Paul Davison is the CEO and Founder of PPWD, a company that specialises in bringing compassionate safety to safety-critical environments. With a 17-year career in the Royal Air Force as a helicopter pilot, Paul’s experiences in Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and Iraq shaped his understanding of safety and human factors. After a formative incident involving the loss of colleagues in 2001, he developed a passion for creating workplace environments where everyone goes home safe. Paul co-chairs the Workplace Well-being Work Group and is an advocate for incorporating psychological factors into UK safety legislation.
Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Paul Davison about his journey from RAF helicopter pilot to safety culture expert, his philosophy of compassionate safety in high-risk environments, and how investing in people is crucial for creating sustainable safety practices across the rail industry
SSH: What is PPWD and what is your role within the company?
PD: I’m the CEO and Founder of PPWD. We started in 2011 with my business partner Paul White, who retired a couple of years ago. What we do is bring compassionate safety to safety critical environments. It’s a slightly different approach, and we use sticky learning methodologies to ensure that what we do in the classroom, boardroom, or workshop stays with people for a long time.
The company was founded to deliver leadership training for the Royal Saudi Air Force at the King Faisal Air Academy in Riyadh. We developed, designed and delivered the initial courses and train-thetrainer programmes. I’m pleased to say that the course continues to this day.
Our work in the rail industry came about through a chance conversation. I met a train simulator manager on an adventurous training course with the Royal Air Force Air Cadets. He was complaining about train drivers and how they could be difficult to work with. I suggested that the challenge sounded much like some of the challenges I had experienced and managed in the Royal Air Force. I was invited to the training academy and spent time driving the simulator and chatting to his team.
This is where I became aware of the term Non-Technical Skills, which seemed very similar to what I had encountered in my military flying career. We used the terms human factors and human performance. We were then able to design and deliver several courses which were really well received, and as they say, the rest is history.
SSH: Tell us about your career before you joined PPWD.
PD: If I give you a couple of stepping stones, I think through that you’ll see my ‘why’ – my purpose in life.
I joined the Royal Air Force in 1994 and I enjoyed a 17-year career. I was a helicopter pilot, flying Puma helicopters for a number of years, and I was very fortunate to fly in places like Kosovo at the end of the Balkans campaign in the 90s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and then into the desert in Iraq. The Puma was a great platform for me because you never knew what you were going to do. It was a very versatile platform – you could take off thinking you’re doing one thing and end up doing a whole load of other things. It was an environment where my technical flying skills were pushed to their limit. At the same time operating the aircraft to solve complex and at times novel problems, in very demanding environments. To do this, required leadership and the building of a team, in the form of the crew. Each one of us had specific responsibilities. None of us held the answer, it required high levels of cooperation, collaboration and cohesion. And then I got tired with that and needed a break, so I ended up at the Royal Air Force College as an instructor of officer training. Suddenly I was working with people in a way which was not technical anymore, because I was really looking at what made these people tick, what motivated them.
SSH: How do you pull together all these abstract concepts around leadership and management into technical tasks?
PD: I think there were a couple of things that happened for me there. I was spoiled working with some really great, highly should go home safe. No one should come to work and then not go home because they’ve had a fatal or a life-changing injury. What can we do to invest in people to ensure that happens? That network, that cocreation of safety, that matrix, that tapestry that we weave, that always catches people kindly, even when they fall. That is my definition of what a Fair Culture is.’ motivated and super talented people. The other bit was I suddenly realised that although I might not be like everybody else, that doesn’t make me weird. We did a lot of work there on staff training to look at psychology, how people learn, how people acquire information, how they present themselves to the world. So that was a real awakening for me.
That got me to reflect on some of the things that happened while I was flying. The main one was something that took place in 2001, which was a crash of a Puma helicopter in which the pilot and the navigator both lost their lives. Those two individuals were on my flight, my squadron, who I knew really well, and I ended up carrying them on their final journey, carrying their coffins in and out of church. I was at Brize Norton when I saw them being repatriated, and I met the families and the orphaned children.
I remember standing in that departure hall at Brize Norton when the aircraft came in with their bodies, and it was like an atomic explosion in my head that went off, I told myself: ‘this must not happen again’. I didn’t quite realise at the time, but I think that sent ripples through everything I did. The way I flew after that was different – far more comfortable putting my hand up and saying, ‘let’s stop, let’s talk about this’. I think that then rippled through both officer training and what I tried to get into people – to have confidence that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, to actually stop and talk.
Coming into the safety critical environment with PPWD was to recognise that there should be no harm in the workplace. Everyone should go home safe. No one should come to work and then not go home because they’ve had a fatal or a life-changing injury. What can we do to invest in people to ensure that happens? That network, that co-creation of safety, that matrix, that tapestry that we weave, that always catches people kindly, even when they fall. That is my definition of what a Fair Culture is which has become the driving force now for what I do and what PPWD does wherever we go.
SSH: That experience, that ‘atomic explosion’ where you were thinking about your safety philosophy that led to the creation of PPWD – was it a challenge to articulate those thoughts and feelings into action?
PD: At the time when it happened, I didn’t realise what had happened. The classic military thing is no one really talks about this stuff, so you just kind of put it in a box. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve sort to lift the lid on that box. There are other stories from my aviation career where I can go, ‘this is when Paul didn’t do those things’ and there are a couple of occasions where I could easily not be here talking to you because I didn’t put my hand up and say I think we should stop when we came very close to having catastrophic incidents.
