Kevin Elliott  0:03  
Kevin, welcome to Home Safely, a podcast from the National Center for Rural Road Safety. Hi, everyone, I'm Kevin Elliott. I'm your host on the podcast, and I'm the marketing manager for the National Center for Rural Road Safety. Each episode on our podcast will bring you stories, strategies, and solutions that are helping communities across the country make their roads safer for everyone, whether you're behind the wheel designing the road or just a community member, we're all working together out there to get everyone home safely. Enjoy the episode. Everybody, I am here with a really special guest on this episode of Home Safely. I'm here with Jay Otto. He is a managing partner at Banyan Collaborative, and he's known around the country as an expert in building culture, safety culture, and how communication affects culture across industries, but specifically in transportation safety culture, and that's how I met Jay at some meeting somewhere around the country, where he was talking about these things, and also to his research when he was at the Montana State University around the positive culture framework, which is transforming the way we talk about transportation safety and how we build safety culture. So this is going to be a really interesting episode, and if you've ever seen Jay speak, or seen one of his webinars, or certainly been in a meeting work that he facilitated, you know he really is a master communicator and going to be a really great guest. So, we're very excited to introduce everybody, if you haven't heard of him, to Jay Otto. Thank you for being on the show, Jay.

Jay Otto  1:41  
Well, thank you, Kevin, for that very gracious introduction. I do remember years ago when I attended one of your breakout sessions, and it was great to hear you speak and talk about communication, and it's a great honor to be a part of the podcast. I've listened to several others, they're great topics, they're very valuable for folks, whether you are focused on rural traffic safety, or just traffic safety in general. I think they're valuable for everyone. So, it's wonderful to be here.

Kevin Elliott  2:07  
Thank you. Well, I tell you what, let's start at the top. It's so important to drive traffic fatalities down. This is a massive crisis around the country, it's ongoing, it's pernicious, it's persistent, it's a really hard one, and we know that certain things work when other humans are watching other humans, right? So, if it's law enforcement, or if there's whatever that happens to be, there's a way to enforce things, but when we're alone and we're on a rural road in the middle of nowhere, we don't have those eyeballs on us, we don't have those ways to make us drive more safely, or whatever. At that point, culture is what matters, our norms, the way we expect ourselves to behave, and that's your specialty. So, start at the top a little bit, and just talk about the importance of culture and building culture around safety to really make a difference.

Jay Otto  3:01  
Absolutely, and as you mentioned, my, my most recent background was as a researcher at a, in an academic setting, and what I loved about that time was the opportunity to sort of do some deep dives around this idea of culture, I mean, we all talk about culture, I came before I was in academia, I was a practitioner at a community level, and you would certainly, we would certainly talk about things like community norms and culture. Certainly, when we're in organizations, we talk about culture all the time, but, like, what is it, and how does it work, and how do we grow it, in particular? So that was a great time chapter in my life where I got to just hang out in that space, I continue to really lean into that. As you said, traffic safety is a very challenging issue. It is a public health issue, which is a big thing we need to shift to. It's not just a transportation issue, it's a public health issue, and it is very persistent. If we look at the data for the past, you know, 20 or 30 years, we saw some declines in the first 10 years of the 2000s but really we've hit a, we've hit a flat plateau, and it's maybe even gone up a little bit in recent years. Hopefully, we saw some odd things happening during the pandemic, and we're bending down back from that, but for many decades now, we have not had a steady decrease. I think about culture as the core component of so much of this work, because it is in that context you described. What do we do when nobody else is watching? But it's not only that, in terms of when we're in the vehicle and nobody else is watching, it's also that element of what do we do when nobody else is watching, when we're at our work? What do we do when nobody else is watching when we're in the context of our family and our peers and our loved ones? One of the things that came out of my, our work when I was at the center, which was done with lots of other folks, and I don't claim this definition at all as my own, it was co-created. Lots of different people, but this notion of culture is being shared values and beliefs, so to begin there, because culture can can mean lots of different things, and there are lots of different disciplines that study culture, but when we look at that place of shared values and beliefs that influence behaviors, and in particular, behaviors that impact safety, and in the context of this conversation, we're talking about traffic safety, roadway safety, and in particular in rural settings, although all these ideas will apply across the board in other settings as well, and so this idea of somewhat focusing our definition of culture on shared values and beliefs gives us an opportunity to hone in on what are those values and beliefs, and then thinking about ways that we can grow those values and beliefs, and of course, instrumental to all aspects of growing beliefs are is communication, so your passion and your background, your expertise, as well, but we really can't think about influencing anybody's beliefs without communication. At the end of the day, we like to like to say it's - it's changing beliefs is grounded in conversation, and those are often conversations we have with others, but sometimes they're conversations we have with ourselves. So, it is very much a communication lends itself to communication, and the critical role that communication plays. So, now when we think about roadway safety, how are we growing shared values and beliefs that support safer behaviors, always wearing our seat belt, not speeding, not being distracted, being fully engaged in the driving task, never driving after drinking or using other impairing substances, and of course that's just one lens of our work.

