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.

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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, some of the concepts and the thoughts, and hey, what did you think about this, or, what could have been better here, or those kind of things, the responses from the crowd.

were fantastic and they were thought of okay.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Oh, I was amazed by just how involved everybody became. Usually it takes a much, it takes a lot longer to get them warmed up, and this is quite a senior audience, albeit, but even with senior audiences, they can feel that they’re a little, this is all a little bit beneath them, of course we know all about safety.

We’re senior leaders. And actually the level of engagement was really gratifying, and in terms of what Teeter and the other facilitators do, they do have a, they’re trained to ask the right questions and wait for an answer, and if you wait long enough, people will answer.

Joel Saxum: We sat in, we had actors, the whole group was in there. We were walking through some scenarios, hitting the rewind button, going back, seeing what, what could change with subtle changes in the emotional delivery or like how someone’s life went the day before, how it affects the way they think today, those kind of things.

And then you guys also gave us some tools in the second half. Like you’ve seen this, you felt this, but now let’s put some tools in your pocket to be able to take back to your, to the field, to your teams and alleviate some of these issues when they pop up in the field.

Allen Hall: I think that immersive experience evoked.

Those responses that I’ll give you the good, really good example here. So there’s live action played out in front of you. There’s a scenario played out with actors in front of you and that we stop. And you can ask the actors what they were thinking or what was happening in the background and get answers.

So now you’re participating in this sort of storyline, Graham Cooper.

Graeme Cooper: It allows you to explore alternate realities. Yeah. That’s the thing is you can rewind. Exactly. The, effectively you rewind the video you rewind the film, and with what you’ve experienced, how would have the outcome been different?

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, I mean our take is that, I can’t directly influence your behavior. I can’t change your behavior. But what I can do is get a fairly good judgment of where your behavior is coming from, and adapt my behavior accordingly, and hopefully you’ll adapt yours. So that’s where we’re coming from, is is.

It’s a, it’s quite a subtle thing that we’re

Allen Hall: trying to achieve. It’s a communication piece. There’s a variety of people in the workforce doing a variety of different jobs. You’re going to get different responses. So if a safety issue does come up, You have to adapt to the person that’s involved in the safety issue, not treat everything the same.

There’s a term in the United States, if you sell hammers, everything’s a nail. It’s right? That’s the way a lot of health and safety organizations and large organizations tend to be. Not so much in renewables, but in other organizations tend to be that way. You’re offering a different solution to be adaptive and to understand, maybe take a, just a brief moment to think about who’s on the other side of this and how do I connect with that person for an outcome that I want.

Sara DaSilva.

Sara DaSilva: We talk a lot about intervention and being comfortable speaking up. And that’s not just at the, safety manager or the project leader, everybody needs to feel comfortable, how to approach people to intervene if they see something unsafe. And this provided a lot of great tools of ways to have that conversation where you can approach it as a coach.

You can approach it in a way that someone will really respond and respect what you’re saying to them.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Which is emotional intelligence, right? Yes. Yeah. It’s about. adapting your approach to the person that you’re faced with. And that depends on how well you know them. What is the situation that I find myself in?

What’s the risk perspective here. And how do I adapt my behavior accordingly?

Allen Hall: You’re new to America, but you’re not new to this process. And you have a proven track record over in the UK. You, we want to describe the number of projects that you’ve done. And the safety training you apply to these projects.

Dermot Kerrigan: We tend to work mainly with major infrastructure projects whether that’s in construction or offshore or rail or transport, and it’s mainly in the UK, it’s what we’ve done is we’ve set up these safety leadership centers, which act as induction spaces. Facilities for people who are about to be engaged on the project.

They have to go through these facilities before they’re allowed on site. The idea being that everybody gets the same experience, regardless of whether they’re a receptionist, a CEO, or a guy with a spade about to dig a hole in the ground. So that you get this common language, this common perspective.

So what have, who have we worked with? So the first safety leadership center was built 10 years ago for the Thames Tideway Tunnel Project, also known as the Super Sewer. This is this huge tunnel being built under the River Thames. Try and take off some of the load, if you’ll forget the expression from the Victorian sewers.

But it’s a 10 year project. So we’ve now, by the end of it next year, when it completes, we will have inducted 35, 000 people into that project.

