E002: Saving Lives, Building Trust & Simplifying Solutions

Mark McBride-Wright 0:02
Liz, so welcome to a new episode of the safe leader. I’m delighted to be joined here today by Liz Bennett, who is a director, who is the director of safety in design. Liz, thank you for joining us today. It’s

Liz Bennett 0:19
a pleasure. Mark, absolutely fascinating. So,

Mark McBride-Wright 0:23
so I think you and I have sort of been virtually connected for a while. We’ve got a sort of Venn diagram overlap of similar interests. We’ve got mutual professional, um, well, I would say professional colleagues that actually go further and say professional friends in common, people who we, who we, you know, really trust and respect and are connected through them. And I just thought, you know what would be really great to get a session in with yourself, to find out a bit more about your experience, your work. I remember discovering your work when I got into diversity and inclusion, it was about 10 years ago, and I was reading Stephen frost book on inclusion, the inclusion imperative. And it was when I learned about all the amazing work that was done at the London Olympics and and how, you know, it was a games that was in to inspire the next generation into sport and leave a legacy within London. So I was really excited to read about the projects that you’ve worked on. See that that’s part of your portfolio, and we’d love to talk a bit about that today, the projects you’ve done in the past, what you’re working on now and where to start, where to start. You know what sparked your interest in safety? Tell us a bit about you, a bit about your background, and it’s

Liz Bennett 1:56
a long story, really, but I’ll try and cut it short, because I can talk for hours and hours, as people who know me will attest. So I actually when I was at school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, like I think most people, most people no idea, and you only really know what your parents do, or those close to you and around and and I wasn’t very keen on on following their route, so I did double Maths and Physics A level, largely because I was very good at maths and absolutely adored my physics teacher, who I found a brilliant communicator with my kind of brain. She explained why it was important to know things, and I needed that background. Maths, if you can do it and you enjoy problem solving becomes an easy thing. So double maths a level was a great joy. So two weeks before the a level exams, we were all playing cards. And the first year six were saying, well, wish we had a levels in two weeks time so that we could play cards too. We kind of said, well, if you don’t understand it, on the journey through, you’ll be lost. So we’ve done the hard work, we’ve got this stuff, and now we can relax and play cards. So kind of did double maths and physics because I found it absolutely fascinating. Loved it. Wanted to go into astronomy, put off by a teacher. Didn’t know what to do, really, didn’t know the A levels are coming up, something we had to fill in forms to say, this is the beginning of the rest of my life, yeah? And I thought, Gosh, I need a gap year. I’m terribly old, and gap years weren’t really a thing that, yeah, there was a thing that was coming in, right? It wasn’t really the norm. Then what I should have done, with hindsight, is going just get a job anywhere in a shop or a, you know, anything, just get a job, take a breath and a bit of a gap between that particular atmosphere of school and the real world outside the school gates. And I decided that I really wanted to work with people, and I wanted to be a nurse

Mark McBride-Wright 4:30
very, very different then,

Liz Bennett 4:33
but I have aunts and uncles who are doctors and nurses and this, that and the other, and the advice I was getting from all the women who were nurses, the men of the doctors was no you’ll be deeply frustrated, because the most junior doctor will be senior to the most senior nurse, and you’ll find it very frustrating. So I made. It a mistake and I applied for medicine when I didn’t want to be a doctor. Oh, yeah, we add into that mix that I have a gentle overlay or inlay, or something of ADHD, absolutely appalling short term memory, unless I’m really vested in something and really engaged and it’s a problem solving thing, medicine. It turns out your toe bone is connected to your foot bone, and your foot bone is connected to your ankle bone, and you’ve just got to learn it, right? So I was scoring, I think, my highest mark in an exam at medical school. I did two years there. My highest mark was 97% and my lowest mark, they didn’t bother to tell me, because I’d written the worst paper they’d ever marked. Right? Wow, biochemistry. So I left with enormous relief, yeah, but I’ve done two years of medicine, and I kind of knew where the bits were right. Really know what they were called, but I knew where they were, knew roughly what they were supposed to do, and found it really, really interesting. Used to do this section on a Saturday morning because it was fascinating. And I went to Manchester, which is my home university, my home city, and I went on the first day of term, and I said to the porter, I’d like to do civil engineering. Now. Why did I choose civil engineering? Because I used to get a lift to school with a gentleman who lived opposite who ended up being dean of the School of University of Engineering at Manchester. So lovely guy. And so he, I suppose, extended my pool of these are things you could do, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think if I’d been a boy, it would have been an obvious choice for me, but it wasn’t something that my school knew about, so they knew about law and medicine and teaching, and that was about it really interesting

Liz Bennett 7:09
anyway. So tutor was brilliant, and he said, Oh, when do you want to start? And I said, Oh, today. And he said, I’ll just give the admission to tutor a call. So he did. He was free. I had an interview. Just need a reference. Got one started that day. And it’s about problem solving, and it did use lots of maths, and again, made mistakes, followed the crowd to be interested in Geotechnics, when really I was interested in hydraulics, right? Loved, I loved, I loved the patterns and shapes of what fluids do. And I love the fact that you can model those mathematically. Of course, then you do something, you put a rock in or or a breakwater in, and everything changes. You know, I you know you might be surprised by it, or you might kind of be a delighted, because you get what you predict anyway. Did that lovely? Went off and got a job. Worked as a consultant, first, then I worked for cost stains, best year of my life on site with cost gains up and down the Thames. Oh, cool. Why the best year because of the people? Right? Always, for me, it’s always about the people. Worst years of my life because of the people, yeah, best year of my life. So then got married, moved house, couldn’t get a job, couldn’t stay in engineering, did a bit of work this and that bit of drafting work, thought, Do you know what? I don’t want to be a teacher, but both my parents are teachers. My brother’s a teacher. And in those days, close your ears. Students, as a mature student, I got an enormous grant that more than paid the mortgage on the house. Oh,

Mark McBride-Wright 8:58
Wow, gosh, wow. Did it very attractive, yeah, of course, right?

