns the other day because they're real too like that. No, I understand many maintenance tricycles they exist.
[00:19:42] spk_0: I never, I never seen one before. You're gonna have to take my word for it. Don't take my word for it. Matt, like, all right. So these maintenance tricycles, they're very hard to start and stop. Right. So, that's one reason, another reason people don't like to start and stop. Like, if you're on a forklift, sometimes you can damage whatever the products that you're moving or anyway, there's a million reasons why it makes sense or maybe you have a ton of stop signs that you're interfacing with. So now I put in aisle cops and now the aisle cops are actually trying to kind of force my hand to do something that I didn't feel like was logical to begin with. And so we're kind of going after the wrong problem. We're trying to dictate behavior with a control and in this case, I mean, aisle cops, I haven't, there could be an exception to this, but I, I if you were trying to put them in for an error, meaning like somebody like forgot to stop and this is supposed to help with it. The only thing I can picture in that scenario if somebody's like, truly has unintentional blindness or is forgetting to, to stop because they didn't see the stop sign and they didn't know was there all I picture is like something careening through the right the aisle cop itself, right? I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't see that as, um, a control that is helping the person do what needs to be done. Now, in certain traffic separation situations, it makes a lot of sense. But in other places, it hasn't, there's another type of control though. So there's a control that's not really designed to proactively constrain your behavior. There's controls that are designed to kind of catch you when you've already fallen sometimes literally like fall protection. Um But sometimes, um like if we go back to, to the the driving instead of thinking about the lane correction, we think about automatic breaking
[00:21:21] spk_1: the hop podcast with no name. Also a driving. Apparently,
[00:21:25] spk_0: like we're gonna have to drop some of driving references in the future because we are not
[00:21:30] spk_1: driving like formula one drivers on here.
[00:21:35] spk_0: But there's as long as you haven't had an experience. So the caveat here is that your automatic breaking is kicking in when it should be, then it doesn't fall into the same category as the crying wolf. Now, there's a few folks who have had automatic breaking happen when they, when it shouldn't be happening. Like I uh I actually went under an underpass once and it was like going from bright sunlight to really, really dark and the camera believed that there was something in front of me. And so it's tried to slow the car down pretty quickly, but because that defense doesn't cry wolf very often then it doesn't feel like it's constraining your behavior in the same way, that one that does cry wolf. So most of the time, actually, for many people, all of the time when that defense kicks in the, the thought process is Holy moly. I am so glad because that's what people say in their life. Like holy moly. Holy moly. I am so glad that my car stopped for me because it was past the point that I could have responded myself and it, and it helped me avoid an accident. So those the, the notion of crying wolf and the notion of constraining behavior um too early in a process or constraining behavior when I believe that my actions are the right thing to do anyway. Um That's a really big separation between a control that works really, really well that people like and people love and people want to use all the time and a control that people try to find ways around because it, it feels controlling.
[00:23:00] spk_1: Yeah, that's wow. Well said um All right. So in sticking with our, our normal process here, what, what homework do we have? What can we think about like it touches on these controls that helps us identify them kind of taking this big hot philosophy and applying it to real life.
[00:23:24] spk_0: Yeah. So let's try to find something in our lives that theoretically when it was put in place, it was supposed to uh help us avoid a consequence. Right. Some sort of control or safeguard. But we find ourselves bypassing it all the time. We find it completely unhelpful. And so we, we make it not work. Ok. I like, are you
[00:23:53] spk_1: already thinking, I'm thinking about it and comes to mind the coffee machine. I have to constantly remind to stay on and stay warm. But, um, I'll think of some more. All right. So we'll, and we'll pick this up next time.
[00:24:19] spk_0: Well, that's it. Yep. Another
[00:24:22] spk_1: one in the books. We did it.
[00:24:25] spk_0: If you want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website W W W dot hop podcast dot com.
[00:24:37] spk_1: That's H O P P O DC A S T dot com.
[00:24:43] spk_0: It's still such a stupid name.
[00:24:46] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.