Can Art Make Your Workplace Safer?

When considering new initiatives and improvements to a company’s health and safety program, art would not normally make it to the top of the list of options. But there is a reason why it perhaps should.

Doug Pontsler—the Chairman and Managing Director of COVE: Center of Visual Expertise—and SafeStart Chairman of the Board Colin Duncan will jointly present a session entitled Learning to See: A New Perspective on Visual Literacy in Safety at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference on November 5th and 6th.

But before the conference takes place, Pontsler agreed to sit down with SafeStart’s Rodd Wagner to explain what visual literacy is and how it can improve workplace safety.

 

Listen to the complete interview

 

Interview transcript

Hi, I’m Rodd Wagner. I’m joined today by Doug Pontsler. Doug is the Chairman of the Center of Visual Expertise, an initiative of the Toledo Museum of Art. The Center of Visual Expertise, or COVE, uses works of art to teach workers—and I’m quoting here from their website—“to identify, interpret and interact with the environment based on accurate visual information.”

They use art to improve safety. Now Doug knows the world of applied safety. He was an executive of Owens Corning for 16 years. Eight of them as Vice President of EHS and Operations Sustainability. Doug will be speaking at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference on November 5th and 6th in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Doug, thanks for being with me. Go with me, if you would, on this first question. Imagine the following scenario: the Vice President of Safety and Health is reviewing the incident numbers and she notices a serious uptick at her company. She pulls her staff together and she says: we’ve got a serious issue with accidents and close calls. Call the Toledo Museum of Art and ask if they can help. I think you’d agree that for most people that’s not an intuitive chain of logic. Help me understand why that’s actually not a strange idea. 

First of all, I would agree with you. That wouldn’t be the number one call that most safety professionals or executives would make is to a museum to help with the safety program and safety efforts in a particular company or organization. We sort of found ourselves in that same place back in 2015 when I was at Owens Corning and it was really quite accidental that we established this relationship with the museum and this connection to visual literacy.

And it really developed because we had heard that the museum had this curriculum, they had this expertise around visual literacy which was sort of shorthanded as “learning to see”. And when I heard the words “learning to see”, it immediately connected to me in terms of work that we were doing around hazard recognition.

We had had a fairly successful hazard recognition and control training program that we’d had in place for a couple of years and we were looking for a way to raise that program to the next level. So we were beginning the thought process of making some changes. But when I heard about this “learning to see” program that existed at the museum, it caused me to wonder whether there was something in that that could help us in our safety program.

So we met with the museum and it was a classic sit-down in a conference room and my question was: What’s visual literacy? And their question was: “What’s safety?” It was through that dialogue that we started to understand that, for decades in art education, they’ve taught processes and built skills and capabilities and individuals to be able to truly appreciate what’s in front of them. Whether it’s an object, a painting, a scene you know it doesn’t really matter. But really building a skill-set in terms of how they can examine that and appreciate the finest details. And in visual literacy language, and as the Toledo Museum of Art had really refined a lot of these practices, it really boiled down to: What is it that you see? What does it mean? And what do you do about it?

And if you think about those three statements, so much of the work that we do in safety is related to: What is it that we see? How do we interpret what it means in terms of risk and risk profile and so forth? And what action is appropriate at the time? And what action do we take?

So while it’s not natural to think about a museum being able to contribute to a safety program, that discipline of being able to look and interpret and act is exactly what a lot of our work in safety is really all about. And that’s where this connection between the world of art and art education and industry and safety really developed.

 

Is that the definition of visual literacy? What does visual literacy mean?

In the shortest way, to think about what visual literacy is, that’s exactly it. It is being able to see and appreciate what’s there, being able to break through the natural tendencies we have to pay attention to certain things and not see others. Because we see more completely, we’re able to draw a much better interpretation and a more complete interpretation of what it is that we’re looking at. And that can be a piece of equipment, it can be a production line, it can be a warehouse, you can go on and on with the different scenarios that exist. And if we’re able to interpret what we’re seeing better, then we’re able to take much better actions in terms of either resolving something that needs to be resolved immediately or, if it’s relatively low risk and low exposure, we have an opportunity to maybe defer action on that so it can be done in a different way. But it’s really all about what we see, what it means and what action we take as a result.

 

I’ve been exposed to some research about what’s called in human physiology foveated vision—the idea that we see very clearly, crisply, full color, right in the center of our retina, but around the edges, our vision is actually quite poor. Is that part of visual literacy? To understand what we’re seeing at any one point in time and where we’re filling in the blanks?