Liz Bennett 9:02
Because we lived in a tiny village in South Wales, which was lovely, so small, it didn’t even have a pub, which is very small, wow. And I was a bit bored, so I went to bronze University and did teaching. So now, if you put that together, a couple of years of medicine, Chartered Engineer, qualified to teach, has done some teaching at Ulf school and so on and so on in another Welsh speaking School, where I ended up teaching Latin, which was a bit surreal, put that together. And then we move back to Surrey area, and I’m looking for work, proper work now, yeah, doing a bit of editing for MacMillan’s, doing a bit of writing for MacMillan’s education, doing Bob’s, doing part time teaching, even, which was, which is great fun, but I needed the family, needed the income. From a second second thing, and I went back to cost names because I’d been so happy there. Fantastic. I’m chartered, but I can’t run a project for you because my husband works for Shell, and he’s all over the place, and we’ve got three small children and so on and so on. So I want to do something that’s more office based. So I went to talk to the head of training. I just asked, Can I have an hour of your time? And he said, Yes, of course. And I’ve been it had been suggested to me that health and safety might be interesting. Yeah, what happens in health and safety? There’s a lot of roughly know what the bits of the body are about.

Mark McBride-Wright 10:40
Yeah, yeah. I see where this is going. Process

Liz Bennett 10:44
is about the practical side stuff and the design side of stuff, yeah, and be able to teach it and explain it to people. And it was like, you know, perfect, yeah, beautiful, sparkly lights and everything. Won the jackpot. So cost stains took me on and trained me, and that’s really what happened. And I was really, really lucky, because, again, that people were extraordinary and and I learned a huge amount, and loved it, and felt as though I was in the right place for me.

Mark McBride-Wright 11:17
And with cost and with Costain was in that role that you then worked on some of these big projects, no,

Liz Bennett 11:23
no, no, no. So with cost stains, I was part of the team looking at, you know, supporting the business on projects. You go onto a project and you say, what’s wrong? So it’s internal audit, you know, right, right. What was interesting, I said, I don’t want to just turn up on a project and tell them what’s wrong. I want to go on a project and find out why things are still not as they should be. Yes, and it was only one of my colleagues had the courage to let me go on one of his projects. I went on two jobs. One, the A three Milford bypass, and one, I think it’s the 339 basic state bypass, but I’ve never been able to find that one since, so I might got the number wrong. I do remember the agency’s head regional office was at the end of our site became quite important when we buy voltage cable and not their power supply off. Oh, no, a story. But costone said to me, we can’t afford to pay you, but you ought to be being paid more. So my head of department encouraged me to apply for jobs elsewhere. Wow,

Mark McBride-Wright 12:37
look at that foresight that’s incredible. People really looking out for you. You’re

Liz Bennett 12:43
really good, yeah. But in Do you know what I think this sort of karma thing? I think it is true, isn’t it? The more you give, the more you get, more you trust, the more you’re trusted. It absolutely does work. I don’t know if you agree with that.

Mark McBride-Wright 12:59
I do, I do. I, I it’s something I, I, it goes through my mind. As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, when you have an idea, or you have a inclination of something that could work, you think, right, I need to develop it and then keep it, and then, you know, try and find a way to sell it and win work and then do the big unveil and what have you. But it in my time of doing some investment in myself and also my team for the business in other service providers, what I’ve found there was we did some training on social media, and I always remember the guy who we used had this really interesting take. Is that people who want to do things on a shoestring and on a budget, give them, give them the stuff, and then they can go away and do it. But what you want is the people that are time poor, and they want the expert to help them do it, and that’s where you can then be paid for the higher value work, the coaching, the consulting, the training, the time coming in to spend time in the business, with the business, doing stuff. But to get to that point, you have to give stuff away, which is exactly what you just said. It’s give, give, give, and then you build so withholding how you do stuff, obviously not giving away trade secrets or not that there’s anything extra special about well, down selling what we do. I like to think we’ve got some uniqueness, but, you know, it’s not like we’ve got intellectual property on some complicated tech, software or something or some pharmaceutical drug. You know, you can’t give away your the things that are the secret sauce to your business, but you can certainly be generous with your insights, with your time, with how you make people feel the experience that they have through working with you. And if there’s ways that you can package up what you offer, it’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book, actually the safe leader. Because. I feel like I felt like I was, my brain was going to explode a bit, you know, I done so much development training to hundreds of engineers, people working in engineering consultancy, working with institutions, with with projects, with employers, with universities, like seeing future pipelines, seeing engineers that have retired, engineers that are returning back to stem, you know, all these like inputs and then still getting frustrated with a lack of EDI in STEM. Or, you know, the culture really shifting, and then on the other side, seeing the disengagement from the male majority, you know, and discovering the suicide rates in engineering, construction, manufacturing, just really frustrated me. As a safety engineer, we wouldn’t tolerate these sort of rates elsewhere. So anyway, I just had my brain felt like spaghetti, that I’ve learned that phrase once on a training course. It’s like combing spaghetti. That’s what I felt like. And I started doing some public speaking training, coming up with keynote speeches and delivering them on stage. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t satiating, it wasn’t scratching that itch that happened. And it was when my coach said to me, she was like, Mark, you’re at the stage now where you need to write the book, you need to write a book. And I was like, oh, okay, so all that storytelling work was helpful, because it helped me, like, write some of the chapters and give some structure to the case studies. But my goodness, when I’d finished writing the book, it was actually when I recorded the audiobook that I still need to publish on Amazon, on Audible, but it is ready. But when I recorded the audiobook, I had to have a couple of months separation from doing the final manuscript to then doing the audiobook because I was too close to it. But Oh, that is when I feel like I use the phrase, I feel like I’ve taken a chip out my brain. I know it’s now there, it’s here. It’s not very long, but I can come back to this. You know, I’m not going to forget. I feel like I’ve created space, mental space, to now grow and think creatively about how to build on the concepts in here. And you know, part of the reasons why I’ve started this, this podcast, is to meet with other subject matter experts like yourself, figure out where there’s areas of overlap. You know, how we can really better serve the communities that we support? And my business, equal engineers, has almost it’s grown so big in it, in its own right in terms of, there’s so much stuff that the business does that I’m now needing to carve out my own professional identity, separate but still linked to that, as you know Mark McBride, the safe leader, whatever that’s going to look like in the years to come. But all coming back to this same point about building community between minoritized groups, but in a way that engages the majority of the profession. And how do we use safety to communicate Ed and I culture belonging. I find it. Find it fascinating. And I really do find it fascinating.

