The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a…

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1 https://t.co/DQMLYTXoq4

O’Neill took over the reins at Alcoa at a time when it was struggling. From the start he said his main focus would be worker safety. Financial and other analysts were incredulous, asking why it wasn’t more traditional business things, like cash flow and inventory etc. /2

The details are in the article in the first Tweet of this thread, and in Charles Duhigg’s great book on habit. But in a nutshell, O’Neill realised that organisations have ‘keystone habits’, things they do that connect through to everything else they do. There’s no need to do…/3 https://t.co/FVCBkxcbN6

…the usual thing of trying to capture the whole organisation with flow-charts, and ‘message’ change through every box on the chart separately. O’Neill’s genius was to understand that safety connected everything *already*. To work safely means to be doing everything else in…/4

…the business well. Focus on safety and by osmosis it fixes everything else. It also energises workers, who unsurprisingly feel prioritised, when their safety is prioritised. But it’s not just a ‘psychological’ thing, safe work requires a business to have all of its shit…/5

…together. Its procedures, its reporting lines, its focus on quality, etc. O’Neill understood this, and Alcoa’s profitability exploded as a result. None of the rubbish we’ve heard during Covid of needing to ‘balance’ safety with economic output. Worker safety should both…/6

…protect workers from Covid, AND supercharge the economic performance of the businesses they work for. That’s the Alcoa lesson that, as the article says, may still not be known widely enough. /end