We're now starting to understand as other, as we compare ourselves to other countries and the tremendous progress that other countries have made in traffic safety, and where we are falling behind is to recognize so many other behaviors that we need to grow, behaviors we need to grow across this idea of a safe system, thinking about that as being grounded in growing cultures amongst all these groups, and these these groups that interact with different aspects of a safe system, so I do find culture at the very foundation of this work, and this notion of shared values and beliefs. Since leaving my academic position and starting this new new chapter in my career with Banyan Collaborative, with several wonderful colleagues, we've had the chance to look back at our work and say what worked well and what did we learn, and how would we take this to the next level, and that's where we've pulled together an idea we're calling the Improving Outcomes Framework, and really connecting in with this this idea of the power of focusing on mindsets, process, and skills, and when we think about mindsets, it encompasses many things, and there are researchers and practitioners who will look at definitions of organizational culture really as shared mindsets, but I think it's fascinating to think about culture, the shared values and beliefs that impact behaviors, and how they influence so much of our work for that driver when nobody is watching, but also for all the other behaviors within a complex system that impact traffic safety. So I went to a lot of different directions there. I think it's a fascinating question, and so we can hone in on aspects of that to continue this conversation.

Kevin Elliott  8:48  
Sure thing, I'd love to hear more about the improving outcomes framework, because I know one of the revolutionary, certainly insightful aspects of your work is in transportation safety or traffic safety, specifically. Historically, when we communicate with people, we say, "Do it or else, right where you see built or else. Don't drive drunk, or we shake our finger at people, and, and, and use a fear-based communication: do this, or you will get a ticket, or you will go to jail, or you, whatever that happens to be. And what was interesting about your work, and has changed the way I do my work, and I know others, because I've talked to others around the country who, who have followed this, and it centers around this idea of shared values. I think you were one of the first people to, that I heard articulate it like this, that said, "Hey, you know, most people don't speed, most people don't drive under the influence, most. In other words, our culture is already leaning in a positive way, but we focus so much on the negative it makes the problem not feel bigger, because it's a big problem, but the emphasis might be on the wrong thing. So we can say, look at all these people. Who are already wanting to do the right thing. How do we build that, and in very simplistic terms, that I'd like you to add nuance to. It's I always equate it to, like, the cool kids table in school, right? People follow the cool kids, so if you get the cool kids their shared values and beliefs around positive safe behaviors, almost by definition, you get a lot of the other people, because everybody wants to be in the, in that positive part of the culture. Did I say that right? Is that that capture that correctly?