Liz Bennett 18:23
So can I sort of feedback some of what I’ve heard there? Just Yeah, high level stuff that actually, writing the book, writing it down, yes, the place that you can come back to and other people can look at in their time has given you the headspace to go and do the next thing? Yes,

Mark McBride-Wright 18:43
absolutely, hand on heart, you know, I, I, there’s a story in the book that links to my kids, and it was, it was, you know, it was when it links to a story that I use in my talk, one of my keynotes, and it talks about my son, the metaphor of a butterfly, and then how like boxes start to get put on on young boys and like what they can be and what they should be, and when does toxic masculinity set in? And it made me reflect on my role as a father, and am I being the best father I could be, and blah, blah, blah. So it’s quite, it’s quite, it’s quite, it was quite emotional, right, in some of that. And you know, I, what I love about the book is that it’s there, and my kids will look at it in years to come. You know, it’s, it’s logged, it’s logged there. It’s got an ISBN number. It’s it’s there. It’s forever in time, it will be there as part of history. And you know, my kids are mentioned in the forward like, in fact, it’s dedicated to them, I think so they love seeing their names in the front of the book. So, but yeah, to your point, it really helped me. I. Clear space mentally to then I’m really enjoying this creativity. Now, you know,

Liz Bennett 20:05
it’s almost actually like writing a list, a to do list, because instead of it going round and round in your head, yes, captured it. So now you can not worry about it anymore. Absolutely. You can come back to it when you need to. So, so your book is, was your ideas and thoughts and creative progress on this, and you’ve written that down, and what you do with that, and where you take it, and the next stages. And the next book, or whatever it is, is an evolution of that, and you can use it as a springboard, instead of it still being part of that spaghetti.

Mark McBride-Wright 20:40
Do you know what’s weird? It’s weird when I found it really strange when obviously, like, you know, friends and family bought the book to support me, and people that I had shared the manuscript with to get input on, you know, they were familiar with what I was writing. But it was when people who I didn’t, I don’t know who they are, you know, I’ve never met them before and started sending me messages or meeting me at an event, and then we’re relaying back to me things that are in the book. It it’s weird. It feel, it felt fictitious. You know, it’s, I’m like, How do you know that, even though I’ve written a book and put it out there, like the fact that people are able to order something from their computer. It arrives then at their door, and it’s something that I’ve written, and then the knowledge, the knowledge transfer, they’ve read it, and then they’re saying the concepts back to me. And I’m like, totally, of course I agree with because I wrote it, but it’s just, I remember I had that moment. Arup kindly hosted a book launch for me at their office, fancy new offices in London. And it was some of the people who came to that that it had been a few months the book had been out, and then they Yeah, they were, we were talking about concepts in the book, and it was just, it was my first moment as an author, like having an interaction with people who I do not know them, and we were talking about, you know, the stuff that I’m passionate about, you know, I think you’ve written some stuff as well, haven’t you? You’ve written some reports. No, Bob’s,

Liz Bennett 22:16
yeah, but bits

Mark McBride-Wright 22:18
and bobs, well, I

Liz Bennett 22:20
don’t know if I don’t know if I need to get in the flow, and I’m just always so busy doing stuff like sitting around thinking about what I’m going to do next, and then thinking about it a bit more.

Mark McBride-Wright 22:33
What’s your so talk me a bit through then about the work you’re doing. So you gave us a history of getting to where you are now. You’ve been running your independent consultancy for a number of years now, like what what brought you to do safety and design and what are some of the projects that you work on throughout? What joy? What joy do you get from doing what you do now?