So how do you translate that? To start with, I didn’t have an awareness of it. My translation was doing the technical stuff – let’s deliver products for people that they want. They’ve got a problem, generally an increase in incidents, so we’ll deliver the non-technical skills course or package, the investigators package, or the assessors package.
In time, I realised those were kind of like sticking plasters. They don’t really solve what’s going on. The idea I now hold in my mind is around what safety and safety culture is, what leadership is, what performance is, and how they’re all woven together – how can we be courageous to actually go upstream and start dealing with these things at source as opposed to just keep pulling the bodies out of the river when things go wrong?
I’m still wrestling with it, and it is a difficult thing. It is a truly Wicked Problem. It doesn’t sit naturally with traditional safety approaches, but I think if we want to move on, we need a different approach to safety, to people, and to culture if we really want to go into a place that’s far more productive, has much higher performance, and looks after people. We need to look at the relationship between these things.
SSH: When you’re introducing this philosophy, do you get any pushback? What sort of feedback do you receive?
PD: I have to be really articulate to create those stepping stones and join the dots. There’s absolutely a place for traditional safety – that kind of clipboard and compliance approach, the governance and assurance side of it is absolutely needed. But it can only take you so far.
There are things you can do like nontechnical skills training, human factors and so on which will absolutely help increase safety by reducing operational incidents, but at the same time we need to deal with the mental health of individuals, their wellbeing, their longevity, getting them through their pension point, not just to it – so they’re actually in a fit state to enjoy life beyond their working career.
To articulate that and to put that together is a leadership responsibility, and that requires some cultural change. It’s not something I’ve been able to do in 30 seconds beyond certain little sound bites. You need a couple of hour workshop to take people through those stepping stones to show them this approach and methodology and how it works.
SSH: Do you find that in recent years you’ve had a more positive response? It seems like other industries and maybe the culture more broadly is catching up to this idea.
PD: I agree with you, that’s exactly what I sense. I wonder if there’s something here around generations – perhaps there’s a generation which is in senior leadership positions now which is starting to retire and is being replaced by a couple of generations who are more open to looking after people in its broadest sense. That you have to invest in them in order to create environments where they can thrive and flourish, for them to give of their best rather than just take the wage and go home. So yes, I think there is a change coming definitely.
SSH: You also co-chair the Workplace Wellbeing Work Group. Could you tell us more about your efforts to bring psychological factors into UK legislation?
PD: That’s purely chatting to people. I’m but one amongst many people who are working on this, and others are far more advanced in the legislative side. Where I think I came in was around the management of psychosocial factors that are hazardous to health. We’re not talking about people being electrocuted or crushed or falling – the traditional things that might harm. It’s about the other factors: stress, the relationship you have with your boss, the financial challenges one might be facing within the workplace, how those start to impact.
And then if you’ve got things like AI coming in and starting to maybe take away some of the creativity that might be required, what about people’s identity and their purpose in the workplace beyond the wage packet?
Working with organisations like the Mindful Business Charter, which is mainly focused on organisations in the legal profession who have a significant mental ill health challenge, and organisations like
ISMA (International Stress Management Association), the question is: if this stuff is so good, if this stuff works and we’ve proven it, then why is it not in UK legislation?
If you look at the Health and Safety Executive and what they’ve got, they’ve got a great framework and legislation for things like the control of substances hazardous to health, working with radiological and biological effects, as well as more traditional safety like working at height, electricity, crush and so on.
But what about this mental ill health crisis that you could argue is happening in the UK? That costs, I think Deloitte was saying, some ridiculous amount like $2 trillion globally. In the UK alone it’s equivalent to £11,000 per worker. And quite often these programmes in the workplace are nothing more than fruit on Friday and yoga on a Tuesday – a sticking plaster.
So I thought, let’s just get stuck in. How could we put some legislation together? What would it look like? I think there’s a great framework already there, which is the control of substances hazardous to health. You just change all of those more physical substances for the psychosocial factors, and you actually have a really great framework, set of guidance documents, risk assessments and so on that people could implement straight away.
It has already started because I know there’s ISO 45001 and 45003. But again, there’s no mandating of it. It’s just ‘this is some great advice, go and do it’. Some do, and the majority don’t.
SSH: What is PPWD’s USP?
PD: I think there are two elements that we bring. It is this compassionate safety approach and it is these proprietary sticky learning methods that we use within the classroom.
Our compassionate safety approach redefines and repositions safety so that we start to look at it from a very human perspective and the environmental perspective. Human, in that it accommodates people’s physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual needs. Then, Let’s create this environment that looks after people, that sets them up for success.
The sticky learning approach is using real approaches in the classroom whereby the person has complete ownership of that learning. Rather than us doing stuff to or for people, we do it with them and we then get them to do it by themselves, and that has significant long-lasting impacts.
I was reminded of this beautifully recently. Just by chance, an individual I hadn’t spoken to since delivering a coaching course during COVID, which was actually online, called me up looking for some advice. It was amazing that four or so years later, he’s using all these phrases and little things that we would have used online and in the classroom that he is now using with his drivers. He’s now been promoted, and he’s comfortable to phone all those years later. The learning has locked in – this lovely idea of a different way of dealing with drivers.
SSH: When he was speaking these words back to you, did you feel like he’d adapted what you taught him and applied it to his own experience?