Jay Otto  10:37  
Yeah, I think it brings together some really important ideas, and when we think about this idea of shared values and beliefs, and in particular shared beliefs, a lot of my work at in the research realm was to measure those beliefs among various people, and one of the beliefs that you can look at is what are people's perceptions of what everybody else is doing, and you can also look at their perceptions of what people expect them to do, but let's just look at this first belief in terms of what do I think everybody else is doing. This is classically called the perceived descriptive norm, for example, like you were saying, the data would clearly show us most people do not drive after drinking alcohol. Let's say they do not drive under the influence of alcohol, they do not drive impaired. Percentage-wise, it's a relatively small percentage of people who engage in that risky behavior, although they cause quite a bit of harm. But if you ask people, how often do most people in your community drive after drinking? People will drastically overestimate that. They will think that most people are doing it a weekly or more often, when in fact most people never do it. So, we've got this really interesting paradox between what people are actually doing, and what people think everybody is doing. It is interesting, because people will say we really need to shift our culture, but if you start to look at what individually people believe and what individually people are doing, they often have very healthy beliefs and healthy behaviors, not everyone, which is why we have the problems that we have, but most people do, and so in aspects our culture is positive, but we don't perceive it as positive, which will enable those folks who are engaging in risky behaviors to feel it's acceptable, which it's not. So we want to shift that, so they're less likely to do it, like you said. How do we get folks to understand what most folks are doing, and sort of seeing that as the cool behavior, and then wanting to be more like that, but it also acts as an inhibitory structure to other things that we might want to happen. For example, passing a law change - an elected official is not going to pass or change a law if they think everybody is violating the law, because then it's like, what are we going to arrest everybody? That's just a mess, but it's really not the case that maybe everybody's engaging in the risky behavior, so the law would actually not result in everybody being arrested, but would have impact on those folks who are engaging in the risky behavior, so this aspect of what we perceive our culture to be and actually measuring it in in rigorous ways, doing high quality surveys, random sampling, all that good stuff, so we can get a sense of what's really going on, and then merely reflecting that back to folks, so that they start to understand the positive norms that exist within their communities, those positive beliefs that are shared, and then the work becomes not trying to change everybody, but grow what's there, and this is a fundamental shift of some of the work, is to say we've got some real strengths, some positive aspects within our communities. How do we grow these? How do we lean into that strength and grow it? And we can also do that with our values. Overwhelmingly, people want to have a safe experience on their roadways. They want to get home safely, and sometimes even at a greater priority, they want their loved ones to get home safely. How do we lean into that and elevate that shared value, which is so protective? It is not that most people don't care. Most people do care. Some people make bad decisions for a variety of reasons. Overwhelmingly, people have very strong positive values, but we don't talk about those, we don't leverage those, we focus on that, those others, so it's exactly right when we talk about traffic safety culture. How do we lean into the positive safety culture that we have, and how do we grow that? How do we leverage it to do more, and that is very much leaning into those positive values, those positive norms, and at the same time.

Acknowledging the harm that exists, so that's sometimes a hard thing to communicate, or cognitively to hold. There's a bit of a paradox. The language we would use is that we need to raise concern. There's absolutely concern around traffic safety. This is a public health issue. Too many people are injured or killed, and we have a lot of hope, hope not being don't worry, be happy, hope, but there is a clear will and a clear way to move forward. So, in communication, we'll often talk to folks about engaging stakeholders by raising concern and hope. You've got to raise concern to get them participating and cognitively involved with your issue, and you need to raise hope, which is a will and a way forward, so they know what to do, how to participate, how to grow their part of this traffic safety culture. It is a fascinating aspect, and a lot of paradoxes involved in that, that people don't accurately see what is going on, but this whole idea of shining a light on what is working, growing the positive norms that exist, is a critical part of doing cultural work, for sure. And that occurs both at large, like a population within a state, the country, or a community, but also happens within our organizations, we will have misperceptions of our peers and what they are doing as well.

Kevin Elliott  16:26  
Excellent, I love this stuff, and I think that because to me, once you get the culture snowball going in the right direction, a lot of the other things take care of themselves because people start to self regulate in groups or organizations or societies, I want to talk more about this, especially digging into concern and hope, and how agencies or communities can build those crucial aspects of culture in their, you know, in their lives. When we come back, so we'll be right back with Jay Otto. He is a managing partner at Banyan Collaborative. 

