Show notes
The Uptime team participated in Active Training Team's (ATT) Thrive USA program launch, showcasing their revolutionary approach to safety training. Allen and Joel discuss ATT with Dermot Kerrigan, the company's director. Their immersive actor-led scenarios are transforming safety culture through emotional engagement, de-escalation tools, and a focus on safety leadership. Their innovative UK-based training model is being adapted for the U.S. market through Thrive USA, bringing their effective approach to the expanding wind industry in the States.
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Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. We all know the risks involved in our work, and all of us have participated in safety training. Recent serious accidents in the U. S. and abroad have placed a heavy toll on our industry, and I, like many others, have been concerned about a fall off in the effectiveness of safety training.
Thank you And the overall safety culture. This podcast is fundamentally about safety training, but not your average run of the mill safety training. Joel Saxon and I were invited by active training team, a UK based company to participate in their thrive USA training event. Our host was Dermot Kerrigan director at active training team.
The thrive USA event was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was well attended by health and safety representatives from large wind OEMs, developers. and owners, and it was a full house. The training I experienced was markedly more impactful, relevant, and memorable than any safety program I've encountered in my career.
After the event, Joel and I sat down with the aforementioned Dermot Kerrigan of Active Training Team alongside Sara DaSilva, Deputy Project HSC Manager at Ørsted and Graeme Cooper, Global VP of Energy Transition with Jacobs to discuss how Active Training Team will change U. S. training methods, hopefully permanently.
Enjoy the show. We're in Boston, Massachusetts. Actually we're in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a lovely area. And we're here for one reason to participate in the Thrive USA training event, which is conducted by Active Training Team. And we have. Dermot Kerrigan, the director of Active Training Team, who has come all the way to America to train us Americans on how to do it right.
I wouldn't say that. Dermot you're making our podcast even more famous because you're the first guest we have on the you're the first guest that has an IMDB. Okay. Yes. Yes. Now you're going back a while. Because that's part of ATT. That there is an immersive experience that involves actors in the actual training scenarios.
It's live. It's immersive. It's wraparound. And that is the brilliance you have brought to safety training. And maybe the thing to do here is just to start off by describing what this training experience is.
Dermot Kerrigan: What is it? Any behavioral psychologist will tell you that if you want to reach someone's intellect, the best way to do that is via their emotions.
So put simply, if I can move you, I can make you think. So if you're trying to get someone to think about safety, their role in safety how their behavior influences other people, and actually it's individual behaviors that produces a culture. And a very good way to do that is by telling a story. And if you're trying to tell a really impactful story theater, film, or a combination of the two, with professional actors facilitating that, it's a pretty good way to go about telling a story and hitting people on an emotional level, rather than the usual kind of dry death by PowerPoint experience, which kind of blights traditional safety training, you know.
Allen Hall: I think that's the big difference here, right? Is, in America, we pretty much are Tick the box watch the training video, get out the VCR. I've actually seen the VCRs. You're dating yourself. No, I saw through training just recently where they brought out a VCR and I couldn't believe it still worked.
And in terms of what I learned there, I've learned almost nothing. Sara DaSilva, deputy project HSC manager at Ørsted.
Sara DaSilva: It takes that next step past. Sitting in a room and going through safety training to really engaging people and getting them involved in thinking about safety. And, we do try to do that with campaigns and initiatives within the projects.
But I do see the benefit of a group coming in, making it very realistic and getting into the hearts and minds of all the workers. So everyone can reflect on their why they work safely, why they want to go home safe, whether it's for their family or other motives. Everyone's got their own reasons.
But really to get people to think about that in their actions in their day to day is something that you can talk about in, in a lot of the training that we do, but really to get people immersed in, in thinking about it.
Allen Hall: If you think about how we brought safety up in general in the world, we have brought it up in industrialized world.
We brought it up a long way, but we now see the need, need that step change.
Dermot Kerrigan: Right.
Allen Hall: And that's the immersive experience.
Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, I think so. It's not a U. S. experience alone, believe me. The U. K. and Europe have always got a long way to go in terms of traditional training. Sure. This is not commonplace necessarily.
No. It's still very cutting edge. Yeah. Even the U. K. and Europe, it's still very innovative. But to my knowledge, there isn't anything quite like it in safety. here in the US compared to what we do, what we have historically been doing in the UK, which is why we're setting up ATT Inc and training up a US team to be able to do what we do in the UK, but, with American accent.
So what we do with the mobile stuff is we make that, the fact that you can't suspend your disbelief, a virtue. Yeah. So even though this thing is happening in a conference room, actually you very quickly think it's really happening. And the way we do that is a combination of film and live performance.
So you see an actor on film. For some reason, people, when they see a film, they actually buy that person is really that person. And then next thing, that person seems to walk through the screen and appear live in the room and they go, yeah, that's crazy. Okay. That's not an actor. That's a real character.
We'll engage with them on those terms. They'll have seen. The consequences of getting that wrong. I've seen that guy perhaps getting very badly hurt on film, but having engaged with them live, he then walks back into the screen and guess what? Nothing happens. This tragic Friday afternoon just becomes another rather boring day at work.
Somehow you can play with people's emotions by mixing this live performance with film. And It really messes with people's brains, so we don't necessarily do that in the centers, because we don't have to. We've got the technical facilities to be able to play in a different way.
But the mobile stuff, sometimes the very simple things work incredibly well. But that made it real.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And I know it's sometimes hard to understand when Dermot's describing all these things, that doesn't seem possible. But yet I experienced it, Sara DaSilva.
Sara DaSilva: They did a really good job showing what not to do and having you feel the impact of responding in a way that may not be effective, right?
So they put you in that situation, made you feel like, Oh, wow, that, being punitive or more aggressive towards somebody is going to have a negative effect. It's not going to have that. response that you're looking for somebody to change their behavior. So being able to live through those and see the changes of how the different actors responded was, it was impactful because you believed the way they responded in each of those situations.
Joel Saxum: When we first connected with you, I thought to myself, This concept just makes too much sense. Why isn't this a part of something in the United States? Graham Cooper, Global VP of Energy Transition with Jacobs.
Graeme Cooper: This is about you going home safe, not at risk, not exposed. You going it actually takes it to almost a primeval level.
That we're all here just to look after each other. Yeah. I know it sounds like, that sounds a bit, worldly and, but actually, if you reflect on what you've seen today, and I reflect on it, when we were having a bite of lunch, Is there was emotion in the room, people gave willingly and freely, people exposed themselves to that level of discomfort, but it was never uncomfortable.
Because it felt like we were in something together.
Joel Saxum: It's not just the actors. It's not just the behavioral scientists behind the scenes. It's not just that. The Tina today. Yeah. Who was giving, who was the facilitator for the whole thing. She was amazing at invoking emotion from the crowd and talking to people and engaging with them and Can I get some of your feedback?
A lot of times when you sit in a room and someone asks for feedback, A lot of times everybody just sits there for a little while, it goes quiet for 10 15 seconds, and then the person just moves on. She was so good at getting people to participate. And evoking some of the emotion through the actors, but bringing that out in people, and getting them to think,