Liz Bennett 22:59
So, yeah, I can do that. Sorry, I have. I’m doing a little bit of technical stuff here because my emails are all on and they’re squeaking to me. Distracting, distracting. I’m very good at being distracted. So what i i joined Costa in this health and safety team because of CDM. So CDM was on the horizon, and Derek, my, my boss at the time, was saying, You’re exactly the sort of person we need in the team. Because up until then, it was mainly people going into health and safety, maybe coming out of, I don’t know, it wasn’t seen as a as a professional discipline. It was more a site safety officer kind of thing across construction and and it was changing so so fast. And do

Mark McBride-Wright 24:01
you want to do, but do you want to just give us an update? I know what you’re talking about because, but can you just give for our listeners the evolution of of practice and what CDM means and what industry

Liz Bennett 24:18
so when I started in the construction industry, when a contractor signed up to be able to deliver a project, they signed up that they were taking all risks, so all commercial risks, all safety risks or health risks, or that we hardly talked about health and you know, you’re going to do this job For this price. Ish, I generalize enormously, of course, but what the view that emerging theories were was that a lot of times, designers were designing things that were difficult and sometimes dangerous to construct for all sorts of reasons of. Them because they didn’t really understand the construction process. They didn’t have enough experience of being there in horizontal sleet, you know, trying to fit been ordered not come to sight according to the order, right? So, so this general view that if we called it back to designers, they could design things being mindful of how to construct them and how to maintain them and how to use them as a workplace. We come to these places. What’s happened? We’ve had three iterations of CDM now, and the current CDM 2015 has has taken that responsibility back to the client as well, because what the HSE has looked at is the principal contractor for many decades, has had to plan, manage, monitor, and coordinate the construction work, and they’ve been king of the construction phase so far, so good. And they’re actually when they’re doing their job well, doing a jolly good job. Our industry is amazing. We did that absolutely superb project, brilliantly a lot of the time. So they said, Could we copy that into a pre construction duty holder called the principal designer, principal contractor, principal designer, whose job will be to coordinate this huge amount of information that’s floating around between the client’s ambition to change their asset into something new, different, reduced, expanded, whatever It is, change their asset in some way could we bring all of that thinking into one place and make it the responsibility the principal designer? So that’s what they’ve tried to do with the latest regulations. Yeah, then they’ve looked at the client, and they’ve said in some sectors, the client takes an interest in and a responsibility for health and safety, typically for commercial reasons. Yeah, yeah, if you blow your oil rig you’re not producing probably not a very sensible thing to do, but so on and so on. So lots of the stuff coming from DuPont safety theory and so on and so on was feeding into this. And it’s like if we therefore make clients take an interest by giving them statutory criminal duties and liabilities, maybe they, through their contracts and their performance requirements of their supply chain, will require better standards where we who don’t have the resources and the detailed knowledge don’t have that opportunity. That’s what CDM is about. Now, if we take that and we look at the front end, which was the kind of new stuff you had done this site, stuff with cost stones. And I loved it, and I still love cost stones. You know, cost stones, wherever you are, you can do very little wrong. They’re like family. They’re just lovely. So this space of design is actually about ideas and thoughts and options and specifications and stuff on site, if the scaffold is a bit dodgy, you can usually see it, it wobbles. Things aren’t straight. It doesn’t look right. Probably isn’t right. That trench isn’t supported. Get it supported. But if there’s an idea that’s not really supported, it’s very easy for it to carry on floating around in that space and get taken forward. And so I’ve become really interested in the whole information space and the communication of information, the absorption of it from complex different sources, the management of it, the dealing with it, and the communication of it when it’s harder to pin down. You know, it’s herding cats, it’s putting fog in a box, it’s all of those things much harder to pin down. And so what we tend to get is lots and lots and lots and lots and then lots more checks and balances on it. Did you read it? Yeah? Well, not very well, actually, but, but, well, I nearly read it, but I’ll sign it anyway, yeah, but it’s been signed, so I’m happy you’ve signed off and taken responsibility. I’m not really as interested in who’s got the liability if something goes wrong. I’m more interested in who’s doing things in creative ways to inform others so that things don’t go wrong in the first place? Yeah, yeah. I’m really interested in simple no comments please. Yeah. Well, it’s

Mark McBride-Wright 29:56
life is too complex or complex? Complicated as it is. So anything simple is the best way. It’s also,

Liz Bennett 30:04
I think somebody terribly famous said it takes an expert to simplify things. So I just hang, hang on to that. But I do think we over comp, over what’s my word I’m looking for. I’ve lost the word Yeah, complicate. Yeah. We do. We do far too much information for people to manage. So if you’ve got too much, you can’t deal with it. You can’t we import into our projects uncertainty. The information is too much, too little, right, wrong, accurate, sufficient, whatever. We’ve got lots of I’m calling the elephant in the room, but we’ve got a herd of elephants that makes it really surprising that we ever deliver anything at all. Because we’ve got skill shortages, we’ve got information challenges, we’ve got different kinds of people, we’ve got all sorts of pressures. I think when we talk about every project being unique. For me, it’s about the different stakeholders in the project. They’re always different. If you’re different people in different organizations prodding at stuff, or the government changing their mind about whether something’s going to go ahead or not. When you moved your family, invested everything about who you are and what you are in a project that’s then suddenly canceled or maybe canceled or put on ice. You know, it makes life very challenging and very stressful. So I see a space in the sorting out the toxic masculinity that this that the other of improving communication in everything. I see it about reducing stress by making work easier, because everything’s simpler and everybody’s behaving better. It’s not a pink and fluffy world. It does happen. It happened for me at cost stains great people with great expertise, behaving in great way. Yeah, dreadful crack, you know, awful teasing. But it was fantastic. Now, it wouldn’t have been fantastic for everybody, but it just worked. So, so I think there’s the interest in the design and interest in the communication has grown and grown and grown from that, and then I had an interesting experience. So some years ago, on the back of CDM, a friend of mine now one of these years of friends, but I think we need a new word for people who are friends, slash professional colleagues. But probably when you retire, you might not stay in touch with them. You know, there’s a new word needed there. But anyway, hash I will stay in touch with he has retired. We do talk to each other. Hash major, who was an HSE specialist inspector based in the Northwest when CDM 2007 came in, identified that designers didn’t really know what CDM, what this, these health and safety regulations were asking of them, yeah, design things that are safe to build, safe to maintain and so on. So he wrote to the President of the design institutions and said, Send me a volunteer. And I happened to be chair of the ice institution, civil engineers Health and Safety Board at the time, again, right? And stayed for years working with them. And when HSE funding went hash said, Well, do you look after these design guides and keep them freely available for people right? Knew that I would and didn’t need a board decision for it, so they’re on our website,