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Okay, I'm back with Jay Otto. He's a managing partner at Banyan Collaborative, and we're talking about the improving outcomes framework, which is something his company is pioneering, and it's based in part on earlier parts of his career and research that they've done, and it is a fascinating way to look at how to build culture around traffic safety. The best example I use when this comes up, because a lot of times when you talk to people, they say, "Hey, there's no way we're ever going to get to no zero traffic fatalities on it. It's just impossible. I understand what they mean by that. I mean, I understand that sentiment. It is a big, hard, rangy problem. And so I remember when I came into this career about a decade ago, I started looking around, like, have we ever done this before? Are there any other examples where we've, where we've actually made progress in a big, hard, rangy societal level problem, and we have now. We haven't. Smoking is the one, cigarette smoking is the one that I go back to the most, that seems to resonate the most with people. Jay, I don't know how old you are, but, but I know you and I are roughly the same generation, or at least old enough to remember how pervasive and universal cigarette smoking was in society, it was everywhere, everywhere, everyone smoked as bowling alleys in public hospitals, airplanes, restaurants, and so if you talk to a young person now and say, imagine a world where you could light a cigarette in the middle of a McDonald's, they can't imagine that world exists. They just like, who would do that? And if now we were in the middle of an airport or a hospital or an airplane and lit a cigarette, everybody on that plane would have a very visceral, very negative reaction. It's like, we don't do that, that's not what we do. And in my lifetime, to see that kind of massive culture shift around something that, if you live through it, you remember there's if you in 1982 if you had told somebody we're going to basically, we're going to, we are going to eliminate smoking in our public, every public space in the country that seemed impossible, not possible to do, and here we did it. Are there any parallels there between. Mean, this raising concern and hope around traffic safety and building culture around that, that you see, or I know that gives me hope, I'll put it that way. It, I go, okay, we've done something this, this hard before, and we can do it again.

Jay Otto  20:14  
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great thing to learn from. It has some very important parallels. I was acutely aware of it as a kid who grew up, and my dad smoked. My dad was a physician. I always thought it was ridiculous when I went to his office, and he had an ashtray on his on his desk. I was like, good to have it ridiculous, but it is an example of a shift. There's some very important lessons learned. The process used a public health process, which is what we are starting to see shifting with our traffic safety work, right? Aspects of the safe system approach and systemic thinking and the safe systems pyramid are all things that we're learning from a public health model. It took time, like you said, these conversations about secondhand smoke and smoke, smoking, and different things. The initial report about that came out in the late 1960s and here we are with tremendous progress, but it's many years and decades to shift those perceptions, those notions, and still, where we are today, tobacco-related illnesses is one of the greatest preventable causes of death right now, so we're not there yet in terms of of of of completely addressing that issue. When I think about aspects of traffic safety, I think one of the challenges is that we we look as we should, we monitor the fatalities and serious injuries of last year, and we're looking at that metric, but some of the things that we need to do and are doing to change the culture and improve traffic safety outcomes take time, so we can become discouraged because we do all this stuff, and then we look at next year's data, and they didn't go down as much as we wanted, and I think one of the things we would learn from tobacco, as well as other the experiences of other countries, is that the improvements we're going to see are slow and small and occur over time, and this is frustrating. We like to go quicker, we like to see it also is a challenge for evaluation, because evaluation can't always attribute what we have done to a meaningful outcome right away, so we have to look at some of the leading indicators, and this is something I think we all need to learn, is like, what are leading indicators for culture, and what are leading indicators for strategies in general, and I mean, I loved listening to your webinar, the previous webinar with Amanda Austin, and that the work of roundabouts in Texas, and where she said three years ago we had 16, and now we have over 650 and now Texas is a huge state, 650 intersections is a teeny fraction of all their intersections, but that's huge growth, and so this is a leading indicator of intersections that are moving towards a vision zero approach. You and I both heard a wonderful idea introduced by an outstanding, I think he's a deputy public works director named Victor Lund in Minnesota, and Victor talked about the notion of vision zero for a country, seems just really hard, and the vision zero for his state is difficult, and even vision zero for his county just seems like, oh my gosh, but then he said, you know, it's not so hard when I think about vision zero for this intersection, what does it mean for this intersection to be zero, and how do I really think about that, or this stretch of highway, and different things like that. So, we got to break it down. It's going to be a lot of small pieces that come together, and this is this is what I would say is a great example of the mindset we've got to grow this mindset that it is going to be multiple strategies across the elements of the safe system approach occurring over quite a bit of time that is going to give us incremental improvements that add up over time. There is no silver bullet. There's no one thing we can do, and so growing this mindset is a key piece of this work, and, as well, we've seen huge shifts in culture on traffic safety. 3040 years ago, we might have an expression of "have one for the road, and that literally meant have a drink to take with you while you were driving home.

