Three Questions with Mike Courtney, Founder/Principal Aperio Insights LLC

What are some of the key challenges currently facing ergonomists and safety professionals?

We are living in a world where it’s increasingly possible to identify, detect and measure factors that can help versus harm humans in the workplace. Things like hyper-localized air quality monitoring (AQM) that give us real time knowledge of air quality, including the detection of viruses in the air. Or machine vision systems that can monitor an environment for human behaviors that fall outside of recommended safety compliance standards and programmatically alter signage to reinforce best practices.

The possibilities in today’s workplace are exciting, but they come with challenges –particularly in allocating resources and budget to explore, pilot and implement solutions that best fit our target environments without compromising productivity. Innovations are emerging constantly, requiring careful evaluation and an understanding of how even small changes can affect the broader system. What’s clear is that building a successful future is a team effort. Ergonomists and safety professionals must collaborate with a wide range of ’subject matter experts such as engineering, behavioral science and finance to develop a holistic roadmap for safe and effective change.

What new technology or innovations do you see impacting workplace safety?

Technologies like digital twins provide powerful tools to simulate how new technologies might perform in a wide range of situations. But to quote Captain “‘Sully”‘ Sullenberger during the famous National Transportation Safety Board hearing: “We’ve all heard about the computer simulations, and now we are watching actual sims, but I can’t quite believe you still have not taken into account the human factor.” Technology is evolving at a breakneck speed but using a behavioral science lens is equally crucial for predicting the human response to workplace changes. Many workplaces encourage all employees to put forth ideas on how technologies might be used to improve a given process or procedure. Stakeholders are defined as those who are impacted by or who can impact the system. In the spirit of giving all stakeholders a voice, we need to begin to include the latest stakeholder in the room, artificial intelligence itself. We need to get comfortable involving AI and asking it to weigh in on issues and options – not to blindly follow its input but to monitor suggestions and pick out the useful nuggets over time.

What do you hope to pass along in your keynote address and also learn from other ergonomics professionals at Applied Ergo?

Since the beginning of humanity there has been a lag between what we can imagine and what we were capable of building. In part, due to the growing access to technologies like AI and robotics, we are dramatically cutting the lag time between dreams and reality. The hard part becomes not figuring out how to build the idea but which ideas deserve to be built. When we are able to convince other stakeholders to focus efforts and resources on a problem worth solving, almost nothing is impossible.

Our ancestors were lucky if they heard about much less experienced a significant innovation in their entire lifetime. We live in a world where it’s hard to read the daily news and not hear about groundbreaking concepts. Breakthrough innovations are exciting, but they can also be highly disruptive. Years ago, Tom Peters’ book Thriving on Chaos reshaped how I think about disruption. The key insight was learning to thrive because of disruption, not merely survive in spite of it. After all, if nothing changes, progress isn’t possible.

Opportunity is everywhere, but it comes at a price – time, money, and, most of all, disruption. Learning to think like a futurist helps us anticipate, manage and even welcome significant change. Futurist thinking helps us develop the mindset necessary to detect early signals and act while others are still struggling to recover from the shock of change.

For more information about Mike Courtney, check out the Keynote Speakers page.