Intergalactic Thinking for Safety. “Beam us up, Scotty”.

2002. The former award winning advertising creative director Tom Monahan publishes his book “The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy: Open Your Mind to greater Creative Thinking.” He merciless addresses the reader several times in the introduction. For example: Now is the time to ask yourself, “What am I doing to enable myself and/or my people to generate the vital business-building ideas that fuel my company’s, my clients’, and our customers’ success?”

The book catapults the reader through refreshingly challenging thoughts about the unlimited creativity that we once naturally experienced as children with all kinds of experiments. The book contains (trademark) tools such as “ask a better question”, 100 mph thinking, 180° thinking and Intergalactic Thinking. The intergalactic chapter contains countless elegant brain teasers such as

- Outside the box is where the future will be created.

- Don’t resist ideas that seem crazy or stupid. Find the brilliance; there’s brilliance in almost anything.

Monahan encourages the reader to explore “seemingly unrelated galaxies of thought” to unlock new creative possibilities.

PS. Note on the title. The Scotty quote is a real one from the legendary TV series and is the closest thing to the catchphrase misquote “Beam me up, scotty”.

The intergalactic approach - just the right thing to thunder through the innovation sound barrier?

For international safety intervention groups, who repeatedly make extractions from existing theories, methods and models that seem illogical at first glance, in order to then try them out as a “customized distillate” in an exercise form.

Once again: In order to unearth new inspirations, you always need the courage to venture prototype modifications of seemingly incoherent theories, methods and models. Not only in safety.

For example, the following workshop, which I have put together for this article as inspiration for other safety teams.

Starting point: Safety team developing human-centric interventions. A collaborative group exercise that encourages creative problem solving and intergalactic thinking on issues such as “tripping hazards”, for example.

Intergalactic Safety Ideation Workshop

1. Diverse Team Formation | Assemble cross-functional teams including safety experts, engineers, designers, psychologists, and frontline workers.
2. Problem Presentation | Introduce a specific industrial safety challenge, providing context and current approaches.
3. Galaxy Exploration | Divide participants into "galaxies" representing different units or domains unrelated to industrial safety. | Each group researches innovative practices or technologies in their assigned galaxy.
4. Intergalactic Connections | Teams reconvene and share insights from their galaxies. | Participants are encouraged to draw unexpected connections between these diverse ideas and industrial safety.
5. Human-Centered Ideation | Using the IDEO.com approach, teams focus on empathy, defining the problem from the worker's perspective. | Apply iterative design principles to rapidly prototype and refine ideas.
6. Safety Solution Mapping | Teams create visual maps connecting their intergalactic inspirations to practical safety interventions. | Emphasize how these ideas address human factors and enhance user experience.
7. Collaborative Refinement | Groups present their ideas to the larger team for feedback. | Encourage interdisciplinary collaboration to further develop promising concepts.
8. Impact Assessment | Evaluate proposed solutions based on potential global impact, feasibility, and alignment with human-centered design principles.
9. Action Planning | Develop roadmaps for implementing the most promising ideas. | Assign roles and responsibilities for further development and testing.

With such experiments and discovery-based learning, there's one thing you can't avoid - everyone has a go at navigating bumpy roads :)

And…a proposal how to measure this to evaluate its effectiveness, to close the loop:

A - Quantitative Measure | Reduction in Accident Rate

After implementation | track the number of workplace incidents/accidents or incidents over a specific period (e.g., 6 months or 1 year) and compare it to the baseline rate before the intervention. In short - a percentage reduction in the accident rate

Formula

Accident Rate =

Pre intervention rate – post intervention rate

divided by

Pre intervention rate

x

100%

Result – strong evidence supporting the effectiveness of safety interventions at group/organizational level in reducing incidents/accidents at work.

B - Qualitative Measure | Safety Climate Assessment

• Conduct semi-structured interviews or focus groups with workshop/intervention participants to assess/visualize changes in the organization's safety climate. Focus on:
• Perceived effectiveness of the new safety interventions
• Changes in safety communication and leadership
• Employee engagement with safety practices
• Understanding and adoption of the human-centered design principles in safety measures

Filtering out these parts of the text can provide information about the impact of the workshops or interventions on the safety culture in the organization. This allows the long-term success of such safety interactions to be modified.

In general, the combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics enables a comprehensive understanding of the impact of people-centered safety actions.

With intergalactic greetings and best interplanetary wishes