That’s the question the Schiphol Safety platform had to answer. Fauzia Aouden: ‘That’s when we started talking to hein, even though I’ve never heard of it before.’
By Jurjen de Jong
'After those talks we realized our problem was more complicated than we had anticipated. The safety day isn’t compulsory, so you have to draw people in with the programme. Another challenge: the participants, who all work at different organizations, have to be able to tell their colleagues what they learned that day. There are only 120 places at the safety day, but over 60,000 people work at Schiphol every day. We had already decided on the theme ‘Just Culture’, which focused on speaking up about safety, transparency, and getting rid of a punishment culture. Fauzia Aouden explains: ‘Forgetting even the smallest details can have terrible consequences at an airport, so you have to be able to speak up about everything. This requires an open culture, which must come from the people, from their own realization that this is an important issue.’ Hein brought nine trainers, another nine cartoonists and a photographer. ‘Cartoons are a great way to bring up tricky issues that are typically met with a lot of resistance. They bring humour into the mix, showing a caricature of the issues, and never referring to specific people or situations. The cartoons were created during the sessions, and we displayed them at the end of the afternoon. Immediately people took out their phones, because they realized they could use the cartoons in their own organizations. That’s when I knew that it was going to work, and the reactions we received were further proof.’