PD: Absolutely. That’s when I really know that someone’s got it – not when they’re just parrot-fashion repeating it, but when they’ve internalised it and they’re applying it to their specific context. You can definitely hear that when it happens.
SSH: What types of products and services do you offer? How would our readers get involved with what you’re doing?
PD: Occasionally we do courses where people book in as ones and twos, but the main route for working with organisations is that they want to develop their safety culture, for example, or they’ve got a challenge with their operational incident rates. They might have a specific requirement to put everyone through our investigation or learning review courses, and then we put together a package or programme that meets that particular need.
We offer a variety of products and services. A range of blended Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills courses are delivered from the frontline operator through to boardroom directors. We also offer courses on recognising and managing trauma, how to be an assessor for Non-Technical Skills, and a jewel for us – the product that has the ability to make the greatest cultural impact – the
Learning Review course, taking accident investigations to a new level of learning. We also provide a wide range of coaching, mentoring and action learning team services. These range from one-to-one postincident support to executive level coaching. All are woven around safety, culture, leadership and performance. The packages and programmes are proving to be very transformative and we’ve been recognised through several awards.
SSH: What are some standout projects that you’ve been involved with over the years?
PD: I think the one for me which demonstrates this approach, and why I have confidence to talk about it because I think we have absolutely put it into practice and have the results from it and the peer reviewing as well, is a project which is now in year nine or possibly year ten working with Southeastern.
That started off, as a lot of these do, with an operational incident rate which was not where they wanted it. Non-technical skills was kind of like ‘we think this will help’. So we came in and delivered a couple of pilot courses which were extremely successful, and then we were able to roll that out to all of the frontline drivers.
That then gets you into having these conversations around ‘what really is going on here?’ and so that started a whole cultural evolution journey with us really intimately partnering with Southeastern. In no way is this easy – this can involve some really quite challenging conversations at times. It requires a lot of trust, a lot of openness and transparency on both sides because there’s no magic book, nothing you can pull off the shelf. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, and that’s partly from us with our experiences and what we bring. But equally, you need the client to be saying ‘this is the lay of the land, how can you help us?’. And I think in that time we’ve just learned a couple of key pieces that you get in place – sort of the corners and the edges of the puzzle.
With great success. In that time, we’ve worked with Southeastern and their operational incident rate has reduced by 64 per cent for train drivers. That’s an ROI of 15.9, the last time we calculated it a couple of years ago. You’re talking significant millions of pounds saved here, let alone all of the other emotional trauma that comes out of accidents and incidents.
But I think for me, the piece that really highlights it is that about two years ago, we rolled out a fair culture charter for the entire business. It wasn’t just for frontline workers or people in the operational side, this is for all four and a half thousand workers – a set of binding principles in how they would be dealt with and managed post-incident.
That Charter has now rippled through the business, such that people will say, ‘How are we doing in line with our Charter? Does this new policy actually meet those principles?’.
And that to me is now a shift. It’s not perfect, but it’s a real shift into a learning culture. How can we now start to do things proactively? How can we get upstream? How can we be preventative to look at what are the things that might harm people and deal with them before they actually do? There have been a number of projects which they’ve done now, some of them with our support, some just off their own back, which have solved some long-standing issues within that organisation.
SSH: It’s fascinating that it’s a charter that applies to the whole staff, the whole company, because then the language has to be more like a worldview and allencompassing rather than specific to each individual.
PD: Whether it’s the apocryphal story when JFK went to Cape Canaveral in 1962 – he’d made his announcement ‘at the end of this decade we will go to the moon’ – and supposedly he’s in a group of people when he turns to an individual and says, ‘Excuse me sir, what do you do around here?’ this gentleman says to him, ‘Well Mr. President,
I put men on the moon’ and that individual was the janitor.
So everybody understood what they were doing, what the mission was. That would be my desire – you could walk onto any platform of any station, bump into a member of GB Railways, ask them what they do, and they would come up with some equivalent phrase that shows they understand. This is well beyond the pay packet. ‘I get everyone home safe every day’ or ‘I create the greatest journey experience that this person will ever have in their life.’
Whatever that might be. A team that’s working collectively to move people. I think you’ve only got to look at examples that came out of 2012 in the Olympics. The incident rates for the companies in and around London are almost non-existent.
SSH: When a client comes to you with a particular problem, what’s your process for coming up with a solution?
PD: My preference is partnering. Some clients do come and it’s just ‘I want to buy this non-technical skills course’ and they’re really not interested – there’s not a foot in the door for any other conversation. But for those clients that are really looking for something longer lasting that is absolutely going to embed a cultural change for what they’re trying to achieve, then partnering is the key.
That has to build trust, because as soon as you get that level of trust, you can really look someone in the eye. Conflict evaporates. Now you get that commitment to that joint cause. Now people have responsibility. They’re invested in what’s going on. At that point, once people have got responsibility, your results start to come.
So that’s the key for me – how do I create this relationship where we work with them and ultimately hand over to them so that they’re doing it by themselves and they understand why they’re doing that and how to do that.
SSH: What challenges come up that might make it difficult to achieve that relationship?
PD: Well, we’re definitely getting into human beings, aren’t we? How much are you willing to show of your dirty laundry, or how bad it might be? I’m a stranger. Even with signing an NDA, suddenly people have got to admit that it’s not as good as it could be. And of course, some of that would be their responsibility – that’s what they’re having to admit, ‘I’m not doing as good a job as potentially I could be here.’