Overwhelmingly, we we would say that's not a good idea, like nobody's going to be going to that space right now. Now, there's some people who are regretfully doing that, but as a culture, we are not there. So, we've seen significant shifts there. We just need to keep going, and we need to figure out and hone. Our skills, so that we can be more effective at doing this work, not getting frustrated, looking for the lead indicators, and really getting better and faster at doing this, which I start to see in different entities across the country.

Kevin Elliott  25:16  
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned Vic Lund, because he's actually a guest on the podcast, we talked to Vic about that, because you and I were at that same meeting where he brought that up, and we heard the same thing, we went, "Oh, he just flipped it completely on his head. These problems can seem so overwhelming, but he goes, "If I can just.. I can fix that intersection, I mean, we can do that, and if everybody's just looking in their own little area at what they can do, that's a. that's a positive way to see it. So, you mentioned in your, in that answer, and you've mentioned a few times, traffic safety as a public health issue. Now, this seems obvious to me now, but it doesn't, it hasn't always seemed obvious, and we're starting to see, we're talking about ideas spreading, or culture changing, or mindset - that's the word - mindsets changing the mindset around traffic safety. I've seen it just in the last decade change, because if you were to say, maybe 10 years ago, in the average room full of practitioners, that traffic safety, or traffic fatalities, and serious injuries are a public health crisis, they just wouldn't have seen it that way, they would have said it's a serious problem, but it's not like a public health, like an epidemic or something. Now you're starting, because, but when we change that mindset, now we're bringing in all the tools from the public health industry and models you mentioned, the public health that pyramid, the safe system approach that you've mentioned several times, which I'd like you to sort of walk through and talk about the systemic approach, all the systemic and safe system, and all these, all these s words that are hard, maybe go through some of those, and with the umbrella of traffic safety as a public health concern, and then what tools that brings to our mindset from that industry, from that world into traffic safety, and why that's such a big deal.

Jay Otto  27:05  
Yeah, I think it is a big deal, and I think if I had to guess, you know, sort of why, why we weren't in that space years ago, well, it was because, you know, appropriately traffic safety was put within the Department of Transportation at the federal level, and sometimes federal agencies have their silos, so they, they, they have that focus, but that, that, that viewpoint then comes down to the states, and then it comes down to the communities, and when we open up that understanding to say, hey, let's just look at from a public health lens, the question is, like, what's killing our people, or what's seriously injuring our people, and how do we start to look at that, and you look at the data. Well, traffic safety is right up there, it's a leading cause of death for young people, five, you know, five ages five to 25 So, when you use those kinds of broad health-related questions, traffic safety is going to come up. Now, what is that? What does that shift bring us well, public health learned centuries ago that we can have limited impact when we think about addressing a public health lens to just focus on individuals, so if I'm trying to address a cholera outbreak, I can try to hospitalize and nurse back to health those folks who are exhibiting cholera symptoms, but overwhelmingly my hospital is just going to get, just going to become overwhelmed with people, like I can't, I can't treat them all, and I'm never going to get ahead of the curve. So public health said, "No, we got to step back and say, what's causing everybody to get cholera, and let's deal with that, so that mindset of starting to think about what's the system involved, and how do I move to the core aspects of the system to therefore prevent those kinds of illness that exhibits within the individual. We're just starting to think that way in traffic safety, so for decades we have thought about traffic safety and fatal crashes as the result of driver error, and absolutely driver error contributes to that big time, but the realization and the shift is you can't make drivers who don't make mistakes, you can't get to significant improvements only by working on driver error. We have for many years been working on driver error, and you know, if you compare our fatal, fatal, and serious injury crashes from the 1960s we are much better. But we've hit this plateau, so if we're going to break, break the plateau and continue to go down, we have to move beyond driver error and start thinking about the whole system, and that's the idea of a safe system approach. The safe system approach was originally developed in sort of high-risk industries, things like aviation, but also things like nuclear. Power plants and other things, this and the underlying ideas, we've got to build multiple systems that if one system fails, we don't have a catastrophic failure. So, if a pilot makes a mistake, can the plane have other instruments and other factors that then help give a second chance? That could be a co-pilot that could be all sorts of different things. If an instrument fails in a plane, is there another way for the pilots to be able to ascertain the information they need, so they can still fly the plane? If one engine fails, is there another engine that can still land the plane? So all these other factors are thinking about redundancy and multiple systems, so we can bring that idea to our space of traffic safety, and we can think about traffic safety is not just being people in vehicles on roads, but think about safe road users and all the things they can do, which is one element, safe roads. How do we then design roads that will maybe not always prevent a crash, but reduce the likelihood that that crash results in a fatality or a serious injury. So we can do things that absolutely change the outcomes of crashes. It can also influence driver behavior by creating different kinds of roads. That's a classic roundabout that's an intersection design that virtually eliminates fatal crashes much better than a classic cross intersection, has other benefits as well, increases engagement of drivers, reduces speeds, all sorts of things, increases flow in many circumstances.