It’s certainly true and it’s not necessarily where we focus in terms of that physiology, but where we focus is on the practices that can be used to overcome not only where our direct attention is paid but how we move away from what we normally look at and look at other things that surround it.

When we look at something, we tend to see maybe 10 percent or so of what it is we’re looking at and the brain is filling in the other 90 percent. And the good news is that the brain is really good at that. If it wasn’t, then we would be having some horrific issues as human beings—being able to function if we were truly only seeing and interpreting only about 10 percent of what we’re taking in. But the brain helps us sort all that out and fills in what we’re not seeing based upon expectations, based upon our experiences, both of which lead us to biases in terms of what we might expect to see.

And by and large, we get along pretty well that way. But it’s not perfect and when we think about what we’re trying to accomplish in our workplaces and at home with respect to safety, we’re trying to be perfect. We’re trying to identify everything that can represent an exposure and make sure we’re controlling that exposure. So that it’s not the incident that informs us we have a situation but rather we see that in advance. And that’s how we leverage the lessons in visual literacy—is to be able to skill ourselves and those within our organization to be more effective and how we look and really see what’s in front of us.

 

It still seems a bit of a non-sequitur. I’ve been exposed to your work for some time now, but it still seems a bit of a jump if you will. How does visual literacy work in combination with traditional safety initiatives?

Great question. And that’s one that we really want to make sure that we keep visual literacy in the proper context. First of all, if we’re practicing using great tools and processes around being more visually acute in terms of what we’re seeing, that doesn’t mean that we have to stop guarding equipment and stop doing permits and all those sorts of things. It’s still important for us to have core safety processes in place. Those are protections that need to be there in order to be able to make sure that when we have that situation where an action might be taken that’s unanticipated, there’s layers of protection to keep that from turning into an incident that we don’t want to have.

What visual literacy does, it helps us strengthen those processes so that we’re more effective in being able to execute hazard recognition, hazard hunts, completing a work permit. Because we’re more effective in being able to actually examine what it is that we’re going to do, what environment we’re in, and it allows us to do a better job of being able to identify the things that represent exposures, represent risk and could actually turn into an incident.

 

Do companies send their employees to the museum or do you hit the road with the tools and techniques?

We do both. Our preference is that we do as much as we can in a museum setting. And we do that because we find it to be a very effective learning environment. Our core program, our foundations of visual literacy, is a two-day program that we do at the museum and we spend 30-40 percent of our time in the classroom, not only learning about what visual literacy is and why it matters but also doing some classroom exercises.

But the balance of our time is actually spent out in the galleries. And we use objects of art in order to be able to drive home the lessons and the processes that we’re teaching. The reason that we see that as being important—but also we get incredible positive feedback from doing that—is that it sets aside the normal workplace. And you leave the baggage of the normal workplace behind and you’re really able to focus on: “what is visual literacy all about?” And people find it fun as well.

And often the time we spend together focused on visual literacy is often described as innovative and fun and different. And I know, in my years in environmental health and safety, it wasn’t often that anyone described our training programs as fun, innovative and you know those kinds of accolades. So being able to do it in a different environment, leveraging a different set of assets in order to be able to teach the principles—which are the objects of art—is a very effective way to be able to do it.

 

There is something to be said there about how people get stuck in ruts when they work the same shift at the same place, doing the same thing, week after week after week. And part of the effectiveness… not just… obviously going to a museum, a place that’s visually so stimulating, but also just getting out of the work zone. 

Absolutely. If you just think about being in your normal place of employment, or your normal work area and trying to learn something new, you are sort of being pulled back to what’s going on in your environment. And things come back to memory that need to be addressed or paid attention to. So it can be a little hard to separate yourself and that’s why the museum environment or, in some cases and alternative environment, will serve a great purpose there.

At the same time, it’s not practical that a large organization—you know we work with some organizations that are 25 to 50 thousand people and above and never will all 25 thousand people from around the world to find their way to the Toledo Museum of Art or any other art museum around the world. What we focus on is those individuals, just like in any effort that we have in an organization that we want them to become the local experts—the company experts—on visual literacy. So they can then train principles and processes within their organization. So we’re really focused on—and we call it the train the trainer program like most people do—but we’re really focused on building that level of expertise in those individuals that can then carry it back to their companies.

 

Among those to whom you’ve been exposed, who’s been the most interesting program participant? Maybe someone you that were surprised to see in the program in the first place or whose experience was really mind-blowing?