So that just takes time to build the trust, build the confidence in each other, to have those conversations and go, ‘Look, I’m absolutely here. It is as much in my interest to make this work as it is for you. I really believe that we’ve got an approach and a method that can do that. Are you willing to do the steps, the small steps? Are you willing to come with me on this? I think I can guide you through how to do it.’
SSH: That’s quite difficult, isn’t it? Having the confidence to talk about things that really need to be improved and might expose us as being inadequate in some way.
PD: Correct. You very quickly get into how things are done in society. To demonstrate vulnerability, to demonstrate humility –‘I’m not as good as I need to be, could be. I don’t have the resources.’ All of those things are not ingrained in any kind of western cultures.
SSH: If you were in charge of the UK rail industry, where would you target investment and look for improvement?
PD: People, people, people, which is perhaps no surprise with the conversation we’ve had so far. I mean that in two ways. One is the people that are actually working in the industry. If you buy a new piece of rolling stock, you know what the cost of that rolling stock is up front. But if you don’t service it and don’t do preventative maintenance on it, it’s probably going to let you down at some stage. I would want the industry to look at all the people within that industry and ask: what is the equivalent maintenance plan you have for those people? They could be with you for 30-40 years. So not just the upfront training, but that whole package through their career, and not just the mandated technical tick boxes. This whole psychological approach – what are you going to do to make their wellbeing such that they can deliver the very best every single day and get through to their pension point?
Also, I don’t know how controversial this is, but I’m not sure the industry really understands what passengers want. There is this real drive at the moment for faster journey times, and I’m not convinced that the most important thing for passengers. It’s often said that people don’t always tell you what they’re thinking, feeling, or wanting –you have to work quite hard to watch their behaviours. I think what people actually want is a really rewarding, enjoyable, and comfortable journey. To shave ten minutes off that journey is probably not going to really make a difference to their life.
I think the question for the regulators to answer is: How do we make rail so enjoyable, comfortable and rewarding that people feel stupid to drive? And the same goes for freight.
I assess that the railway is aiming to answer a question that isn’t being asked. Firstly, we need to move away from purely relying on focus groups. Instead, behavioural research and audience psychological profiling are required to see what customers actually do rather than just what they say. This will ensure we deeply understand how passengers interact with the railway’s products and services.
Take for example pre-booked tickets. The cheapest tickets can only be used on a specific train. So, one builds into the journey a 45 or 60-minute buffer in case you get caught out. If your journey’s been smooth and you arrive with time to spare, the easiest way to shorten that journey is to allow you to go on one or two trains that are going to depart while you’re sitting in the station. For an administrative fee of £5 or £10, you could change it on the app and travel on an earlier train. That person’s happy because you’ve shortened their journey by 45 minutes.
You’re also building capacity in the system for all the tickets and seats that now are not going to be used later on, which you can resell if you want to.
Could you have business pods on the train with impeccable Wi-Fi, where people can have meal and drink packages and create that journey as a business-based journey? I think aviation has gone a long way down this route, and rail has an opportunity to look at how it does things differently.
SSH: What are your hopes for the new regulatory bodies, such as Great British Railways?
PD: It’s going to require some really strong, assertive leadership to take Great British Railways and actually start to look at it, set it up, and integrate it in a way which is different from what has happened before. That requires innovative thinking. Such thinking contains a degree of imagination and creativity, to do things differently. Doing different things, as well as starting new things, also requires some things to stop. All of which involves planning and practicing.
A lot of companies are operating on annual budgetary cycles. That’s just not long enough for the railway. Network Rail fortunately has the control periods, the five-year period. To me, that’s the kind of cycle you’ve got to st
Paul Davison is the CEO and Founder of PPWD, a company that specialises in bringing compassionate safety to safety-critical environments. With a 17-year career in the Royal Air Force as a helicopter pilot, Paul’s experiences in Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and Iraq shaped his understanding of safety and human factors. After a formative incident involving the loss of colleagues in 2001, he developed a passion for creating workplace environments where everyone goes home safe. Paul co-chairs the Workplace Well-being Work Group and is an advocate for incorporating psychological factors into UK safety legislation.
Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Paul Davison about his journey from RAF helicopter pilot to safety culture expert, his philosophy of compassionate safety in high-risk environments, and how investing in people is crucial for creating sustainable safety practices across the rail industry
SSH: What is PPWD and what is your role within the company?
PD: I’m the CEO and Founder of PPWD. We started in 2011 with my business partner Paul White, who retired a couple of years ago. What we do is bring compassionate safety to safety critical environments. It’s a slightly different approach, and we use sticky learning methodologies to ensure that what we do in the classroom, boardroom, or workshop stays with people for a long time.
The company was founded to deliver leadership training for the Royal Saudi Air Force at the King Faisal Air Academy in Riyadh. We developed, designed and delivered the initial courses and train-thetrainer programmes. I’m pleased to say that the course continues to this day.
Our work in the rail industry came about through a chance conversation. I met a train simulator manager on an adventurous training course with the Royal Air Force Air Cadets. He was complaining about train drivers and how they could be difficult to work with. I suggested that the challenge sounded much like some of the challenges I had experienced and managed in the Royal Air Force. I was invited to the training academy and spent time driving the simulator and chatting to his team.
This is where I became aware of the term Non-Technical Skills, which seemed very similar to what I had encountered in my military flying career. We used the terms human factors and human performance. We were then able to design and deliver several courses which were really well received, and as they say, the rest is history.
