Building a muscle memory to drive Safety

As the CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Digital Services business, I often try to imagine myself in a situation where I witness something unsafe: what would I do to stay safe? ?I try to understand what our colleagues operating wind farms would do in such conditions. ?As a company, we seek to provide our teams with everything they need to prepare for unsafe situations: processes, tools, training, audits, drills. Despite these efforts, there is still no guarantee that a split-second decision reacting to danger won’t result in injury or death. All our written procedures may still fail to protect our teams in these sudden moments.

Then I asked myself how the Army ensures a Safety culture when regularly placing its men and women in life-threatening danger. I have the chance to work along honorable veterans that bring a great mindset and value to my team. I recently had a discussion with Brian Case, an Army veteran, who is now our Chief Digital Officer.

Brian noted, “When it comes to safety or any priority, it’s all about creating muscle memory”.

As he told me:

“The military trains relentlessly. The teams capitalize on moments of downtime to continuously hone their skills, even mundane tasks like assembling and disassembling your equipment. We would continuously make it more challenging by assembling and dissembling it for time, blindfolded, in the dark; all to create that muscle memory. There is a discipline that goes with taking on that hard preparation work to ensure when it’s time to execute, the team is as best prepared as it can be.”

“And for more complex tasks like reacting to an unexpected event, we practice what are known as tactical drills. Then, when these situations happen in the real world, our brain and our body know what to do in sequence with the rest of the team. Everything is coordinated like a dance, and everyone knows their role. These are standard operating procedures that are based on common repeatable events that may happen in a high stress environment, and you practice those all the time, to the point that they become engrained in you, so you don’t even have to think about your response in a stressful situation. You just have engrained the muscle memory of the action that you would take in that scenario.”

Brian and I agreed on the fact that anyone working in the field should go through that constant rehearsal; continuously practicing scenarios that could be high-risk events. As in the military, every task that a wind technician performs is a mission and we should triple efforts to make sure that we are fully prepared for each of these missions, by talking about the contingencies and most importantly rehearsing for the task (our mission) and potential scenarios until being fully ready, and then, like the military, conduct an after-action review to discuss what went well and what could have gone better and should go better next time. This process of plan, do, and review is essential for safe operations that we seek to continuously improve.

We have standard procedures across the wind industry and within our business that require every field technician to go through this phase of planning and training before performing a task. However, I think we could learn from the experience of our veterans to do even more to help our teams build that muscle memory, rehearsing potential scenarios frequently and especially before embarking on a climb. Then if an unsafe situation unexpectedly arises, we have those life-saving practices engrained in our muscle memory.