Mark McBride-Wright 33:48
and that’s what I meant. That’s what I knew you’d written stuff you’re making me question my

Liz Bennett 33:54
team is collaboration. Mark is fine. I know enjoying making a difference, that’s what it’s about. So we did this. We did it for years. And there was this wonderful guy, Tim Goff, who was vice president of riba for small practices, so the royal entities of British architects small practices. And he said, he said, Look, he said, This is all wrong. He said, If you say work at height to an architect, and given that falls from heights that usually the biggest cause of accidental death and construction, work at height is an issue. If you say work at height to an architect, they will glaze over and say it’s the contractor’s responsibility. But if you say the design of an atrium to an architect, they’ll want to know where and how high and what it is and what the you know, if they designed it, you know, they’ll get really engaged with it, right? So access vocabulary is important, and the vocabulary, I can’t say that vocabulary of the guide is important, yeah. Now that made me. Think a lot because we have this kind of jokey structural engineers and architects don’t get on. Brains work in different ways. I mean, they do get on, of course they get on, but they do think in very different ways. Yeah. So that’s been sitting there, sort of brewing away. We said to Tim, go and write a guide for architects then. So he did, and he came back, and we all read it. We’re all engineers and stuff. We all read it. What on earth is this so fluffy stuff? You get an architect? And they said, Oh, at last, thank goodness somebody understands our world. Now, if we’ve got such a discontinuity of communication, because people’s brains work differently, what’s that going to do in terms of the missing of that communication? And so that really started, I mean, what we did in the end is we got somebody whose job it is to wordsmithing, to write them all in a better and we’re reviewing the front end stuff at the moment, but that was really interesting and and I think I would say that that’s part of my interest in the equitable safety initiative, and the work that we’re doing now is if we can be in the in if I use that analogy of the design guides, if we can be the words methods that make the language common for everybody, then everybody can understand what everybody’s talking about and what everybody’s communicating. Yeah, right.

Mark McBride-Wright 36:37
You mentioned you did, yeah. You mentioned the equitable safety initiative when we were planning this. This, this chat together. Can you tell us a bit more about that, and how fresh is it? What? What’s the

Liz Bennett 36:52
so fresh for it not been baked yet? Oh, right. Okay. So, yeah, we’re still mixing in currants and sultanas, and

Mark McBride-Wright 37:00
what flavor

Liz Bennett 37:03
brandy, right? So, right? What is it? So it’s basically construction, health and safety meets equality, diversity and inclusion, awesome. So is, I think let’s say health, safety and well being. Let’s put that in the space as well. Okay, so I’m going to describe a pilot project that we’re doing because we’re leading on that. But the main project is being led by the absolutely amazing Jenny mcbroken from Heathrow Airport, who I know you know absolutely think it’s utterly amazing. She

Mark McBride-Wright 37:42
is forced, force of good in this world. Need more force

Liz Bennett 37:46
of good. Absolutely marvelous woman, right? So, so she’s looking after the whole project, and she with Heathrow supply chain, are working on designing places and spaces for people, recognizing that we all have a different response to place and space. Yes, now that’s quite interesting, because it’s echoing some work that by law, the Buick Lange O’Rourke joint venture at Hinkley Point C is doing looking at accommodation and the design of places and spaces for people who are far from home, who are working on a site, difficult and dangerous and challenging work all day, and then they need to relax. So how do you relax? Do you go and have a drink? Do you go and play loud music, or do you sit quietly and read a book? Can we have all of those happening at the same time? Is the space the right can we, you know, put special? I don’t know. I’m not really familiar with the detail of what they’re doing. Okay, know that it absolutely chimes to the whole of Langa rock, certainly, and they’re taking it across their business. Wow, looking at site, offices and everything. Are we designing them? And we’re just saying, Here’s a box. It keeps the weather off. Here’s a phone. Get on with it. Yeah, we’re always saying, you’re going to spend a lot of time here. Let’s make it as pleasant a place as possible, so that you can be relaxed and good as you need to be to do this difficult job anyway. So that’s all going on, but the Deaf pilot we’re looking at, can you be deaf and work in our industry? Absolutely you can. There are lots of very senior deaf people working in our industry, yeah. Can you be deaf fund and work in our industry? Absolutely you can our industry deafens lots of people, lots of people who are hard of hearing. Do we have situations in our industry where we can’t hear all the time? Lots of places too loud we got hearing. We’re in a complicated space. We’re, you know, this, that and the other. I. We’re looking at all of that. If you want to take somebody to work in your office who’s got a hearing problem, what could you do to make their life easier for them? Right? How could you make them feel part of the team? Because if they don’t feel part of the team, then the consequences of that for everybody Yeah, negative and can spiral down really quite quickly, quite badly. So we’re working with ITV signpost, because they specialize in that. And best interest, I have a profoundly deaf son for ITV signpost.