SSH: Tell us about your career before you joined PPWD.
PD: If I give you a couple of stepping stones, I think through that you’ll see my ‘why’ – my purpose in life.
I joined the Royal Air Force in 1994 and I enjoyed a 17-year career. I was a helicopter pilot, flying Puma helicopters for a number of years, and I was very fortunate to fly in places like Kosovo at the end of the Balkans campaign in the 90s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and then into the desert in Iraq. The Puma was a great platform for me because you never knew what you were going to do. It was a very versatile platform – you could take off thinking you’re doing one thing and end up doing a whole load of other things. It was an environment where my technical flying skills were pushed to their limit. At the same time operating the aircraft to solve complex and at times novel problems, in very demanding environments. To do this, required leadership and the building of a team, in the form of the crew. Each one of us had specific responsibilities. None of us held the answer, it required high levels of cooperation, collaboration and cohesion. And then I got tired with that and needed a break, so I ended up at the Royal Air Force College as an instructor of officer training. Suddenly I was working with people in a way which was not technical anymore, because I was really looking at what made these people tick, what motivated them.
SSH: How do you pull together all these abstract concepts around leadership and management into technical tasks?
PD: I think there were a couple of things that happened for me there. I was spoiled working with some really great, highly should go home safe. No one should come to work and then not go home because they’ve had a fatal or a life-changing injury. What can we do to invest in people to ensure that happens? That network, that cocreation of safety, that matrix, that tapestry that we weave, that always catches people kindly, even when they fall. That is my definition of what a Fair Culture is.’ motivated and super talented people. The other bit was I suddenly realised that although I might not be like everybody else, that doesn’t make me weird. We did a lot of work there on staff training to look at psychology, how people learn, how people acquire information, how they present themselves to the world. So that was a real awakening for me.
That got me to reflect on some of the things that happened while I was flying. The main one was something that took place in 2001, which was a crash of a Puma helicopter in which the pilot and the navigator both lost their lives. Those two individuals were on my flight, my squadron, who I knew really well, and I ended up carrying them on their final journey, carrying their coffins in and out of church. I was at Brize Norton when I saw them being repatriated, and I met the families and the orphaned children.
I remember standing in that departure hall at Brize Norton when the aircraft came in with their bodies, and it was like an atomic explosion in my head that went off, I told myself: ‘this must not happen again’. I didn’t quite realise at the time, but I think that sent ripples through everything I did. The way I flew after that was different – far more comfortable putting my hand up and saying, ‘let’s stop, let’s talk about this’. I think that then rippled through both officer training and what I tried to get into people – to have confidence that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, to actually stop and talk.
Coming into the safety critical environment with PPWD was to recognise that there should be no harm in the workplace. Everyone should go home safe. No one should come to work and then not go home because they’ve had a fatal or a life-changing injury. What can we do to invest in people to ensure that happens? That network, that co-creation of safety, that matrix, that tapestry that we weave, that always catches people kindly, even when they fall. That is my definition of what a Fair Culture is which has become the driving force now for what I do and what PPWD does wherever we go.
SSH: That experience, that ‘atomic explosion’ where you were thinking about your safety philosophy that led to the creation of PPWD – was it a challenge to articulate those thoughts and feelings into action?
PD: At the time when it happened, I didn’t realise what had happened. The classic military thing is no one really talks about this stuff, so you just kind of put it in a box. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve sort to lift the lid on that box. There are other stories from my aviation career where I can go, ‘this is when Paul didn’t do those things’ and there are a couple of occasions where I could easily not be here talking to you because I didn’t put my hand up and say I think we should stop when we came very close to having catastrophic incidents.
So how do you translate that? To start with, I didn’t have an awareness of it. My translation was doing the technical stuff – let’s deliver products for people that they want. They’ve got a problem, generally an increase in incidents, so we’ll deliver the non-technical skills course or package, the investigators package, or the assessors package.
In time, I realised those were kind of like sticking plasters. They don’t really solve what’s going on. The idea I now hold in my mind is around what safety and safety culture is, what leadership is, what performance is, and how they’re all woven together – how can we be courageous to actually go upstream and start dealing with these things at source as opposed to just keep pulling the bodies out of the river when things go wrong?
I’m still wrestling with it, and it is a difficult thing. It is a truly Wicked Problem. It doesn’t sit naturally with traditional safety approaches, but I think if we want to move on, we need a different approach to safety, to people, and to culture if we really want to go into a place that’s far more productive, has much higher performance, and looks after people. We need to look at the relationship between these things.
SSH: When you’re introducing this philosophy, do you get any pushback? What sort of feedback do you receive?
PD: I have to be really articulate to create those stepping stones and join the dots. There’s absolutely a place for traditional safety – that kind of clipboard and compliance approach, the governance and assurance side of it is absolutely needed. But it can only take you so far.
There are things you can do like nontechnical skills training, human factors and so on which will absolutely help increase safety by reducing operational incidents, but at the same time we need to deal with the mental health of individuals, their wellbeing, their longevity, getting them through their pension point, not just to it – so they’re actually in a fit state to enjoy life beyond their working career.
To articulate that and to put that together is a leadership responsibility, and that requires some cultural change. It’s not something I’ve been able to do in 30 seconds beyond certain little sound bites. You need a couple of hour workshop to take people through those stepping stones to show them this approach and methodology and how it works.
