The Coaches' Guide to Driving Real Change in Safety

"The foundation of health and safety practice must be on technical skills. But what we often miss are the enabling skills, the ones that actually help us connect work-as-imagined to work-as-done."

- Andrew Barrett

By the time Andrew Barrett took the stage to close ePIC 2026, the room had heard why safety needs to change from every angle.

Greg Smith had shown why paper safe isn't the same as safe. Andrew Sharman made the case for engagement. Megan Tranter tackled culture. Sidney Dekker argued that real change starts with listening. Craig Bleakley had spent the day tying it all into one story: safety isn't managed, it's led.

Barrett's session ran differently to the ones that came before. Instead of a talk, he ran a working session, and the tools in it came from his own coaching practice, built over years working with more than 700 health and safety professionals through actual change, not a single day.

Why good ideas die before Monday morning

Barrett named the gap all of this sits inside: "work as imagined" versus "work as done." Every policy or procedure is, by definition, imagined. It only becomes real once someone does the job tomorrow. Technical skill, knowing what "reasonably practicable" means, running a proper risk assessment, doesn't close that gap on its own. What closes it are what he called enabling skills.

He also named two ways good ideas usually die: getting lifted from a conference and shoved into an organisation without testing if it fits, or getting shelved entirely because it doesn't arrive as a complete answer. His alternative: treat the day's material like a MasterChef pantry. Everyone gets the same ingredients, what you make with them is up to you.

Tool 1: Get more ideas before you chase the right one

Safety already knows this rule from fire exits: never rely on a single way out. Most problem-solving ignores it. One idea shows up, sounds reasonable, and the room defends it instead of looking for others.

“This rush to the answer is one of the biggest problems that we have, because as the world gets more complex, there is no 'the' answer. What we need to do is to think about things differently, and one of the ways to do that is with more ideas.”

The tool: 8-X-Outs, one of the exercises Barrett uses in his own coaching practice.

• Draw eight boxes on a page, with one idea or problem at the centre
• Fill each box with a different idea, prompted by asking "What if I...?", "What if you...?", "What if we...?"
• Keep going even when it's hard to fill them all. The instruction was to capture as many ideas as possible, not to stop at the first one that felt workable

After the room tried it, he checked in directly: who filled all eight boxes, who filled at least four, and who struggled. For the ones who struggled, the reason people gave was having too many problems and not knowing which to focus on first.

He then asked the room whether, after the exercise, they had more ideas than when they'd started. As he put it: "That is the point."

Tool 2: Go looking for bad ideas on purpose

Counterintuitive, but deliberate. Barrett pointed to research showing people are far more reluctant to say a bad idea out loud than a good one, which quietly shrinks the pool everyone's drawing from.

The tool: the Change Inverter. Bad ideas and good ideas, at a simple level, are two sides of the same coin.

• Name a bad idea first, out loud, no judgement
• Ask what the direct flip side looks like and move on from that

One attendee's actual experience matched this exactly: while standard SOP training wasn't landing, short videos on the same content worked well for the team

Barrett also worked through this live with an attendee, Rob, who was dealing with a CEO and leaders who wanted their teams to "have an adventure," risk included. Talking it through, the room connected Rob's problem back to something Megan Tranter had said earlier in the day, a "yes, and" response, showing how one speaker's idea can hand another leader their next move.

Tool 3: Get specific before it goes back to the team

The room's own discussion proved Barrett's point for him. Words like better, improvement, and assurance came up repeatedly in the room's own conversations, each time as something people had assumed everyone else understood the same way.

The tool is a framework Barrett borrowed from an educator, Vanessa Guthrie. He said her framework wasn't originally built for this, but works well for getting clear on communication.

Three types of questions came through clearly in the session:

• Purpose, the "why" questions: what is this for, what's its rationale, its relevance
• What, is it a concept (vague, "fluffy... like vapor," things like safety or risk) or an object (something you can point at, a table, a guard, an SOP)
• How, the action questions, what you're actually going to do next. Barrett called this one "Bingo," treating it like a bingo card you work through until an answer lands

Tool 4: Take the smallest possible step

Barrett's closing tool was about not leaving the room with a drawer full of unused ideas. Big change, he said, doesn't happen all at once, it happens incrementally, step by step.

• Ask: what is the smallest possible step I can take when I get back to work tomorrow?
• It doesn't need to be dramatic: a conversation, a different question, testing an idea on a small scale
• Pick one, and focus on that. Momentum, not scale, is what drives lasting change

The bottomline

Barrett closed by recapping all four tools for the room: more ideas, bad ideas used on purpose, clearer language, and the smallest possible step.

It was the right way to end ePIC 2026. The rest of the day made the case for why safety needs to change, compliance without outcomes, the case for engagement, culture, and listening. Barrett's session gave the room a way to act on all of it: pick one idea from the day, run it through these four tools, and take the smallest step that gets it moving before Monday morning arrives.

We're proud of how this year's ePIC came together, and even prouder of the ideas the room is walking away with. Roll on ePIC 2027, so we can see what everyone builds from here.