Great example of a different roadway that is going to lead to much better outcomes. I can think about safer vehicles. We obviously see the technology that have come in in recent decades, airbags, seat belts, even. I mean, you know, many decades ago vehicles didn't have seat belts, so having seat belts, then airbags. Now we have things like automatic braking, traction control, so I don't lose total control of the vehicle if there's a skid or something. Getting more advanced technology, so I don't lane departure, things like that. We're starting to get into things of feedback on speeding at the end of the day. Every fatal crash, overwhelmingly not everyone, but overwhelming majority of fatal crashes involves too much kinetic energy. The body exhibited too much kinetic energy in a crash, either slowing down, hitting an abutment, or something else crashing, where that energy was dissipated in the human body, and the human body fell apart, and it killed somebody. So, slowing things down, and especially for the context, makes a huge difference. If I've got vulnerable road users, I got people on bikes or walking, and things like that. If I can slow things down, I can drastically reduce the likelihood that those individuals are killed or seriously injured in a crash. And then I can think about post-crash care. Crashes are still going to happen, but how do I reduce the likelihood that somebody dies as a result of that? So all aspects of the safe system approach allow us to think more systemically through a public health lens about things we could change in those systems that together would start to create redundancy, whereas if one component fails, then it doesn't, there's another component there that can reduce the likelihood of a fatal or a serious injury. I really love Washington State's addition to the five elements of the safe system approach. They added a six element safe land use. So, how do we even start planning differently to enable safer transportation that can look like a lot of things, right? It can look like communities that reduce how much we have to drive more active transportation, all sorts of different aspects with safe land use. And then I love Colorado's approach, where they put safety culture at the center of their safe system approach, recognizing the importance of shared values and beliefs to then influence all the behaviors of those different elements, so states have adapted it, but the safe system approach is a big game changer if we let it be. It's a big shift in mindset if we let it be, and so a lot of what I advocate is for folks to lean into that and to allow themselves to think differently, to shift a mindset, because when you shift that mindset, new opportunities come up. There are new ways of seeing things, and new actions emerge. And at the end of the day, we've got to have new actions, not only amongst drivers, but amongst everybody who's a part of all these systems. It's through those new behaviors that we're going to start to see better outcomes and improvements.

Kevin Elliott  34:40  
Excellent. We're going to take one more break, and then we'll come back and have a few more, a few more minutes with Jay, and he is an expert in the improving outcomes framework and safety culture, and how to build culture and communicate that. So, we'll be right back after this break.

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All right, I'm back with Jay Otto, who's a managing partner at Banyan Collaborative, and we were talking about the safe system approach and the idea of traffic safety as a public health issue, and by changing that mindset, which is what is a core part of changing culture by changing the whole mindset, the way we think about traffic safety, and putting it right up there as the serious problem it is with with other items that kill a lot of people, it helps us build different values and then of course different behaviors around that, so Jay, if you could just give in your experience, are there examples from other areas, other industries, or other parts of public health where you've seen something like a safe system approach really make a big difference to kind of give us a mental model for how it could maybe go in traffic safety.