We’ve seen it all. We’ve had senior-level executives, even CEOs, that have sat in the workshops and all of a sudden, the light bulbs are clicking in terms of: “wow, I didn’t see what that other person is now describing that they saw” in a particular painting or a picture that we might be working on. And we’ve had individuals that are front-line workers you walk in the room and they’re sitting there with their arms crossed, at least in physical appearance, challenging you to teach them anything that could be relevant to them. It doesn’t take long until they’re headlong into it.

I remember a session that we did in Indianapolis where there was a particular individual that, at the beginning of the workshop, you felt the vibes coming and it wasn’t long until he was one of the most active participants in the workshop for both days. You just never know who’s going to take to it and really dig in and who might be a bit of a tougher nut to crack.

 

Do you have a lot of tough converts? Before we talked today I was thinking of the stereotypical longshoreman or journeyman electrician who, when you say to them: “We’re going to work on our visual literacy”, says: “Our what? We’re going to work on what?”

I’m sure that’s definitely the case. There is some portion that, as you open the conversation, this leap between safety and the world of art education doesn’t seem to be a logical walk. So I’m sure there are some reactions like that, but I think that by the time we get started, we see their interest peak in terms of “What is this all about?” And all of a sudden, because it is personal I mean, we are talking about things that exist not only in the workplace but in our lives overall.

And one of the things that we talk about is who’s had the experience where there’s been an incident in the workplace, there might be an incident at home, and all of a sudden you realize, “You know, I’ve walked by that a thousand times and I never saw it.” It was just in the background of my normal workplace or my normal home life, and then something happened that drew my attention to it and now I can’t believe that I didn’t see it before. And because it’s personal and because it’s 24/7, I think people begin to connect with it in a different kind of way than they might connect with if we’re only focused on their particular job task in their particular work environment.

 

How do you bridge between the worlds of art and the industrial environment? Specifically, what kinds of concepts is a person supposed to learn from looking at a piece of art and then transfer to, say, an oil rig?

Great question. What we do is we use art, and art history, and objects of art, to be able to teach the principles. Then we move to actual workplace examples in order to be able to apply what we’ve learned. I know we don’t have something we can use to illustrate in this conversation, but just in general description, one of the components that we use to improve our visual acuity is applying the elements of art that are taught in art education. And the elements of art are things like lines, and shapes, and colors, and contrast, and space. So we work on identifying those elements of art using works of art.

But then we flip to a photograph of a typical work scene. And all of a sudden, when we start to look for lines, and shapes, and colors in that work scene, we start to see things that we might not have noticed before. So that’s the transference from what is taught in art education to the application that is taught for the workplace.

And that’s what our strength really is from a COVE standpoint is that we’re combining the expertise that the Toledo Museum of Art in this case has in visual literacy with its application in the industrial world through individuals that have had deep experience in safety and operations working for large Fortune 500 companies in those respects.

 

Usually, when you go to a museum, you’re looking to be intrigued, visually stimulated, something thought-provoking… The end in mind is to say: wow, this piece really moves me or that one’s got me thinking, or I’ve never seen something quite like that. You’re using art for a very practical purpose for people to be able to see in an environment where they could lose a limb or get themselves killed. Is there a certain piece of art or a certain type of art that seems to work best to help employees rethink how they’re seeing in an industrial environment?

We find that a wide variety works very well. It’s not like there is some bad art that isn’t good for teaching the lessons and so forth. And there’s really, really good art that helps. Any sort of painting, or any sort of drawing, or object we find works very well.

One of the exercises that we do is the individuals actually select an item that they’re going to describe to another individual and we see significant variety in terms of what people will go out into the gallery and actually select in order to be able to describe to someone else for the purposes of them being able to draw it off only their description. Any object really works. If we’re not in a museum, we can use dog toys and all kinds of other things, successfully as well. So it’s really the whole idea of being able to look at something, be able to interpret what it is you’re looking at, being able to describe it in a way that someone else can understand what you’re talking about.

 

It just so happens that today the Toledo Museum of Art has on its website a photo from Hubert Robert’s 1783 painting called The Studio of an Antiquities Restorer in Rome. I was looking at this and from a traditional safety perspective, I see all kinds of things. The building is old and it looks unsafe. The roof is falling apart. There is a guy at the top of a ladder and it looks like he’s reaching too far and, of course this being way back when, there’s no personal protective equipment. But I’m guessing, you’d say that what I just described is looking, not visual literacy. Can you help me understand the difference?

I’d say a couple things about that. First of all, safety practices in 1783 probably weren’t all that well developed at the time. But as far as the difference between looking and truly seeing—we live in an environment where we’re heavily influenced by getting things done quickly and being able to leverage the sort of knowledge and expertise that we have and allow that to draw us to a focus.