Mark McBride-Wright 40:39
Oh, fantastic.

Liz Bennett 40:41
We we’ve got some of what we’re doing is stuff, BSL, British Sign Language by deaf people, for deaf, but, you know, Deaf enabled, let’s say yes, sort of being able to celebrate the Deaf culture and say yes, there’s a place here for you, and there’s an amazing architect who’s no more forgotten, who’s be founded deaf, and who works in London and says, Do you know architecture is a great career for deaf people, because all our synapses, if you’ve deaf and from birth, have reconnected, And visually we’re extra acute.

Mark McBride-Wright 41:18
Oh, interesting.

Liz Bennett 41:21
So we’re looking at that and, and it’s really interesting because I’ve been talking to a lovely lady and, oh, I can’t remember her name. Oh, it’s just gone. I’ve just been emailing her all afternoon, since I finished, and I’m so excited talking to you, Mark, and it’s gone ADHD moment. It’s not because I’m old. I’ve been like this all my life. So there we go. But so looking at she’s an amazing architectural graduate, right? She went blind when she was 17, and then studied architecture. Wow, completely blind. She’s got some peripheral vision that she’s registered about and she, you know, and she is utterly amazing, fabulous, utterly amazing. So now what we’re doing with her, and what she’s helping us with is okay, so deaf people can’t hear, so everything that we’re communicating needs to be focused on the visual, visual, visual, pictures, videos, films, words, fabulous, Hi, oh, you can’t see. Well, that’s not going to work very well right now. Then we go on to, oh, you’ve got dyslexia. You don’t like words, you’re happy with the pictures and the films and the stuff. So we’re looking at and we’re trying to ask ourselves questions. Are we trying to look for a one size fits all, or is that very foolish? Should we actually be communicating in lots of different ways? Be interesting to tell you a little tiny story one of my grandsons, when he was at junior school. Fantastic teacher came in and and gave them a questionnaire about how they learned. So showed them videos they did all sorts of different teaching styles, and then gave them a questionnaire and said, I want to know how each of you learns best, so that I can use those methods to help you.

Mark McBride-Wright 43:41
Interesting. Wow, really

Liz Bennett 43:45
good, yeah, so maybe we should be asking, how do people communicate? Best here? Best, yeah, best take on information. Best Yeah, and is that a rich smorgasbord of communication? Now, it kind of feels friendly and okay if we’re talking to construction workers on a construction site, you know, maybe reading is a bit of a problem for them. So bloomin, patronizing. Appalling. And actually, it turns out that you can run a multi million pound business, a multi billion pound business, and be dyslexic. So yeah, of course, dyslexic doesn’t mean stupid being having ADHD doesn’t mean stupid. Being deaf or blind doesn’t mean stupid. Please, just, let’s look at the can do’s not the can’t do’s

Mark McBride-Wright 44:43
I’m still on on your grandson. What did? What did? What did he put down in terms of how he liked to learn,

Liz Bennett 44:52
you have to ask him, I’m going to try

Mark McBride-Wright 44:54
that on my son. Maybe it’ll be a way to get engaging homework, engagement in doing

Liz Bennett 44:59
homework. Yeah, the homework is pretty limited. You’ve got to do this, you know, but, but it’s, but I do think it’s, you know, it is quite interesting if, if I were at home taking this call on the phone, I would be walking round and round and round the room, yeah, right, yeah. When it’s being diagnosed for ADHD, they said, Do you fidget? And I said, don’t know. Do I fidget? And she said, Well, why is you Why are you shaking? And I said, Well, I’m just tapping my foot on the floor. She said, that’s called fidgeting, yeah. But what I’m saying is I would be able to engage in the conversation better if I was moving about I

Mark McBride-Wright 45:42
see, I see, it’s, it’s so interesting, like how we’ve learned, I learned about stimming, you know, release and excess energy when you need to focus. It’s something I’ve learned about through this journey into neurodiversity and learning about this emerging identity that we’re only starting to learn more about in the last 510, years, really, certainly more happening now. And I think it’s, it’s it’s fascinating, and what that lovely thing that it to your point about what you’re doing on those projects and with equitable safety initiative is you’re bringing diversity of opportunity to engage because actually hearing, reading, seeing, Listening, you know, smelling, touching, sensing, having a multi sensorial experience of of communicating information, increases the likelihood that it will stick and it’ll it’ll retain. So even if you’ve got your primary mode of how you you take something in if it’s then also being reinforced through other methods. Everyone benefits from it, and that’s the whole crux of it, isn’t it?

Liz Bennett 47:07
It’s partly that, but it’s also partly the famous tin opener story. You know that people who had arthritis in their hands were finding gripping a tin opener to open a tin really, almost impossible. People got to and designed the tin opener that people with arthritic hands could use, and it turns out that we all found it easier. Yeah, we’ll use it now. Yeah. So that, for me, is the magic moment when we can find that because we’ve made something easier for somebody who is different from ourselves. We’ve made it easier for them to understand what we’re trying to say. We’ve made it easier for everybody.