Jay Otto  36:40  
Well, I mean, I think absolutely. If you look at the aviation industry, they have a very low crash rate, very low fatalities per miles traveled or individuals traveling, and they very much use a safe systems approach. I think when we look at public health, there are many aspects that start to use that kind of a lens. Historically, we've used that lens on on communicable diseases, so when we think about not having an outbreak of, or not having smallpox, or issues around measles, or other highly contagious diseases, thinking about that intersection of vaccination and then isolation when things do occur, so, so lots of different examples in those spaces. High-risk industry will will constantly look at aspects of a safe system where operator error can't result in a serious injury or fatality. There are other backup systems that have to take place to reduce that. So, I think I think that exists in many places. I think there are aspects of that safety culture, the growth of that safety culture, which is where folks were just very intentional about growing their culture. Culture exists all the time, whether we are intentional about growing it or not. It is always there. It is there amongst our communities, it is there amongst our organizations. I think one of the things we recognize and want to promote is the idea that we can create, we do create our culture, and we can be more intentional about that. So, how do we recognize our role in creating our own culture and culture and starting to take steps to advance that? And you, you raised a really important issue earlier when you mentioned that, you know, in the conversation, for example, with with Vic Lund, that notion that that even a small group of people in a small context can have can impact their, their, you know, what's going on in their community and the outcomes in that space, and that's very much true of culture too. So, when we think about organizational culture, it can be daunting because we can feel like, well, it's the leaders who set the culture. Well, the research is pretty clear that leaders have absolutely an influence on culture, but if a leader comes in and attempts to overwhelmingly shift the culture significantly and does not do it in a very collaborative, engaging way. When that leader leaves, the culture goes back to the way it was. It was never really changed. It was just sort of artificially shifted while that leader was there. And so that's this recognition that culture exists throughout an organization. And I think the critical importance for individuals who could be listening to this, and with that daunting task of, like, well, how would I ever try to do something within my culture? It's just me, but that's how culture changes. So I think to think about, like, what is one conversation you could have with one person where you might talk about I. To what degree are your all's practices aligning with your values around safety, and how much do you talk about your values around safety, and what those values mean in terms of the thing we're doing right now, or the task we have to complete next week, and make it real, and that's really how culture starts to grow, it's one conversation at a time to grow out to more and more conversations, and then group conversations, and then the culture of your team starts to shift, and then other people recognize, "Wow, your team has a really good culture, I want to be a part of that team. Well, exactly right, you do. And how could we grow that culture in more teams? So, a positive culture can be contagious in a very constructive way, and I think we want to just recognize we don't have to view it as as daunting as changing the entire organization, but maybe we just work within our immediate circle of influence, and how do we start to grow our culture in that space?

Kevin Elliott  40:58  
I have found one of the most challenging mindsets around culture is the how long it takes because it's funny, it like you mentioned several times, it's just slow incremental change, and that is really hard, the the upside of that, if we can, if we can do it, is that those while culture is always in flux, some of those big cultural values, once you get that ship turned around, they stay that way for decades, for a very long time. So it's, it's slow, hard work, but it's funny when we look back on these other examples, that's where I draw a lot of hope, like you mentioned, communicable diseases like polio, the average American can't conceive of a world where it was you where you was afraid to send your child out of their home in their own neighborhood because they might catch polio, but my mother-in-law told me stories about that, that her mom wouldn't let her out because somebody down the street had polio, we could all get it, if you know these are it is not in our very distant past where we've had these these items, but when we say in our not very distant past, we mean, you know, 70 years ago or something, and so we want everything to happen this quarter. It just doesn't go like that, but when we look back, you do see the progress, and so it's, it's really meaningful work. It's just really, really difficult work, but I, I so value this conversation, and every time I hear you, you speak about it, because just as a professional communicator, I like that angle of it, but also, too, I think this is just the umbrella that covers everything else. If we can get the culture to change and our behaviors and our norm, what we do when nobody's looking, that is going to accelerate this, I think, potentially very dramatically, because sometimes you'll see these trend lines where you'll go for decades, all of a sudden you'll see this big drop off where we just made up our minds as a collective that we're not going to do that. So, in closing, I would like one, talk a little bit about your work at Banyan Collect Banyan Collaborative, and what you all do there, because I know it's in line with this work. And then just any other thoughts that I have not asked you about that you think are important around safety culture, or around your work, or traffic safety, especially in rural areas that I have not asked you about,