SSH: Do you find that in recent years you’ve had a more positive response? It seems like other industries and maybe the culture more broadly is catching up to this idea.
PD: I agree with you, that’s exactly what I sense. I wonder if there’s something here around generations – perhaps there’s a generation which is in senior leadership positions now which is starting to retire and is being replaced by a couple of generations who are more open to looking after people in its broadest sense. That you have to invest in them in order to create environments where they can thrive and flourish, for them to give of their best rather than just take the wage and go home. So yes, I think there is a change coming definitely.
SSH: You also co-chair the Workplace Wellbeing Work Group. Could you tell us more about your efforts to bring psychological factors into UK legislation?
PD: That’s purely chatting to people. I’m but one amongst many people who are working on this, and others are far more advanced in the legislative side. Where I think I came in was around the management of psychosocial factors that are hazardous to health. We’re not talking about people being electrocuted or crushed or falling – the traditional things that might harm. It’s about the other factors: stress, the relationship you have with your boss, the financial challenges one might be facing within the workplace, how those start to impact.
And then if you’ve got things like AI coming in and starting to maybe take away some of the creativity that might be required, what about people’s identity and their purpose in the workplace beyond the wage packet?
Working with organisations like the Mindful Business Charter, which is mainly focused on organisations in the legal profession who have a significant mental ill health challenge, and organisations like
ISMA (International Stress Management Association), the question is: if this stuff is so good, if this stuff works and we’ve proven it, then why is it not in UK legislation?
If you look at the Health and Safety Executive and what they’ve got, they’ve got a great framework and legislation for things like the control of substances hazardous to health, working with radiological and biological effects, as well as more traditional safety like working at height, electricity, crush and so on.
But what about this mental ill health crisis that you could argue is happening in the UK? That costs, I think Deloitte was saying, some ridiculous amount like $2 trillion globally. In the UK alone it’s equivalent to £11,000 per worker. And quite often these programmes in the workplace are nothing more than fruit on Friday and yoga on a Tuesday – a sticking plaster.
So I thought, let’s just get stuck in. How could we put some legislation together? What would it look like? I think there’s a great framework already there, which is the control of substances hazardous to health. You just change all of those more physical substances for the psychosocial factors, and you actually have a really great framework, set of guidance documents, risk assessments and so on that people could implement straight away.
It has already started because I know there’s ISO 45001 and 45003. But again, there’s no mandating of it. It’s just ‘this is some great advice, go and do it’. Some do, and the majority don’t.
SSH: What is PPWD’s USP?
PD: I think there are two elements that we bring. It is this compassionate safety approach and it is these proprietary sticky learning methods that we use within the classroom.
Our compassionate safety approach redefines and repositions safety so that we start to look at it from a very human perspective and the environmental perspective. Human, in that it accommodates people’s physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual needs. Then, Let’s create this environment that looks after people, that sets them up for success.
The sticky learning approach is using real approaches in the classroom whereby the person has complete ownership of that learning. Rather than us doing stuff to or for people, we do it with them and we then get them to do it by themselves, and that has significant long-lasting impacts.
I was reminded of this beautifully recently. Just by chance, an individual I hadn’t spoken to since delivering a coaching course during COVID, which was actually online, called me up looking for some advice. It was amazing that four or so years later, he’s using all these phrases and little things that we would have used online and in the classroom that he is now using with his drivers. He’s now been promoted, and he’s comfortable to phone all those years later. The learning has locked in – this lovely idea of a different way of dealing with drivers.
SSH: When he was speaking these words back to you, did you feel like he’d adapted what you taught him and applied it to his own experience?
PD: Absolutely. That’s when I really know that someone’s got it – not when they’re just parrot-fashion repeating it, but when they’ve internalised it and they’re applying it to their specific context. You can definitely hear that when it happens.
SSH: What types of products and services do you offer? How would our readers get involved with what you’re doing?
PD: Occasionally we do courses where people book in as ones and twos, but the main route for working with organisations is that they want to develop their safety culture, for example, or they’ve got a challenge with their operational incident rates. They might have a specific requirement to put everyone through our investigation or learning review courses, and then we put together a package or programme that meets that particular need.
We offer a variety of products and services. A range of blended Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills courses are delivered from the frontline operator through to boardroom directors. We also offer courses on recognising and managing trauma, how to be an assessor for Non-Technical Skills, and a jewel for us – the product that has the ability to make the greatest cultural impact – the
Learning Review course, taking accident investigations to a new level of learning. We also provide a wide range of coaching, mentoring and action learning team services. These range from one-to-one postincident support to executive level coaching. All are woven around safety, culture, leadership and performance. The packages and programmes are proving to be very transformative and we’ve been recognised through several awards.
SSH: What are some standout projects that you’ve been involved with over the years?
PD: I think the one for me which demonstrates this approach, and why I have confidence to talk about it because I think we have absolutely put it into practice and have the results from it and the peer reviewing as well, is a project which is now in year nine or possibly year ten working with Southeastern.
That started off, as a lot of these do, with an operational incident rate which was not where they wanted it. Non-technical skills was kind of like ‘we think this will help’. So we came in and delivered a couple of pilot courses which were extremely successful, and then we were able to roll that out to all of the frontline drivers.