Mark McBride-Wright 47:52
Yeah, absolutely. And that very important, very, very important to you know, one of the challenges that you mentioned is, you know, skills attraction and skills retention. So if we can bring more people in, open up and be, be, be attractive as an industry, to more from a wider range of people, then hopefully we’ll not have any skills gaps or close, close that. I mean, it’s

Liz Bennett 48:20
such a fascinating industry, it’s quite frustrating not, not to be able to share that with with people absolutely

Mark McBride-Wright 48:26
and hopefully we don’t have or we’re making improvement with educators on who can be who can work in STEM who can work in engineering and construction. I want to do some quick fire questions with you. Now that’s all right. So what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? Oh,

Liz Bennett 48:54
so best piece of advice.

Mark McBride-Wright 48:58
Yes,

Liz Bennett 49:02
at a low point in my life, I explosively said I’m never going to trust anybody again. And my tutor from Manchester University with whom I stayed friends, said, you have to you have to trust or you won’t be trusted. And that earlier on in the conversation, and I’d just been thinking about that in terms of we were talking earlier about sharing information and giving out information, I find I’m really lucky, because we need to shout about health and safety from the rooftops, but in ways that people can engage with. So I feel I don’t need to be confidential about it, because I am in my own business, I can give away stuff. So people who come on a safety and design course, you. For principal designers or whatever, which is most of what I spend my time doing. You know, I’ll give them away PowerPoint slides if they, if they’re going to come on and learn to be, you know, learn how to develop a CDM course that they’re going to go on and sell. I’m very happy to help them to do that. I might be a bit aggrieved for a minute when they’re terribly successful at doing it. There’s nothing like there’s nothing like finding something that you’ve been saying for years, coming back to meet you, and you kind of think, yep,

Mark McBride-Wright 50:34
what’s your favorite safety innovation or tool that’s made a difference in your work?

Liz Bennett 50:41
Hmm? See, I have to be honest here, that Mark has given me this list just before our conversation. So I’ve had a minute to think about this safety innovation or tool. I’m actually going to say that it’s nothing new. I’m going to say very firmly. I’m going to come back to its people and its collaboration. And for me, that always is the winning thing, yeah, working together with generosity of spirit.

Mark McBride-Wright 51:16
What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long day.

Liz Bennett 51:22
Go and talk to my hens.

Mark McBride-Wright 51:24
What’s your proudest professional accomplishment?

Liz Bennett 51:29
Now, this is a bit this might surprise you a bit, changing the way the public behaves when their cars break down on the fuss road network. Oh, interesting within a three year time span from start to seeing some changes reported, and that’s a project called survive safe use of roadside verges in vehicular emergencies. Oh, wow, that

Mark McBride-Wright 51:58
is a good acronym,

Liz Bennett 52:02
great. How did we do that? The need was clearly there an AA operative and an RAC operative had both been killed on the hard shoulder of motorways. And I worked with the AA and RAC to look at their procedures, their training, their systems, and this that the other and I said, there needs to be an industry wide group looking at this. And I think I’m quite lucky or something or other, that I seem to know when the time is right to do something. And they said, right, let’s do it. And so had director level support from AA and RAC to do this. So they brought in the Associate Chief, Chief Constable from Devon and Cornwall, who headed up the association Chief Police Officers traffic group. We worked with national highways, who had got a contract with transport research laboratory. We worked with the police country. We work with the HSE, and we got Sir Peter Baldwin as our chair, who is the chap who set up the Department of Transport. And I absolutely loved working for him. Wow. Really clever man, and really lovely to work for so, so so we did that, and I was a technical secretary for that, and I wrote the report, but the information we gathered was great. We did a questionnaire for everybody who left the motorway via the hard shoulder, got onto the hard shoulder, or crossed it because it was an accident or something or other, and we honed that questionnaire. So I think some of us wrote, wrote an aunt, Sally for it their basic documents, and then we asked others to input, and the HSE put some extra questions in and different questions. And then we asked the police to collect the data. And then all the data went to transport Research Laboratory and national highways funded that research, and so we got, we got some evidence base for our decision making, and that group still works, is still going today. Wow. The reason, and this was a bit of a unique reason, the reason that we could change the way the public behaved is that we could work with academics internationally. We could work with everybody, but in terms of the controllers of that environment and the people whom we call if there’s an emergency, we the traveling public. It’s either the emergency services through 999 or it’s big recovery sector. We had the vehicle recovery trade associations and the tire changing associations and so on, a big community. So do you see it’s people collaborating from an intent? Yeah. I. Okay, and we explained how to park, and we explained to the public that the motorways are our safest roads, but if you have to stop, then you are at risk of heavy vehicles drifting onto the hard shoulder and hitting you. Yeah, so I’m in a very unusual position as a health and safety professional, there are people alive today who would have been dead, were it not for me and I could identify them, because they’ve had a breakdown. They’ve done what they were told by everybody. Everybody had the same simple message, if it’s safe to get out of your car. Do so if it’s safe to get over the barrier. Look out in case you’re on a bridge or there’s a steep bank or something, it’s safe to get over the barrier behind your car, then do it. Yeah, that was just been quoted back to me today. Amazing.

Mark McBride-Wright 55:59
If you could have dinner with any design or safety expert, who would it be?

