Active Training Team’s Immersive Training Comes to America

The Uptime team participated in Active Training Team's (ATT) Thrive
USA program launch, showcasing their revolutionary approach to
safety training. Allen and Joel discuss ATT with Dermot Kerrigan,
the company's director. Their immersive actor-led scenarios are
transforming safety culture through emotional engagement,
de-escalation tools, and a focus on safety leadership. Their
innovative UK-based training model is being adapted for the U.S.
market through Thrive USA, bringing their effective approach to the
expanding wind industry in the States. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This
episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn
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https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech -
www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your
host, Allen Hall. We all know the risks involved in our work, and
all of us have participated in safety training. Recent serious
accidents in the U. S. and abroad have placed a heavy toll on our
industry, and I, like many others, have been concerned about a fall
off in the effectiveness of safety training. Thank you And the
overall safety culture. This podcast is fundamentally about safety
training, but not your average run of the mill safety training.
Joel Saxon and I were invited by active training team, a UK based
company to participate in their thrive USA training event. Our host
was Dermot Kerrigan director at active training team. The thrive
USA event was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was well
attended by health and safety representatives from large wind OEMs,
developers. and owners, and it was a full house. The training I
experienced was markedly more impactful, relevant, and memorable
than any safety program I've encountered in my career. After the
event, Joel and I sat down with the aforementioned Dermot Kerrigan
of Active Training Team alongside Sara DaSilva, Deputy Project HSC
Manager at Ørsted and Graeme Cooper, Global VP of Energy Transition
with Jacobs to discuss how Active Training Team will change U. S.
training methods, hopefully permanently. Enjoy the show. We're in
Boston, Massachusetts. Actually we're in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
a lovely area. And we're here for one reason to participate in the
Thrive USA training event, which is conducted by Active Training
Team. And we have. Dermot Kerrigan, the director of Active Training
Team, who has come all the way to America to train us Americans on
how to do it right. I wouldn't say that. Dermot you're making our
podcast even more famous because you're the first guest we have on
the you're the first guest that has an IMDB. Okay. Yes. Yes. Now
you're going back a while. Because that's part of ATT. That there
is an immersive experience that involves actors in the actual
training scenarios. It's live. It's immersive. It's wraparound. And
that is the brilliance you have brought to safety training. And
maybe the thing to do here is just to start off by describing what
this training experience is. Dermot Kerrigan: What is it? Any
behavioral psychologist will tell you that if you want to reach
someone's intellect, the best way to do that is via their emotions.
So put simply, if I can move you, I can make you think. So if
you're trying to get someone to think about safety, their role in
safety how their behavior influences other people, and actually
it's individual behaviors that produces a culture. And a very good
way to do that is by telling a story. And if you're trying to tell
a really impactful story theater, film, or a combination of the
two, with professional actors facilitating that, it's a pretty good
way to go about telling a story and hitting people on an emotional
level, rather than the usual kind of dry death by PowerPoint
experience, which kind of blights traditional safety training, you
know. Allen Hall: I think that's the big difference here, right?
Is, in America, we pretty much are Tick the box watch the training
video, get out the VCR. I've actually seen the VCRs. You're dating
yourself. No, I saw through training just recently where they
brought out a VCR and I couldn't believe it still worked. And in
terms of what I learned there, I've learned almost nothing. Sara
DaSilva, deputy project HSC manager at Ørsted. Sara DaSilva: It
takes that next step past. Sitting in a room and going through
safety training to really engaging people and getting them involved
in thinking about safety. And, we do try to do that with campaigns
and initiatives within the projects. But I do see the benefit of a
group coming in, making it very realistic and getting into the
hearts and minds of all the workers. So everyone can reflect on
their why they work safely, why they want to go home safe, whether
it's for their family or other motives. Everyone's got their own
reasons. But really to get people to think about that in their
actions in their day to day is something that you can talk about
in, in a lot of the training that we do, but really to get people
immersed in, in thinking about it. Allen Hall: If you think about
how we brought safety up in general in the world, we have brought
it up in industrialized world. We brought it up a long way, but we
now see the need, need that step change. Dermot Kerrigan: Right.
Allen Hall: And that's the immersive experience. Dermot Kerrigan:
Yeah, I think so. It's not a U. S. experience alone, believe me.
The U. K. and Europe have always got a long way to go in terms of
traditional training. Sure. This is not commonplace necessarily.
No. It's still very cutting edge. Yeah. Even the U. K. and Europe,
it's still very innovative. But to my knowledge, there isn't
anything quite like it in safety. here in the US compared to what
we do, what we have historically been doing in the UK, which is why
we're setting up ATT Inc and training up a US team to be able to do
what we do in the UK, but, with American accent. So what we do with
the mobile stuff is we make that, the fact that you can't suspend
your disbelief, a virtue. Yeah. So even though this thing is
happening in a conference room, actually you very quickly think
it's really happening. And the way we do that is a combination of
film and live performance. So you see an actor on film. For some
reason, people, when they see a film, they actually buy that person
is really that person. And then next thing, that person seems to
walk through the screen and appear live in the room and they go,
yeah, that's crazy. Okay. That's not an actor. That's a real
character. We'll engage with them on those terms. They'll have
seen. The consequences of getting that wrong. I've seen that guy
perhaps getting very badly hurt on film, but having engaged with
them live, he then walks back into the screen and guess what?
Nothing happens. This tragic Friday afternoon just becomes another
rather boring day at work. Somehow you can play with people's
emotions by mixing this live performance with film. And It really
messes with people's brains, so we don't necessarily do that in the
centers, because we don't have to. We've got the technical
facilities to be able to play in a different way. But the mobile
stuff, sometimes the very simple things work incredibly well. But
that made it real. Allen Hall: Yeah. And I know it's sometimes hard
to understand when Dermot's describing all these things, that
doesn't seem possible. But yet I experienced it, Sara DaSilva. Sara
DaSilva: They did a really good job showing what not to do and
having you feel the impact of responding in a way that may not be
effective, right? So they put you in that situation, made you feel
like, Oh, wow, that, being punitive or more aggressive towards
somebody is going to have a negative effect. It's not going to have
that. response that you're looking for somebody to change their
behavior. So being able to live through those and see the changes
of how the different actors responded was, it was impactful because
you believed the way they responded in each of those situations.
Joel Saxum: When we first connected with you, I thought to myself,
This concept just makes too much sense. Why isn't this a part of
something in the United States? Graham Cooper, Global VP of Energy
Transition with Jacobs. Graeme Cooper: This is about you going home
safe, not at risk, not exposed. You going it actually takes it to
almost a primeval level. That we're all here just to look after
each other. Yeah. I know it sounds like, that sounds a bit, worldly
and, but actually, if you reflect on what you've seen today, and I
reflect on it, when we were having a bite of lunch, Is there was
emotion in the room, people gave willingly and freely, people
exposed themselves to that level of discomfort, but it was never
uncomfortable. Because it felt like we were in something together.
Joel Saxum: It's not just the actors. It's not just the behavioral
scientists behind the scenes. It's not just that. The Tina today.
Yeah. Who was giving, who was the facilitator for the whole thing.
She was amazing at invoking emotion from the crowd and talking to
people and engaging with them and Can I get some of your feedback?
A lot of times when you sit in a room and someone asks for
feedback, A lot of times everybody just sits there for a little
while, it goes quiet for 10 15 seconds, and then the person just
moves on. She was so good at getting people to participate. And
evoking some of the emotion through the actors, but bringing that
out in people, and getting them to think,