When someone is looking at that particular painting that you’re talking about—I’m familiar with it in our gallery—each of us are going to pay attention to certain things and we’re very quickly going to draw an interpretation from that. You may look at something like the individual that’s on the ladder and immediately that captures your attention. And it can capture your attention because you’re naturally perhaps drawn to people; it can capture your attention immediately because of its positioning in that particular composition. There’s lots of reasons why we pay attention to some things but we don’t pay attention to others.

The visual literacy component that comes into play here is that there are practices that we can employ that sort of breaks us out of our natural tendency to pay attention to some things and ignore others. And by following those processes, we can examine that particular painting; we can examine a piece of equipment; we can examine a production line, it doesn’t really matter. And we can take in more completely everything that’s occurring there, and from that, we’ll be able to see more things than what we had been able to see before. And by seeing more things—back to the beginning of our conversation—we’re able to draw stronger interpretation of what’s actually happening and we can arrive at actions that are more appropriate for what’s happening than we might if we missed those items.

 

Part of the program’s effectiveness, it seems to me, is in the signal that it sends to employees that their employers care. If the company gives someone gloves, he can say: “Well, I’m not giving you credit for that because I need gloves to do the job.” But if a company says: “We’re going to bring you to the Toledo Museum of Art”, it makes employees at least wonder, doesn’t it, if the employer is going above and beyond?

I think so. And I think we see that in our participants as well… I think, when we talk about employee engagement, there’s nothing more engaging, in many respects, than an employer who’s willing to invest in each of us as individuals. And that investment comes in a lot of different ways and we value that investment in different ways as well.

Often, we may be asked to engage in an e-learning module around a particular topic. That can be very effective; it can be necessary, but it can be maybe not as engaging as taking someone out of the workplace, putting them in a unique environment—and a really special environment—and saying: “We want you to understand these principles that are coming out of art education that we can put to work in the workplace.”

So I think that investment is a key to being able to make employees feel like they’re cared for, there’s an investment going into them that’s different and sort of above the norm.

 

What’s been the biggest surprise as you’ve taken this program to companies?

I think the biggest surprise is often, how the value proposition is relatively simple compared to many other value propositions that we think about in the business world. We often talk with companies about the fact that every day in their organization and in organizations like theirs, individuals are going out to perform tasks. And we do too if we work in that organization. We may be going out to inspect a piece of equipment, or inspect product, or repair a piece of equipment. There’s all kinds of tasks that are executed on a daily basis and all of them involve seeing. We have to go look; we have to go see what it is that we were tasked with being able to go do.

We also spend a lot of time training people in our organizations as well and sometimes we think we don’t train enough and that certainly can be true as well. But there’s a lot of training that goes on that we often don’t think about, like on-the-job training and watching someone else perform a task if they’re more experienced than we are, and believing that they may know better how to get that done than I might, and we begin to copy practices that way and so forth. Which is a lot of training that goes on in an organization.

But fundamentally, the value proposition for visual literacy is that if seeing is really important in being able to be successful and performing tasks that we need to perform, when is the last time that anyone went through training or a class or an investment in improving their ability to see?

When we ask that question in the workshops, it is rare that anyone will put their hand up and say: “Yeah, I’ve actually been through some kind of a class on how to see.” On that rare occasion that the hand goes up, it’s often someone that has some art education in their background.

We take for granted that if we’re able sighted, we have been seeing all of our lives, we never turn it on, just like we don’t turn breathing on, we just do it. It’s automatic. And we have a lot of confidence that we’re actually seeing what’s there. But we prove to ourselves every day that’s not true when we walk by that hazard or that exposure and we don’t deal with it because we don’t see it. Until an incident informs us that it’s there.

It’s that value proposition that really causes people to reflect and to think that “Yeah, I have those examples in my life, and my workplace, at home, that I can connect with that.”

The second thing I would  say about the surprise factor here is: companies that have engaged and have adopted the application of visual literacy, they’ve also been very creative in terms of how they build it into their processes. We believe that visual literacy in an of itself is not an initiative. What we do believe is that we can improve the safety processes that are important to us by skilling up people with visual literacy capabilities.

And that really resonates with companies. Because they’re not after a new initiative. No one is anxious to put their hand up and say: “You know what? I’ve got six things going on, I’d love to create a seventh.” The innovativeness of being able to integrate visual literacy inside of hazard recognition, inside of incident investigation, inside of design for safety reviews is the way to go. And it’s that innovativeness of that application that I think makes it very real.

 

Where does the program go from here?

We started from the perspective of educating around what visual literacy is, why it matters and, in a broad sense, its application to safety. And we’ve migrated into getting a little more specific on particular practice areas, where we can take the foundations of visual literacy and the tools and processes that we have, and we can link them together with common safety processes that we execute every day.

We’ve focused initially on hazard recognition and also incident investigation. And in the case of hazard recognition, there’s all kinds of programs that are out there, there’s all kinds of things that people are doing and we’re not proponents of one versus another. But what we can do—whatever program you’re engaged with around hazard recognition—if we improve our ability to see, then we improve our ability to actually identify more hazards.

And we have some initial evidence… I want to emphasize that because the body of quantified impact will grow over time, but we have some initial impact numbers that are in the 30% range in terms of being able to identify more issues than what happened before visual literacy was utilized to skill with people who are performing a task.

The same thing is true in incident investigation. Everyone has their root cause and corrective action methodologies and, sometimes within companies, there’s multiple methods that are being used. We’re not advocating for any one in particular because all of them have a set of common steps. And we can link the lessons from visual literacy to those common steps and bring visual literacy into that space as well. 

And then we’re working on how visual literacy relates to leadership, how leaders can be more effective by understanding the principles of visual literacy, and the practices associated with that, and also in the area of observations. A lot of companies have invested in behavior-based safety and other observation processes, and anything that you’re using to look, and see, and observe, you can benefit by having capabilities in visual literacy.

 

You’re speaking at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference in November. Could you give a preview of your remarks there? And are you bringing some art with you?

We’ll bring some images with us for sure in order to be able to talk through the time that we have together. But the heart of the discussion at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference will be around these three points that I just referenced. And that is: what is visual literacy? When we say “visual literacy” what is it that we mean? Why does it matter to us in our daily lives? And then what is its relationship to safety?

What you will hear me say over and over and over again: we can substitute for the words visual literacy, it’s all about what we see, it’s about what it means, and it’s all about what we do as a result of that. And that’s what we’re trying to improve. 

 

For people who are, let’s say driving their cars right now while listening to this, are there two or three points that have emerged from this program that they should know right now to ensure that they get home safely?

First of all, put the phone down. If you happen to have the phone to your ear—unfortunately—or otherwise. Put the phone down. And that isn’t related necessarily to our program, but anyone that’s driving it’s always the first thing that I say. But the thing that goes along with this process of improving our visual capability and our ability to interpret is really slowing down. Too often—you used the word earlier “look”—too often we look and then we interpret. But when we look, we don’t necessarily see. So I would tell everybody to slow down, take a few extra seconds or more when you’re examining something and really make sure that you’re seeing really what’s there.

The second thing I would say is, look at it from a different perspective. Too often, we walk up to something and we look at it only one way. Let’s look at it in a couple of ways. Let’s look at it from the side, let’s look at it from the back, let’s look at it close, let’s look at it far. Make sure that we’re using the opportunity to see things from a different perspective, which can lead us to see different things, all together.

And then, the last thing I would say is there is nothing better to convince yourself you’re seeing what’s in front of you than actually describing it. So whether you’re describing it to yourself or describing it to someone that may be with you, take a few seconds and just describe what it is that you’re looking at. And in particular, if you have someone else with you, you’ll be surprised at the dialogue that then creates about what you are seeing that they may not be seeing. And that’s the payoff. That’s what we’re trying to do.

 

I’d like to close, if I might, with a more personal question. You’ve had a long and successful career. Much of it in Owens Corning. And I’m guessing that if you wanted to jump on a motorcycle and cruise to all the national parks or go fly-fishing for a couple of years, you’d be in a position to do so. So there must be something particularly meaningful about this work. What is it?

Great question. As you said, I’ve had the great opportunity to be able to do a lot of different things over the years that I spent in industry. There is no higher mission in my mind than creating an environment and engaging with our people in a way that they can go home the way that they came to work or better in terms of some other things we can do in the workplace and so forth. So it is just this mission of being able to take art education and be able to use it in a way that saves lives. It’s a pretty motivating way to think about what you’re doing every day.

There’s a lot of work that’s been going on and will continue to go on in the world of safety that is borrowing from other disciplines. And a lot of our high-performing organizations, maybe they’ve plateaued, they’re certainly committed to get to zero and they’re struggling to get there, and they’re looking for things that can be grown from other disciplines that can help that. And I think, visual literacy and what’s been taught in art education for decades is one piece of that.

Being involved in all of that is pretty motivating.

 

Doug Pontsler. Chairman of the Center of Visual Expertise. It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time today.

You’re welcome, Rodd. Very nice to talk to you and I look forward to seeing everyone in November.