Jay Otto  43:22  
yeah, absolutely. So, I think when we, when we, myself and my colleagues got together and sort of said, what have we learned, and how would we take this to the next level of, of our past, you know, 15 to 20 years of working together and working with communities, and that was where we, we, we started putting things together in this idea of this, this newer framework, the Improving Outcomes Framework, and, and the idea there is to really focus on these three critical components of mindset, process, and skill, and so mindset, there are many mindsets that start to matter, as we mentioned several of them during this conversation, but certainly this idea of a systems-focused mindset, a positive, hopeful, generative mindset. We haven't talked much about it, but there's a concept called an adaptive mindset, as opposed to a technical mindset, an adaptive mindset, and really, this grounded all in this aspect of what is culture and sort of a cultural mindset. So, we've really leaned into this idea that much of this work begins with growing these mindsets and helping folks identify their mindsets and expand them. When we look at communities that are doing really well and moving forward, we see these mindsets present, so how do we start to grow them? All of our work, I think everybody in the transportation field, in particular, is in various cycles, so process is inherent to the work, particularly on the safety side, you know, you have a. Office that does an annual planning process, an annual grant application. They'll do a triennial safety plan now, where they'll do a three year plan. We have five year strategic highway safety plans, and all sorts of folks who are doing various planning efforts to build the transportation system, so the process is inherent, but sometimes we don't see the process, we just focus on the tasks. So our work is to really help folks see the process, see the steps within their process, and focus on how they're getting better at their process and how that process is leading or not leading to the outcomes that they want, so process and thinking through the lens of process is very important. And then this third component of skills, so much of this work sometimes when somebody does it well, it seems like they're just magical, but actually they're skilled, and skills can be grown. A skill is a learned ability, so we can grow skills if we're intentional about it. So, helping folks recognize, like, what are the skills I need to grow, and how am I going to grow those skills? How am I going to grow those skills amongst my team? And these three things - mindset, process, and skills - really are the core components that get us to the outcomes we want. That's what I'm very excited about now, but at that core, it is this work of culture and this work of communication. You know, Kevin, your specialty is communication. Always love our interactions. This is where, in our training that we're going to do, actually, the first skill we're going to really focus on is communication, and we're even moving it down to just interpersonal communication. How do I have more constructive dialogs sometimes about what might be difficult topics that then allow me to reveal some of the mindsets, grow our culture, move forward in a constructive way. So we're really looking not even at mass communication but just interpersonal communication, and really transformational interpersonal communication is the core skill that we see as a parent among some of the leaders who are able to move this forward, and a need for some of those folks who might be feeling stuck. So, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I love talking about this stuff. Always love interacting and talking with you as well, but it's interesting to come back to that space of communication. How we communicate about our culture, how we communicate individually with one another, and how we can do that in a more constructive way to grow these positive cultures that are going to really lead to the outcomes that are so important to all of us, and in this space of reducing fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways, our rural roadways, but all of our roadways together.

Kevin Elliott  47:52  
One of the most encouraging aspects of all of this to me is that language and culture are in our hands. We literally, we, as societies or groups or families, or we can change this if we make up our mind to, we just check, we use different language, is malleable, culture is malleable, and we can change both of those to affect really positive outcomes, and so that's it's very encouraging, right? It can be daunting, but it's also very encouraged. This is not, there's no such thing as a lost cause when it comes to culture, because you can just make up your mind to do differently. Really, appreciate you taking the time to be on today. I know this is going to be a valuable episode to everybody, and Jay, thanks for taking the time and sharing all this wisdom and insight.

Jay Otto  48:34  
Absolutely, thank you for the opportunity, and yeah, let's let's keep growing our positive cultures and continuing to see important progress on this critical issue. Thanks for the opportunity.

Kevin Elliott  48:47  
Thanks a lot. Bye, everybody. See you on the next episode. 

Thanks for riding along with us on Home Safely. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others who care about making rural roads safer. For more resources, training, or upcoming events, visit us at Rural Safety center.org And until next time, stay safe, stay connected, and let's all get home safely.

Unknown Speaker  49:14  
Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai