Safety Speaker Drebinger’s Creativity and Safety Solutions Part Two

Welcome to Part Two. This week, as a safety speaker, I will share with you the second half of my chapter on creativity from my book, “Mastering Safety Communication.”

This week, I will discuss imagination and how to build it as a useful tool to help you discover solutions.

Activities You Can Do To Improve Imagination
Great safety speakers have learned the value of imagination for solving challenges. Whenever you want to excel at something, find an expert and discover how they do it. Once you discover their strategy and are able to copy it, you can achieve the same level of success or better. When it comes to imagination, children have to be the world’s greatest experts. In an instant, they can pretend two chairs covered with a blanket is a massive secret cave or even a spaceship. If you want to imagine things, do some of the things children do. Ask questions, look at something upside down or inside out, take an object and make up a new and different use for it. Take some blank paper and draw something, (I know you can’t draw well but if you could what would you draw?) Thinking like a child is a way to help your imagination
grow. Children grow quickly because they are insatiably curious. In fact, growing is one of the things you must be committed to if you want to improve your ability to imagine. Children are fearless and at times they take risks. They rlsk looking silly or making a mistake. Try playing make-believe or try writing with the opposite hand than you normally use. Try drawing with one hand and then the other.

“Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.” – Maria Mitchell

Safety speakers will tell you, Read! Read! Then read some more. The average American stops reading after high school except nonfiction or informational reading. Read something just to expand your horizons. Try talking to yourself consciously, the trees, animals or whatever you like. If they answer then you really have supercharged your imagination. You know you are in big trouble when you talk to yourself or argue with yourself and lose the argument. Walt Disney looked to nature for inspiration. Take a look at the world through the eyes of a child. In fact, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood if you learn to act like a child and who knows what life-saving ideas you might originate.

An Example of Growth of A Training Technique
As a safety speaker, I began to develop the needle through the balloon trick to illustrate the concept of possibility thinking. My original outcome for the effect was to show oftentimes people won’t even try something they haven’t seen done before. I soon discovered I use the effect to show how people unconsciously model others in order to do what they do. Consistently, after doing the trick I noticed when I handed balloon and needle to the person they would always take
the balloon and put the needle in just at the same spot I did. I did not instruct them how to do the trick; I merely did it. They unconsciously modeled my strategy and as a result, most people would successfully accomplish the trick on their first attempt. I then caught the vision of a new employee or someone with less experience watching an experienced worker and unconsciously learning how they do that job. If the procedure the experienced worker was using was unsafe or incorrect the new employee was most likely going to model the other employee’s behavior even if it contradicted company policy. We learn what the real rules are by watching what others do. When the local custom is different than what we were taught we will adapt to that in order to become more accepted.

“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”
– Margaret Fuller

Sharing Ideas With Others
One great thing about the safety business is safety professionals are willing to share because everyone benefits. Several of my clients make it a point to send their safety chairman to visit other safety meetings held within their company to check what other divisions are doing. It is also possible to contact some of your competitors and ask to visit their meetings and in return invite them to yours. In many cases, this would help keep workers compensation costs down if in a given industry we all worked together.