Based in Singapore, I am a safety consultant who travel around Asia to provide people-based solutions. My clients are from construction, chemical, manufacturing and transport companies. Before starting my own firm, I have been a practitioners for 10 years, last as a regional EHS manager for a U.S. MNC. My passion and expertise lies in safety culture, change management and leadership. 

My personal mission in safety is to be a skillful “midfielder”. Using soccer analogy, the researchers and academics are the defenders—their work forms the foundation in safety; and practitioners are the strikers, whose goal is to score against safety hazards. There’s a chasm between academics and practitioners. While there are often solid research and concepts, practitioners struggle to relate to them. They find these concepts too high-level and complicated to have real-life use. In soccer term, it’s like a striker trying to catch a long ball from the defender 80 metres away. It’s hard.

That’s where the midfielders come in—they bridge the gap between defenders and strikers. They receive the ball from the defenders, dribble it up field and make it easy for the strikers to  “catch  the ball”.

What I do is to look at concepts and research through the lens of a practitioners; distil those applicable ones, and combine, simplify and explain them in a simple and pragmatic way.

Workplace safety is more than management system, regulations and engineering controls. There are a lot of useful stuff that we can adopt and apply from other fields, especially when it comes to engaging and changing people. 

Through this book, I hope to introduce new tools to safety practitioners, so that when dealing with people, they have more suitable tools at their disposal than the carrot and stick.