World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2024

Once upon a time, someone – a certain Mr William Shakespeare to be precise – coined the immortal phrase, “All the world’s a stage”, so here at 2macs on World Day for Safety and Health at Work we thought we’d scour our dusty files (and dustier memories!) to share a few thoughts on some of our world travels over the decades. As we sometimes say to new clients who ask, our team have delivered programmes all over the world – and we continue to do so.

Travelling so widely is an education in itself, but particularly in relation to 2macs safety team’s stock in trade – using drama as a central learning tool - there’s a whole other level of awareness that has reared its head over the years.

One of the early lessons we learned was that the UK safety culture and practices we all carry around in our heads as ‘the norm’ do not always serve us as well in some other locations. When creating our characters and scenarios we often pitch them a step or two behind what would be generally recognised as good practice. We do this so that the delegates we’re working with have something they can readily identify as less than perfect. We then invariably set them the task of ‘fixing’ the situation – anyone who has worked with us will recognise this. We long ago learned our first lesson which was seeing different, perhaps less developed, safety cultures for what they are and to adapt accordingly! We once turned up to run programmes overseas and found on Day 1 that the people in the room looked at our scenario and not only saw nothing wrong with the blatant rule breaking we depicted, but actually believed that our deliberately errant characters were well ahead of the curve, exemplifying best practice!

And then when we went out on sites (no names, no pack drill!) … well let’s just say we came back rather shocked and surprised! My personal favourite (is ‘favourite’ really the right word?? – Ed.) was seeing a guy being fed into a 2 foot diameter steel pipe to grab hold of something, head first with his mate holding onto his ankles. Eek!

But enough of horror stories, this was meant to be a celebration of safety cultures worldwide, so here are just a few prominent memories from down the years …

Working with BP out in Doha, Qatar back in the early millennium and meeting some of their senior guys, one of whom was a sometime diver and ex-member of the respected and feared SBS – he turned out to be a hoot!

Visiting North Carolina to deliver a one-off programme just a few years back. Cue jet lag, delivering the programme, hotel, home again, more jet lag… and we saw none of this loveliness – it’s all glamour, y’know!

Arriving in Brussels for a conference, going into the main square in midday sunshine and being met with thousands of Scottish football fans who were over for a game. Undoubtedly on their nth pints of the day, they good humouredly sang us in and didn’t stop until we left an hour later!

Ireland. A beautiful place and among our most often visited – in fact we’re in and out of there almost every week right now. We almost didn’t include it, being so close to home, but in fact it’s utterly different from the UK….and people who speak of Guinness tasting different there are correct!

Lastly, instead of us attaching photos to this page, why not go onto our website’s front page, where you’ll see a video of Shaun & Harry in action. They were delivering a big conference just last year in lovely Esbjerg, Denmark for our client Dansk Offshore.

Happy trails!