That then gets you into having these conversations around ‘what really is going on here?’ and so that started a whole cultural evolution journey with us really intimately partnering with Southeastern. In no way is this easy – this can involve some really quite challenging conversations at times. It requires a lot of trust, a lot of openness and transparency on both sides because there’s no magic book, nothing you can pull off the shelf. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, and that’s partly from us with our experiences and what we bring. But equally, you need the client to be saying ‘this is the lay of the land, how can you help us?’. And I think in that time we’ve just learned a couple of key pieces that you get in place – sort of the corners and the edges of the puzzle.
With great success. In that time, we’ve worked with Southeastern and their operational incident rate has reduced by 64 per cent for train drivers. That’s an ROI of 15.9, the last time we calculated it a couple of years ago. You’re talking significant millions of pounds saved here, let alone all of the other emotional trauma that comes out of accidents and incidents.
But I think for me, the piece that really highlights it is that about two years ago, we rolled out a fair culture charter for the entire business. It wasn’t just for frontline workers or people in the operational side, this is for all four and a half thousand workers – a set of binding principles in how they would be dealt with and managed post-incident.
That Charter has now rippled through the business, such that people will say, ‘How are we doing in line with our Charter? Does this new policy actually meet those principles?’.
And that to me is now a shift. It’s not perfect, but it’s a real shift into a learning culture. How can we now start to do things proactively? How can we get upstream? How can we be preventative to look at what are the things that might harm people and deal with them before they actually do? There have been a number of projects which they’ve done now, some of them with our support, some just off their own back, which have solved some long-standing issues within that organisation.
SSH: It’s fascinating that it’s a charter that applies to the whole staff, the whole company, because then the language has to be more like a worldview and allencompassing rather than specific to each individual.
PD: Whether it’s the apocryphal story when JFK went to Cape Canaveral in 1962 – he’d made his announcement ‘at the end of this decade we will go to the moon’ – and supposedly he’s in a group of people when he turns to an individual and says, ‘Excuse me sir, what do you do around here?’ this gentleman says to him, ‘Well Mr. President,
I put men on the moon’ and that individual was the janitor.
So everybody understood what they were doing, what the mission was. That would be my desire – you could walk onto any platform of any station, bump into a member of GB Railways, ask them what they do, and they would come up with some equivalent phrase that shows they understand. This is well beyond the pay packet. ‘I get everyone home safe every day’ or ‘I create the greatest journey experience that this person will ever have in their life.’
Whatever that might be. A team that’s working collectively to move people. I think you’ve only got to look at examples that came out of 2012 in the Olympics. The incident rates for the companies in and around London are almost non-existent.
SSH: When a client comes to you with a particular problem, what’s your process for coming up with a solution?
PD: My preference is partnering. Some clients do come and it’s just ‘I want to buy this non-technical skills course’ and they’re really not interested – there’s not a foot in the door for any other conversation. But for those clients that are really looking for something longer lasting that is absolutely going to embed a cultural change for what they’re trying to achieve, then partnering is the key.
That has to build trust, because as soon as you get that level of trust, you can really look someone in the eye. Conflict evaporates. Now you get that commitment to that joint cause. Now people have responsibility. They’re invested in what’s going on. At that point, once people have got responsibility, your results start to come.
So that’s the key for me – how do I create this relationship where we work with them and ultimately hand over to them so that they’re doing it by themselves and they understand why they’re doing that and how to do that.
SSH: What challenges come up that might make it difficult to achieve that relationship?
PD: Well, we’re definitely getting into human beings, aren’t we? How much are you willing to show of your dirty laundry, or how bad it might be? I’m a stranger. Even with signing an NDA, suddenly people have got to admit that it’s not as good as it could be. And of course, some of that would be their responsibility – that’s what they’re having to admit, ‘I’m not doing as good a job as potentially I could be here.’
So that just takes time to build the trust, build the confidence in each other, to have those conversations and go, ‘Look, I’m absolutely here. It is as much in my interest to make this work as it is for you. I really believe that we’ve got an approach and a method that can do that. Are you willing to do the steps, the small steps? Are you willing to come with me on this? I think I can guide you through how to do it.’
SSH: That’s quite difficult, isn’t it? Having the confidence to talk about things that really need to be improved and might expose us as being inadequate in some way.
PD: Correct. You very quickly get into how things are done in society. To demonstrate vulnerability, to demonstrate humility –‘I’m not as good as I need to be, could be. I don’t have the resources.’ All of those things are not ingrained in any kind of western cultures.
SSH: If you were in charge of the UK rail industry, where would you target investment and look for improvement?
PD: People, people, people, which is perhaps no surprise with the conversation we’ve had so far. I mean that in two ways. One is the people that are actually working in the industry. If you buy a new piece of rolling stock, you know what the cost of that rolling stock is up front. But if you don’t service it and don’t do preventative maintenance on it, it’s probably going to let you down at some stage. I would want the industry to look at all the people within that industry and ask: what is the equivalent maintenance plan you have for those people? They could be with you for 30-40 years. So not just the upfront training, but that whole package through their career, and not just the mandated technical tick boxes. This whole psychological approach – what are you going to do to make their wellbeing such that they can deliver the very best every single day and get through to their pension point?
Also, I don’t know how controversial this is, but I’m not sure the industry really understands what passengers want. There is this real drive at the moment for faster journey times, and I’m not convinced that the most important thing for passengers. It’s often said that people don’t always tell you what they’re thinking, feeling, or wanting –you have to work quite hard to watch their behaviours. I think what people actually want is a really rewarding, enjoyable, and comfortable journey. To shave ten minutes off that journey is probably not going to really make a difference to their life.
