PAPod 602 - From Brazil with Safety: Gilval and the New View Revolution

Because my name is very strange, and sometimes American speakers tend to say Gilval, but it is actually, it is Gilval. Gilval. Yeah, yeah, like a J. Gilval. Gilval. I got it. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And sometimes the L, we don't say like L, we say like W or U. Gilval. Gilval. Yeah, that's it. Oh my God, we're going to be good.

Yeah, that's it. I'll get everything else wrong, but I can probably get that right. Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast. I'm Todd Conklin. How are you, my friends? Today is a bit of an international journey. So grab your passport because we're heading to Brazil, which is a good thing to do for food alone.

Plus, everyone's beautiful there. I mean, like the dogs are beautiful. Everybody's beautiful in Brazil. It's just a deal. They just, it must be genetic because it's just working at every single level. And you probably remember, because we've talked about it before, But a million years ago, I met Ugo, and Ugo was working for a company in the United States, and he translated a bunch of slides, this is a long time ago, too, for a fundamentals class in human performance.

And that started a very fun friendship that's been going for a long time. And now what's happened, because Ugo went on with a set of partners to translate lots of different documents. He's a really good translator. Brazil has just kind of taken off. And the excitement as a nation is important when you think about how they're looking at safety.

But even more interesting is the community they've built. And that's kind of what we wanted to talk about. Gilberto, I really wanted him on the podcast. Just for a couple of reasons. One, you'll just figure out right away. He's hilarious and fun to listen to and just a ball of energy. But two, the reason they're doing the work they're doing is pretty profound.

And I think it's important for us to realize in the rest of the world that these communities are being built. And the importance of sort of culturally aligning and defining these concepts so they fit the country in which they're being built. Diffused, in which they're being used. And that, I think, is very, very interesting.

It's a very exciting time here in New Mexico for me, because I don't know if you know this or not, but we have this concert series that runs all summer long, and it's basically a free concert every night. And you can do that in a town that caters to tourism, but the music, the guy who does the music is just amazing.

And this week we have for two nights, this is kind of amazing, a guy named Shiny Ribs. And if you've never heard of the musician Shiny Ribs, you probably ought to look Shiny Ribs up. Don't just look up the tunes because the tunes are fine you'll like them a lot. Watch him on video watch how he interfaces with a crowd of people i do not know how to define him he's definitely not a folk musician i don't know if if if if if the only thing i can't i'm really struggling to define it.

If New Orleans music met West Texas folk singer music, that would be Shiny Ribs. Yeah, that's probably as good a definition as I could come up with. Anyway, if you're looking for a little music to sort of explore this summer. Shiny Ribs video, probably worth your time. Other than that, I mean, things are just popping along in a crazy world in which we live.

It's exciting to see all the things that are happening, and it's really exciting to see what's going on. Well, in fact, probably the best thing to do is let's just get into this conversation. This is Joval and myself and you, and let's talk a little bit about how these ideas diffuse over continents and through languages. Here we go.

So introduce yourself for us and tell us, you guys got it going on down there. It's exciting what's happening in Brazil. Yes, sometimes I cannot believe about that, what's happening. Are we still recording? Yeah, of course. Okay. We're always recording. What if you said, like, the smartest thing in the world and we weren't recording?

Okay, okay. Well, my name is Gilval Menezes. I'm a typical Brazilian guy. I'm a civil engineer, and later, just when I was 44, I decided that I had to study safety. And in Brazil, in order to study safety, you have to enroll post-graduation. So I became a safety engineer when I was, I finished it when I was 46, you know?

Because before that, I thought that safety was so boring. I thought that safety sucks, you know? It is a tiny bit boring sometimes. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, it is. Yeah. But then I started to read The Field Guide for Understanding Human Error from C.J. Decker. Sid Decker's book, yeah. And Todd, you know, at that moment on, everything changed in my mind because that was exactly what I was looking for.

Excellent. Yeah. And then my friends who were studying the new view, they introduced me to your book. I first read the pre-accident investigation, and then I started to read all the rest. Wow. And I got in love with the whole idea of the new view. And I thought that ha was something very practical, that we could put it in place the next day, you know?

That's what I thought at the beginning. Well, that's me. And, well, would you like to hear the whole story involving Hugo and Paolo? Yeah, of course. Of course I want the whole story. Don't edit. Give me all the dirt. If it involves Hugo, it's going to be an interesting story involving fancy hairdos.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was looking for information about the new view, and then I found Hugo's channel. And Hugo, we're talking about Hugo Ribeiro, who nowadays is my business partner. And then I met Hugo. I found his channel on YouTube. But I noticed that his channel, he used to speak in English.

