Phil van Hest in ECCHO Live: The Safety Practice That Starts With "I Don't Know"
The harness keeps you off the deck. Being able to say "I don't know" keeps the whole call from going sideways.
Load-ins start before sunrise, the day sheet keeps moving, and a hundred decisions get made before first break. That is the job.
Kara Kemp's new piece for ECCHO Live asks a question that never makes the call sheet: how safe does it feel to be a person while you do all of that? Safe enough to ask a question, admit you have not done this rig before, or say you are near your limit.
It grew out of conversations with Phil van Hest, Senior Director of National Safety at RockForce, who builds the training, certification, and field programs behind a national live-event workforce, with a background in rigging and fall protection.
"I don't know" is a safety control
Phil put it this way on the Event Safety Podcast: the strongest thing a new crew member can say is "I don't know."
That cuts against what a lot of us were taught coming up. Ask too many questions and you look green. Look green and you do not get the call back. So people guess. On a rigging call, on a power distro, on a forklift path through a crowd of loaders, guessing is the hazard.
Kemp lands on a fix that costs nothing: use the daily safety talk. It is often the only moment all day when everyone is pointed at the same message. Say out loud that questions are welcome, and eventually it stops being a speech and becomes what people reach for when the pressure is up.
Both have to be true
A certification card tells you someone was trained. It does not tell you whether they felt able to speak up at 2 a.m. as the newest person on the call. RockForce builds training and certification centrally so the standard travels market to market. The culture has to travel with it.
