Podcast: Practical strategies to stop playing it safe with your industrial safety programs

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Mike Jones, president of Discover Leadership Training, explains why sometimes the best thing you can do to protect workers is take more risks. He explains how safety professionals can go beyond "best practices" to "next practices." And he offers a preview of his upcoming keynote presentation, "Playing It Safe," which he'll deliver at Safety Leadership Conference 2025, held October 20-22, 2025, in Glendale (Phoenix), AZ.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

NS: It’s a pleasure to have you here today, Mike. You’ve authored books and articles, hosted a regular TV segment and radio show, flown helicopters for the Houston Police Department, and served in the military. That’s quite a few lives. Can you share more about your experiences and any common themes or attitudes that have carried through your career?

MJ: Yeah, I would say the journey has been an absolute blast. I don’t feel like I’ve ever really worked a day in my life — I’ve always done things I truly love to do.
Flying was my childhood dream, so when I had the opportunity to fly fixed-wing aircraft, I did that professionally and commercially for Continental Airlines. Later, I left Continental, and since my boyhood dream was flying helicopters, I joined the police department, became a police officer, and worked my way into the helicopter division. That allowed me to realize that dream, and it was just absolutely fabulous — an amazing and very rewarding job.

You know, the beautiful thing that happened while I was at the police department was that I started a teen program where we taught teenagers how to transform negatives into positives. That’s really been the theme of my life — finding ways to turn challenges into opportunities.

Along my journey, I’ve had many chances to transform negative things into positive realities. I’ve come to recognize that in every one of the 86,400 seconds in a day, both positives and negatives exist. Wherever there’s a negative, there’s also a positive — and vice versa. Ultimately, what I’ve learned is that one of the greatest gifts we all have is the gift of choice. We can choose positive or we can choose negative. Stuff’s going to happen — especially in the realm of safety — but if we approach it from a negative perspective, that’s all we’ll get from it. If instead we focus on the positive, focus on what we want, we can reframe and transform that situation into something different — and often, something better.

NS: That’s wonderful — and I definitely needed to hear that today. Thank you for your service. I’ve always been fascinated by the U.S. Coast Guard — I don’t think it gets nearly enough attention. How did your experience in the Coast Guard prepare you for unknown situations, and what did it teach you about safety?

MJ: The Coast Guard is the foundation — my learnings there, my experience there, everything that I’ve done in my life. I grew up in the Coast Guard. I became a man in the Coast Guard. I went into the Coast Guard right out of high school.

One of the reasons why it doesn’t get a whole lot of publicity is that it’s literally part of the Department of Transportation and not part of the Department of Defense. So, it’s still considered a military branch; however, they’re under two different leadership roles as it relates to that. But the thing in the Coast Guard — safety was a huge issue, as you might imagine, because I was on a 320-foot ship right out of basic training. And everything was about safety — where you stand, what you do, and how you do it in order to still be a breathing human being at the end of the day. It was very important that we embraced the safety practices they taught us.

When we were doing rescues out at sea, and later when I became a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Port Safety Station in Houston, there were lots of rescues and safety issues to manage — not only to keep yourself safe but to keep others safe as well. We were also responsible for overseeing the boating community, which was a whole other animal when it came to safety. We had to make sure people were doing what they said they would do on the water — that they weren’t drinking, that they had life jackets and flotation devices, and so on.

So yeah, safety has been a huge part of my life — from flying to boating to the Coast Guard and beyond. Safety has always been a really important issue, and I’m really happy to get a chance to talk about it today.

NS: Your presentation at the Safety Leadership Conference 2025 is titled Play It Safe. I wondered if you could elaborate on what that means — what you’re thinking, and whether playing it safe can be a good thing, a bad thing, both, or something entirely different.

MJ: From a growth mindset, Nicole, I believe that when I say “play it safe” as it relates to safety, my real context is that there’s really no need to play it safe while focusing on safety.
And I’ll tell you why: if I’m playing it safe, then I’m looking in the rearview mirror at all the things that have gone wrong and all the things that could potentially go wrong. Generally, focusing on that stuff means that it does go wrong — because whatever we’re focusing on is generally what expands for us. Our energy and our actions follow our thoughts.
So, like a magnet, if that’s what I’m focused on, I’m generally going to find myself in a situation that is unsafe.

My whole focus is to get to a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset — which means the rearview mirror has to come down. Sometimes we find ourselves tiptoeing through situations, like we’re walking on eggshells, because we’re afraid of what could go wrong. And then it does go wrong — and somebody says, “See, I told you.” Well, of course, you’re going to be right. You’ll make yourself right with that mindset, because you have evidence in the rearview mirror that says if A happens, then B is going to occur. So, if we shift our mindset from focusing on what we don’t want to focusing on what we do want, it can completely change how we approach safety in the workplace. 

There are a lot of best practices out there — and I know you realize that — and a lot of safety leaders are looking for safe ways to develop programs for their organizations. But I’m saying that somebody else’s best practice may not be your best practice. They don’t have your environment, your team members, or your specific components — whether human or otherwise. So for me, I’m going to talk to these folks, Nicole, about understanding that the one thing I have 100% control over in this universe is myself.

When I focus on what I have control over, and I identify how well we’re doing — what our safety record is — then I can take the data, the KPIs, and benchmarks we have in our business and focus on besting our best. Let me explain what I mean by that. If we’ve had X number of incidents in a particular month, we now have a benchmark to develop not somebody else’s best practice, but our next practice — a practice focused on our specific situation and people. That’s not necessarily “playing it safe” while focusing on safety. But as long as we’re focused on safety, we may not need to play it safe. Once I’ve identified my benchmark, I can get my team to understand the value of besting our best.

Taking small steps and getting small wins — through the process of neuroplasticity — allows us to build new muscle. It’s through the power of repetition that we can create new neural pathways in our brain, develop new habits, and ultimately create an even safer environment. And we don’t have to take it from somebody else’s playbook — we can create our own playbook to do so.