Curiosity Wanted

If you’re expecting me to go over a deep dive of my CV here or provide a list of my work experience and educational accomplishments (and by the way, I use that word extremely lightly), you're going to be disappointed. Feel free to head on over to LinkedIn if you are that interested in my demographics, but trust me, a list of how many months I’ve done certain things and where I’ve done them can’t even begin to convey the very strange journey I’ve been on and why I think the lessons I’ve learned along the way can help you!

The Making of a Raconteuse- An Origin Story with a Less Than Linear Plot Line

Raconteurs are gifted storytellers. They have a knack for spinning captivating tales out of everyday life. As for how employing one can help you on your organizational learning journey, I’ll get to that soon. But first, let’s start, naturally, with a story.

Some of you may know me as Professor Jenn. And yes, for 9 months out of the year, the fine institution of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, trusts me to help educate the next generation of safety professionals. But that’s just one thing I love to do.

I love stories. Before becoming a connoisseur of journal articles, I was a voracious reader of narrative nonfiction and I always wanted to be a filmmaker. Well, honestly, I also went through phases where I wanted to be one or more of these things- a princess, a forensic pathologist, a pilot, and a veterinarian. However, my plans to become any of those very cool things were unfortunately diverted thanks to the realities of my non-royal lineage, extreme empathy for furry creatures, impending financial responsibilities, and less-than-stellar cognitive abilities.

Somehow, I ended up being an academic (I’m still unraveling that piece of the story for myself!), but before I took that very unexpected leap, I earned my “street cred” working for over 20 years doing a bunch of weird and unplanned safety-related stuff. This stuff included being shuffled between national labs, struggling as a hazardous waste manager, a stint as a poorly prepared safety professional, more time as an overcompensating regulator than I like to admit, responding to numerous emergencies when state and federal agencies ran out of the “expert” volunteers, and a decade dabbling in health physics. So, although my career probably still didn’t end up being as awesome as some of my preferred alternatives (I also never got a chance to perfect that ergonomically correct, restrained, yet classy royal wave), I did get to do some interesting things. Some of these things included directing research safety at an R1 university, overseeing chemical safety at a world-class biotech laboratory on the Seattle waterfront, regulating the use of radioactive materials in medical and research facilities, and training as a public information officer at a statewide Emergency Operations Center.

An Unexpected Plot Twist

Due to my insatiable curiosity about how things go wrong, a case of mistaken identity, and the willingness to say yes to doing just about anything in my never-ending quest to find something I didn’t suck at but also didn’t hate doing, I also got to live out some of my stranger career aspirations as a consultant performing fatality investigations. This work primarily involved redoing investigations for legal teams involved in subrogation and included reviewing fatal occupational accidents, crowd crushes, occupied building collapses, fatal medical mistakes, assembly occupancy fire disasters, and serious aviation accidents. These opportunities also allowed me to travel to 36 states and 6 countries (but please don’t take me for well-traveled as these trips also happen to be the only international travel I have ever done. Also, don’t ask me for travel pictures unless you want to see what the inside of a Turkish morgue looks like or be treated to the stunning visage of a burned-out building against a Burkina Faso sunrise).

After fumbling my way through doing this work the first few times, I was surprised to find that I kept getting invited back to do more. I even began to wonder if I had finally found something my dyslexic and hyperactive brain was good for! Yet, due to my unrelenting drive to collect acronyms and my sneaking suspicion that my popularity had more to do with my lower-than-average billing rate, I threw myself into becoming proficient in a variety of accident analysis methodologies, including Accimap, HFACS, Bowtie, Fishbone, RCA, FMEA, Probabilistic Fault/Event Trees, ConCA, STAMP, FRAM, CREAM, CAST, MORT, PHA, THIRA, Barrier Analysis, Change Analysis, HAZOP, HRA, and some other stuff I have probably forgotten about by now (I have a drawer in my office with a lot of dusty training certificates- admittedly including some that appear to have been printed with a dot matrix printer). I even combined some facets of these methods to create my own proprietary investigation method I dubbed “FEATHER”.

The Epilogue (with customary time jump)

Yet, as I began to further develop and test FEATHER with the idea that one day I could prove its usefulness and release it to the world for mass consumption, I began to realize that the most powerful part of what I was doing when conducting investigations was simply just being curious and humbly asking as many questions of those doing the work as they would let me. In fact, eventually, I came to the conclusion that no accident analysis method, no matter how sophisticated or intuitive, could be used successfully without first fully capturing the context related to the decisions made through the stories of those involved in the event.

So sadly, despite all the free “continental” breakfast bagels hard enough to use as cribbing during an emergency response exercise I had consumed in random Holiday Inn Express conference rooms while taking investigation training courses (almost always located in a town with a name like Mechanicsburgville situated in Iowa, Arkansas, or Kansas), I stopped using most of the acronyms I had collected and began to focus more on the advanced interviewing techniques I learned from the NTSB during my time at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, the storytelling techniques I acquired as a film school dropout, and the qualitative research skills I reluctantly picked up during my circuitous and rather painful doctoral journey.

If you made it this far into my story and are still intrigued, I would love to help you learn how to use this odd but effective amalgamation of skills to leverage your curiosity about work and discover more about what is happening in your organization. I’m convinced that I can help you capture the stories of success and innovation, frustration and failure, and triumph and struggle your workers are experiencing every day. And unlike me, I can help you learn how to do this without wasting a heck of a lot of time and money in grad and film school (or, in most cases, exposing you to one of the fine motor inns located no more and no less than 20 feet off a major freeway in Iowa, Arkansas, or Kansas.)

So, if you want to explore how to use qualitative research methodology, attribution theory, human decision-making, humble and appreciative inquiry, storytelling, and accident causation models to bracket cognitive bias and increase cognitive diversity and empathy while studying work- Let’s talk!

I’d love to help you learn how to learn your stories.