And at that time, YouTube didn't provide automatic subtitles in Portuguese. Right. That was okay for me, but since I was trying to grow in a community, that was not useful. Because here in Brazil, even the most educated people, I would say most of them do not speak and understand English. So we decided to create a group of volunteers, and then we translated line by line of every Hugo's videos. Wow.

How important do you think it is to bring these concepts into a country's language? I mean, how significant do you think that is? Yes, yes. It's very important to do that. And we have to be very, very careful. Yeah, it would be hard to do, I think. Yeah, because it's not a single translation. Right. You can't do it automatically. Right.

Yeah, yeah. It's not about that. We have to translate even the expressions and what it means to be here in Brazil. Right. Yeah, it's because cultural is completely different. Very much so, yeah. Sometimes I can say something that I just translate, and for you, it may sound very bad, and it's okay in Brazil.

Yeah, I understand. And cultural differences are huge. And the concepts are, in any language, the concepts are ethereal. They're ideas, right? They're paradigms. And those often don't translate well at all. I mean, you have to sort of re-paradigm it or re-formulate it to make the ideas, the concepts make sense in another language. It's an interesting challenge.

Yeah, yeah. And Hugo, now when Hugo was doing those, was he with ICLs at that time? Yeah, he still is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had his role as he still does. And then, well, Hugo, he participates only about the strategy of the company. Right. Of course, he cannot be there. All the dirty work, that's my job to do the dirty work. We also have Paulo.

Paulo Gomez, he lives in Australia. And then the three of us decided to build a company. But before that, at the beginning, when we were trying to build a community, they both decided to write a book, you know. And they invited me to help them organize this book. This book, it was released in 2022. It's entitled The New View of Safety, a Brazilian Glenn. Nice. Nice.

And then, yeah. And then we invited the 17 co-authors, like practitioners, scholars, and people with PhD and people like me who were just supervisor or managers. And then we wrote this book. And this book, in a few months, it became free. It became free. We just delivered the PDF because we didn't want to get a revenue.

Right. You know? Right. Yeah. We just want to spread the word. And after that, we started to deliver hub trainings. Right. Hub introduction online. We created the first hot training in Brazil, Paulo, Hugo, and me. And then the thing started because companies, they wanted in-house training. But I was a full-time safety engineer for a great gas company here in Brazil.

And then it was very hard for us. Hugo has his job I had my job Paulo, he's in Australia well but at the same time I was trying to implement HOP in the company I was working for and then Todd, you know that. Well, at that time, I was reading Brent Sutton's learning team book. Right. And I felt in love.

When I read the half of the book, I said to myself and then to my chief, we can do this. We can do those learning teams here in our company. It was a gas company. we were having accidents with fingers and food because we dealed with cylinders. Right, those canisters, yeah. The U.S., yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then we started to do learning teams. I created, in turn, facilitators of learning inside the company. Yeah, yeah. But the CEO was very concerned about the amount of accidents and decided to go into BBS. And then I said, well, it won't work for me. I won't be able to help you anymore because I won't go back. Right.

And they decided to fire me. You know, they decided to fire me. It was 2023. And then we already had our company. Yeah. Did they fire you or did they set you free? Yeah, I started to do what I do now. And Todd, I have to tell you that it was the best thing that could happen to me. I am so in love. I'm so passionate about that.

At the day one that I was fired, I did not start. Just working, visiting several types of companies. And that's the work I do now. Right. What do you think it is that makes the new ideas so effective in Brazil? Why is Brazil having such good energy around looking at safety differently? It's a very, very hard question. I only ask hard questions. I don't ask easy questions.

Yeah, that's why I'm here. The next question I'm going to ask is, why is your pizza so good? So be ready for that one. And pão de queijo Oh, yeah, yeah, that's worth it And garlic bread, remember? Yeah Garlic bread Oh, I remember Pão de alho Yeah, garlic Pão de alho Garlic bread But I'm still saying you guys represent some of the best pizza in the world But that's the next topic Let's talk about uptake in Brazil Yeah, yeah, yeah Because, well, in Brazil, it makes...

It makes much sense, but it's very hard because, you know, we were one of the latest countries to get rid of slavery. So let's go back a little anthropology here. We are so, so we have a very distance of power in Brazil. Right. You know, the minimal wage of an operator and you get the CEO wage, it's very different.

It's so, things are so weird here in Brazil. And that's the most difficult part. But at the same time, Todd, that's what makes it so logical. When managers, when they hear about HOP, that we are fallible people, that blame fixes nothing, it makes sense to them. Because we are like 40 years trying to do the same things, blame, shame, retrain, and it's not working.

So I'm going to give you a terrible number. Sorry, but I have to give you a terrible number. Here in Brazil? Every three hours and 42 minutes, a worker dies working. Wow. And we are not talking about Uber and those motorcycle deliveries. Because they are not formal jobs. We are just talking about formal jobs that the Ministry of Work can do these statistics.

I'm going to repeat. Three hours and 42 minutes, a worker dies. Todd, we have to change that. Yeah. That's why. And you can. I mean, and you can change that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I want to do until my last breath. That's the thing that moves me right now. And that's a perfect thing to move you.

And you're busy all the time. Companies are constantly calling you. I mean, it sounds like things are just exploding. How are you getting support to help you? Well, great questions. And just for you to have an idea of our job, my schedule, I have my agenda full until the second week of October. Wow. Yeah. That's depressing. I'll just say it. That's depressing.

Why? Because I'm lazy. Because I'm lazy. I like to think about vacation. De vacaciones. De vacaciones. Yeah, yeah. No, really, really, it's very exciting. Yeah, in Portuguese, you would say férias. Férias, like fer? Férias, yeah, férias. Oh, okay. Because, yeah, vacaciones is Spanish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we are also going to talk about Colombia and Mexico, okay? Just in a minute. Because we have been there. Okay, so we are quite busy. And now we are starting to do some partnerships. We have now a very good woman that has joined us. Her name is Maria Cantida. She was safety manager and safety director of huge, huge companies.

Multinational companies. And she's now free of those companies and she's ready to join us. She also, she is already scheduled to go to Mexico in a couple of months because my agenda is full, you know, and we are getting, we are starting to do partnerships. Good. But we have been very careful because we decided to do partnerships only with those who believe in the same thing. We believe in hop.

We believe in new view. And we believe that doing behavior observations, it's not hop. Hop, it's not an evolution from BBS. Hop is something completely different. Right. It's a philosophical shift. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, we don't do partnership with companies that invite us to do like an improved BBS, a better BBS.

No, we don't do that. We don't do that. But we are growing. Thank God we are growing. And we are just starting to do some jobs in Latin America. Right. Do you see safety changing in Latin America? Becoming more important? Yeah. It's going to change. It's not changing. But they want to change. Yeah, they want to. Yeah. I have been to Mexico twice.

And we see that it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. But Brazil's already kind of, the idea of, well, with that high every three hours and 42 minutes of fatality, there's clearly an important reason to change. And Brazil seems to really change. I think the difference is, is you guys thought about the language so early.

Hugo translated my book a long, long time ago. I mean, a long time ago. Long time ago. Is Sid Decker's book in Portuguese as well? Yeah. Field Guide? No, no. We have, ah, the safety anarchist. Right. Right. Yeah, that's what we have in Portuguese. And that's funny because that's not my favorite Decker book.

No. Yeah, it's too punk to me. Although I like punk music and grunge music. But no, it's not the best one. But someone choose it and it's okay. Yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. But I'm excited. I'm excited by you guys anyway. But I'm excited about how much energy is around this. Companies are genuinely interested. And for a long time, we built a community here. There's a huge movement.

Brazil is very ahead of the other countries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other countries are seeing us and they want to change too. And guess what? There is not enough companies speaking Spanish, and so people are looking for us. And so Hugo, he speaks Spanish much, much better than I do, but he cannot travel.

He has his job. Yeah, he has a job. He has to respect his job, and we understand. Hugo, he joined us only in strategical stuff and during the meetings on Saturdays, and that's okay. And then we have, now we have this woman, Maria Cantida. She speaks Spanish fluently. I can communicate in Spanish, although I'm studying everyday Spanish.

I got to improve. It's very hard. People think it's similar. No, it's because we're old men. No, my brain and my heart, they are young. Oh, there you go. That was a good answer. So what's next? What do you see the future holding? Where do you guys want to be? Well, as a matter of fact, I have this question for you. Oh, I'm ready.

Yeah, yeah, I have that. I have that. Many, many friends of mine who study methodology and who study French, French, the French school, they talk about methodology. Right. A couple of guys, they have told me, you know, HOP lacks of methodology. And I said, why? No, because it has principles. Sometimes they sound not like principles. They sound like slogans. And, They say, I miss methodology. And I was thinking during a couple of weeks, and I was thinking to ask you, what about this?

Is it true, this lack of methodology? The second question would be, would you consider developing hub in order that it would have a deeper methodology? So I think it's a really good question. And I think that eventually, as the concepts of this new definition of safety grow and become more and more understood, that there will be a need to create some kind of method around how we think about doing this work.

The thing that's been most interesting at least to me is because this is so early and you know these ideas are new that we've really spent the majority of our time at least for me i'll speak for myself the majority of my time helping shift the paradigm from seeing safety as a way to manage huge risk to safety as a way to sort of understand capacity.

And so, that shifting definition, I think, is going to be primary before the new method becomes a part of the conversation. We're still struggling to get companies to see the worker not as the problem, but as the solution. And so, we're really redefining safety. We're giving safety a new meaning, which is kind of where we started.

So, culturally, as you know, the word safety is kind of a difficult word. I mean, it doesn't really even translate well, for instance, into Spanish. I mean, it translates to security, right? Securidad. Yeah, yeah. Because in Latin language, we only have one word that is segurança in Portuguese and seguridad in Spanish.

But they mean both safety and security. And security. And so we're helping give contextual underpinning to the safety part of that, to the fact that the way you manage risk is not by managing risk. The way you manage risk is by having the ability to do risky work well. And so when that shift happens, then I think we're going to have to have another big discussion about, well, what are the best methods to manage this program?

And I think it's fair to say that the principles can be seen as slogans. I think people see that as slogans. But I think we have to ask ourselves this question, and this might bear some translation. We can either be right or we can be effective. And sometimes in our desire to be right, we lose the ability to be effective.

I see. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'll give you some time to translate that because I think that's a very conceptual idea. Yeah. But the goal is like around fatalities, like every three hours and 42 minutes. Well, we know some things because we've looked carefully for a long time at what is it that kills people at work.

Well, so we know that killing people at work isn't really a failure of prevention. It's a failure of control. Yeah, yeah. But, Todd, let me address that. We are talking about control and we are talking a lot about capacity. One way to reach this stronger methodology, in my humble opinion, would be to broaden this meaning of capacity.

Because capacity is not only tangible things. It's not a tangible control. I like to see capacity also with untangible, uncountable abilities, like relationships. You're right. You're completely right. Which is kind of why... The community has drifted to the word capacity. It's not a very meaningful word, capacity.

No, it's not. And it doesn't translate that well into other languages because it's, but it's a word that's generic enough. It's general enough. It's like a bucket of all the things that we need, which are, some are linear. Some are energy wheels, and some are, you know, hazard assessment tools, and some are traditional classic safety tools that have been around for a million years, failure modes and effects.

Those are all part of that capacity bucket. But a lot of it is relationships and caring and, you know. Learning. Learning. Capacity to learn. really key part of the equation. Those things all make a huge difference. And that's the interesting challenge. I think what's been so fun, at least for me, and I'm so glad that we're on the podcast, is watching you guys go through this journey.

Because you're moving quickly, and that's always exciting, but you're also moving very effectively. And we are moving deeply. Yeah. You know, deeply. I'm going to show you something. This is a book. That we did, inspired by your Better Question book, but also inspired in other many authors that we admire, like Professor Robert Long, like Nipping Anand, and people that study safety in a deeper way.

And then we wrote Field Guide for a Different Safety. Nice. Yeah, and it's a book with 99 questions. Wow, what a great idea. Better questions. Yeah, yeah. So, like 42. What are the procedures that are harder or even impossible to apply here? Oh, that's a great question. You know, and see the colors. See the colors. We have orange and then darker orange. Right.

The darker orange goes to the end of the book, which brings us to harder questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, let me get to one here. 90. They are 99. The question number 90. How often do you feel pressure to take shortcuts to comply with deadlines or goals? Great question. Yeah. And let's talk about learning.

The last question is not to do. On the shop floor. The last question is for the one who poses the question. What a good idea. You know, what have you learned about yourself that really you didn't know before? Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's great. Thank you for your time. This was a great conversation.

Thank you, Todd. But I admire you a lot, and I'm eager to help all the community to bring up a deeper methodology and to change safety and change forever. Welcome aboard, my friend. We're glad you're here. You can count on me. You can count on us. That's going to energize you for the rest of the week, maybe not even a couple days longer. That's how good it was.

Thanks for your time. Thanks for being a part of this. Tell your friends. The podcast is always fun. And if we can hang out with people from Brazil, like Julel, it'll be the perfect day. So I hope you enjoyed this immensely. I did. Have as much fun as you possibly can. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other.

Take care of one another, even the least among us. And for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe.

PAPod 602 - From Brazil with Safety: Gilval and the New View Revolution

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