Liz Bennett 56:04
Well, I just did. I just did. So couple of weeks ago, I had lunch. Will that do dinner’s far too late. I had lunch with hashmatra, who started those design guides, and another friend of mine from Atkins days when I was head of health and safety Atkins, David Thomas, who left Atkins, he said it was my fault. He got into health and safety, left Atkins to join the HSE as well, and they live near each other. They became very good friends up in the north west. And when David left the HSE, he went to work for a contractor for a while to discover what contracting was like. And then he became Secretary of the temporary works forum. And temporary works is temporary works design, and temporary works in general, had always been the poor relation in construction. So this is things like scaffolding and support the structures. And, you know, it’s like it’s a contractor’s responsibility, you know, you’ve got to sort that out. And yet, it’s often crucial, because temporary works often interacts with and interferes with permanent works. And so there’s a strong imperative to take a shortcut or leave something out, and we’ve had some horrible disasters as a result. So Dave and hash and then a lovely chap I’ve met through the equitable safety initiative, Tim Evans, who’s a director for Amy consulting rail side, who does in house training for Amy consulting staff, at least on CDM, we agreed to meet, and because I’m sharing, told ethereal what we were doing, and it’s Rose told a calm and hash used to work for a calm as a regional director after the so on. And so we met at my brother’s house up near Manchester Airport for lunch, and it was really lovely. And you’ll understand this, sitting with a bunch of people who understand the complexities and frustrations of something that they know is really worthwhile and has taken up large chunks of their life and been very rewarding. But we tend to have to be a bunch of old focus in some Oh, everybody should expect some time on site back in my day. We have a plan, and we’re developing some designer specific training. Fabulous, because it’s about design, not about health and safety. It’s about design that, of course, needs to be safe to build, and of course needs to be safe to maintain, and of course, isn’t going to harm people’s health.

Mark McBride-Wright 58:52
So absolutely, tea or coffee

Liz Bennett 58:54
both depends on the time of day. Obviously, what’s

Mark McBride-Wright 58:59
the one? What’s one book, podcast or resource you recommend to someone in safety or design?

Liz Bennett 59:05
No brainer, the Get It Right initiative,

Mark McBride-Wright 59:08
okay, what I’ve heard of it? Yes,

Liz Bennett 59:13
you need to look at it. And every designer and every client ought to read the design guide on it. It’s brilliantly communicated, very clear, very simple, very succinct, and absolutely nails it. And it’s about reducing error.

Mark McBride-Wright 59:30
Yes, G, re, I have heard of it. Yeah. The G, I, R, I, yeah. So the Get It Right initiative, we’ll put the link to that in the show notes. What? What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on?

Liz Bennett 59:42
Oh, it’s got to be the Olympics, hasn’t it, London 2012 so now here’s the thing that’s interesting about London 2012 Lots has been written about the lessons from London 2012 but they’re almost entirely from the Olympic Delivery Authority. Yes, because. Low cog where I was, was a private business and had no imperative to do any reports on lessons learned. Okay, the Olympic Delivery Authority did, right? So one of the key lessons for me a really big plus from lowcock and well Oda as well, but from low cog in particular, was that on a certain known day we were going to have one chance to deliver the beginning of something extraordinary. We didn’t have a second chance. There was never going around and snagging stuff. You know, you’ve got to get it right first time, every time. And here is the day it starts, and here is the day it finishes. And to get to that place and deliver that extraordinary we’ve got to work together so all sorts of different people from all over the world came with all sorts of different experiences, but we all had that guiding understanding of we know what we’ve got to do, and I think that’s something that other projects could learn from. Yeah, having that, what do we want to achieve here? We all want it to work. Nobody’s going into a project saying, I don’t mind if I kill a couple of people. Yeah, of course. And nobody’s trying to be the weak link. We all want it to work, so Let’s all make it work together.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:39
Very good advice and on that, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Liz Bennett 1:01:51
This is my younger self who studied civil engineering. Yeah, that would be go and work for a contractor. First, right? Contractors inherit all the mistakes of everybody else, and they’ve got to deal with them and get on with them. So in a sense, a contractor is perhaps closest to the low cock model of we’ve got this. We’ve got to make something of it. We’ve got to deliver it, and we’ve got to do it as quickly as we reasonably can, given all the strengths on us. And I think it teaches you so much about yourself, about people, about communication, about good and bad and sometimes quite ugly. And I think then go back into the design piece, and this would be what I would say. And if it was before that, I don’t think I decided what I wanted to be till I was about 37

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:44
never too, never too old to get that self discovery. Yeah. Well, Liz, I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you today. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your insights. If people want to get in touch with you and find out more about your work, how can they how can they make contact? They

Liz Bennett 1:03:07
can go to our website, or they can email me. So maybe you can add

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:13
those links. I will absolutely put them in the show notes. Do you want to just say, say the link for the website?

Liz Bennett 1:03:19
I’m Liz Bennett. My email is Liz at safety in design.org.uk,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:27
fabulous. And the website is,

Liz Bennett 1:03:31
the website is safetyindesign.org.uk, and we’ve got a LinkedIn presence, and so have I as well. So that’s another useful thing, because I do get about a million emails a day.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:42
Fabulous. So look you up on LinkedIn. Connect in there. Link will be in the show thanks. Plural will be in the show notes.

Liz Bennett 1:03:48
Be great. Thank

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:49
you very much. Please.

Liz Bennett 1:03:51
We’ll talk again.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:52
Absolutely, of course, we will. We’ll stay in touch. Have a great day.

Liz Bennett 1:03:58
My hands have gone to bed. You.