I think the question for the regulators to answer is: How do we make rail so enjoyable, comfortable and rewarding that people feel stupid to drive? And the same goes for freight.
I assess that the railway is aiming to answer a question that isn’t being asked. Firstly, we need to move away from purely relying on focus groups. Instead, behavioural research and audience psychological profiling are required to see what customers actually do rather than just what they say. This will ensure we deeply understand how passengers interact with the railway’s products and services.
Take for example pre-booked tickets. The cheapest tickets can only be used on a specific train. So, one builds into the journey a 45 or 60-minute buffer in case you get caught out. If your journey’s been smooth and you arrive with time to spare, the easiest way to shorten that journey is to allow you to go on one or two trains that are going to depart while you’re sitting in the station. For an administrative fee of £5 or £10, you could change it on the app and travel on an earlier train. That person’s happy because you’ve shortened their journey by 45 minutes.
You’re also building capacity in the system for all the tickets and seats that now are not going to be used later on, which you can resell if you want to.
Could you have business pods on the train with impeccable Wi-Fi, where people can have meal and drink packages and create that journey as a business-based journey? I think aviation has gone a long way down this route, and rail has an opportunity to look at how it does things differently.
SSH: What are your hopes for the new regulatory bodies, such as Great British Railways?
PD: It’s going to require some really strong, assertive leadership to take Great British Railways and actually start to look at it, set it up, and integrate it in a way which is different from what has happened before. That requires innovative thinking. Such thinking contains a degree of imagination and creativity, to do things differently. Doing different things, as well as starting new things, also requires some things to stop. All of which involves planning and practicing.
A lot of companies are operating on annual budgetary cycles. That’s just not long enough for the railway. Network Rail fortunately has the control periods, the five-year period. To me, that’s the kind of cycle you’ve got to start shifting towards. You’ve got to really give people this long-term ownership to go, ‘This is the goal. How are we going to work our way towards it?’. Acknowledging that there can be compromises, it’s never easy, we don’t have all the resources. How are we going to achieve this desire that the railway is the default choice for long-distance journeys?
We need a human approach, investing in creating teams and teams of teams. Create a system which has at its core flexibility, agility, adaptability and responsiveness. Rather than fine, incentivise. Provide the opportunities for ownership and responsibility. This can only come through trust, a removal of conflict, a commitment to what really matters for passengers, and only then will people fully invest themselves to take responsibility. That is how meaningful results will transpire.
Productivity is too thin a measure of performance. Other metrics must be designed. We manage what we measure, and mis-manage what we mismeasure. Productivity has no richness, no narrative, no meaning. Therefore, a truly integrated railway requires an honest appraisal. We need to go upstream and look at some of the long-held assumptions.
SSH: How do you make your business a good place to work?
PD: Ultimately, I would say that I really work hard to practise what I preach. By that I mean it’s about the long-term investment in the people that I have within my organisation. Often I have to put them beyond the price or the cost of something – looking after them and investing in them rewards me far beyond any kind of profit or share price or capital return.
That has been all the way through my entire career, whether it’s working with air cadets, working with bobsleigh, my own business, or within the Air Force. Going out of your way to support and help people – you just get that back in waves for years to come. Practice what we preach. It is not easy, and it has a cost. People and their long-term wellbeing must be placed ahead of profit, share prices and investor capital. PPWD fosters a very inclusive environment where everyone holds an equal voice. Internally we have many support networks for course content through to wellbeing and welfare. Online and in-person CPD is at the heart of this.
As Richard Branson offered: ‘Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.’
art shifting towards. You’ve got to really give people this long-term ownership to go, ‘This is the goal. How are we going to work our way towards it?’. Acknowledging that there can be compromises, it’s never easy, we don’t have all the resources. How are we going to achieve this desire that the railway is the default choice for long-distance journeys?
We need a human approach, investing in creating teams and teams of teams. Create a system which has at its core flexibility, agility, adaptability and responsiveness. Rather than fine, incentivise. Provide the opportunities for ownership and responsibility. This can only come through trust, a removal of conflict, a commitment to what really matters for passengers, and only then will people fully invest themselves to take responsibility. That is how meaningful results will transpire.
Productivity is too thin a measure of performance. Other metrics must be designed. We manage what we measure, and mis-manage what we mismeasure. Productivity has no richness, no narrative, no meaning. Therefore, a truly integrated railway requires an honest appraisal. We need to go upstream and look at some of the long-held assumptions.
SSH: How do you make your business a good place to work?
PD: Ultimately, I would say that I really work hard to practise what I preach. By that I mean it’s about the long-term investment in the people that I have within my organisation. Often I have to put them beyond the price or the cost of something – looking after them and investing in them rewards me far beyond any kind of profit or share price or capital return.
That has been all the way through my entire career, whether it’s working with air cadets, working with bobsleigh, my own business, or within the Air Force. Going out of your way to support and help people – you just get that back in waves for years to come. Practice what we preach. It is not easy, and it has a cost. People and their long-term wellbeing must be placed ahead of profit, share prices and investor capital. PPWD fosters a very inclusive environment where everyone holds an equal voice. Internally we have many support networks for course content through to wellbeing and welfare. Online and in-person CPD is at the heart of this.
As Richard Branson offered: ‘Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.’