Joel Saxum: Wow.

Dermot Kerrigan: Or in that region. So in all of these facilities, I think that the industry wakes up and goes, that seems to work. That’s different. So lo and behold, the next big infrastructure project says, we need to do that.

So the likes of HS2, which is the big high speed rail project in the UK, we’ve built a center for them. We’ve built a center for the Trans Pennine route upgrade, which is another rail, big rail project linking a high speed link between Manchester and Leeds. We’ve just built a a center for SSE up in Perth.

Near their headquarters. And then there’s Thrive, which was originally sponsored and partnered with Ørsted. The idea was that it would be a an induction facility for everybody gonna work on Horncy II Windfarm, which it was, but it was always supposed to be a legacy facility so that when Horncy II was done, it’s open to the entire industry, which is what’s happened.

But yes, and that’s why we’ve had so many people from the likes of RWE, the Ocean Winds, Equinor, all these guys who’ve come through Thrive, their American counterparts have heard about this, or they’ve experienced it themselves and gone, we want to have a look at this because is there a version which can be adapted for the U.

S. market, which rather than us going to them, or rather them coming to us at Thrive, we go to them. So this is a big country, the idea of having one center, somewhere like Newark, and everybody flies into it. It’s not really going to happen in this day and age. So if you’ve got something which is light on its feet and you can go to them, that’s going to be probably a better way of doing it.

Graham Cooper.

Graeme Cooper: What I would strongly advocate for is experience the ATT learning process. Is it a process? It’s an experience. Experience? Yes. Yeah. And that, fundamentally, if you get that it will drive that behavior, it will drive your approach. There’s no bad in that, right? It’s, it’s beyond the value of the cost of doing it.

Actually, intrinsically, it just feels right.

Allen Hall: Can you explain how you’ve made this? These centers now mobile.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, the centers, the advantage with the centers is you’re able to build a controlled environment. If you like, you’re almost building a soundstage with multiple sets. And people walk, literally go through a journey.

They go, they walk from set to set. And you’re able to create this world. For example, In the centers, three days after the incident, we lead people into a police interview suite. And they don’t have to pretend it’s a police interview suite. It is a police interview suite. And through a double sided mirror, they’re seeing the supervisor that they saw in the room next door, the canteen, being grilled by a police officer because the guy that he instructed to go out and finish the job, finished the job without being properly briefed or understanding what he had to do and why he had to do it, And not been given sufficient tools to do it.

And lo and behold, he got killed. Three days later, we’ve got the supervisor now desperately trying to explain what happened and the fact that it’s not just his responsibility. He’s not to blame. And that interview ends. There’s a knock on the door. And then somebody will open the door and say, Is there a Joel Saxon here?

It’s a in your world, an usher lawyer. And Joel will get led through, and he will also be grilled by the police. So you’re able to create these sets. Now, we can’t do that. With the mobile

Allen Hall: stuff, there’s a lot of health and safety environment, people in the United States that need to connect with you to get this experience to, to come see this, maybe even travel to the UK and go right to the Thrive Center and see it up close.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah they can come to the Thrive Center, of course they can. We will have set up a U team working outta New York come November and the, a aim is to be rolling this out at scale. Certainly for the wind industry and for other industries that we’ve worked with in, in the UK.

Anybody is always welcome to come to any of our deliveries, so long as the client says they can, and they usually do. So if anybody’s interested, get in touch. We can sort something out for you. Dermot, how do they get in touch with you? What’s the best way? Email. Info at ActiveTrainingTeam.

us. Or what is your website? It’s we have the US microsite, which is ActiveTrainingTeam. us. Or there’s the larger scale UK website, which shows all our stuff, which is ActiveTrainingTeam. co. uk.

Allen Hall: And it is an impressive website. You’re going to learn a lot there. And when you want to Get a hold of Dermot and get a scheduling package in your system.

You need to do it pretty quick because based on the attendees that were here today, ATT is going to be busy and you better get on the books now or you’re going to miss out. So get a hold of Dermot. Go to the website. Check out all the cool things that are there because this training is next level. So Dermot, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

I really appreciate the opportunity to go through that experience today and to meet you in person. Thanks very much guys. And thanks so much for coming as well.