Mental Models – How to Engage Workers on Safety

• Mental models help people interpret situations and decide how to act.
• Your employees’ mental models could prevent them from reporting incidents or sharing concerns.
• Workers weigh the personal costs of reporting concerns, such as embarrassment, career risk, or isolation.
• Leaders can shift mental models by building psychological safety through civility, enquiry, and positive reinforcement.

Mental models are the internal frameworks people use to interpret the world and decide how to act. They effectively work as shortcuts, helping us make sense of situations quickly without analysing every detail from scratch.

We compare what’s happening in front of us to the patterns we already hold in our heads. If it feels familiar, we tend to respond in the same way we have before because it seems right in the moment.

In a safety context, this can be both helpful and harmful. Mental models allow workers to react quickly under pressure, but they can also reinforce unsafe assumptions.

Mental models shape behaviour in more than one way. Sometimes they help workers make the right call in high-stakes moments where quick action is critical. But they also influence the way workers interact with supervisors and safety systems.

In safety-critical environments, workers often need to make intelligent decisions quickly and under pressure. In those moments, mental models guide their reactions. Well-developed models allow them to recognise risks, spot patterns, and respond without hesitation.

Training plays a key role in shaping these models. It gives workers the chance to practise decision-making in controlled conditions before they face the same challenges in real life.

Airline pilots are a well-known example. They rehearse worst-case scenarios in simulators on the ground so that if the same emergency happens at 35,000 feet, they have an established mental routine for how to respond.

This principle applies in every workplace. Structured training helps any worker build mental models that prepare them for emergency situations.

The same pattern-matching process happens in everyday workplace interactions.

People instinctively want to do the right thing, but what feels right depends on the patterns their mental models have reinforced.

If a worker raises a safety concern and is ignored or, worse, met with hostility, the experience teaches them that keeping quiet is the “correct” option. When this pattern is repeated often enough, it undermines engagement with near-miss reporting systems and weakens the wider safety culture.

This is closely tied to the concept of psychological safety. If workers believe there is a personal risk to speaking up – such as blame, embarrassment, or being labelled a nuisance – their mental models will push them towards the “safety” of silence.

When faced with a decision about whether to raise a concern, workers carry out an unconscious cost-benefit analysis. They weigh the value of reporting against the potential personal risks.

Unfortunately, staying quiet often wins.

This is because the benefits of reporting are rarely immediate or tangible, whereas the costs of reporting are instant and personal.

These costs can take several forms, including:

• Embarrassment if a supervisor dismisses the concern or pushes back
• Career risk if questioning a supervisor’s decision is seen as problematic
• Isolation if speaking out goes against the group consensus

This is why psychological safety is so important. Only when workers believe that raising concerns carries no personal risk will their mental safeguards shift towards openness, reporting, and learning.

You cannot change workers’ mental models directly, but you can influence them.

Every interaction, response, and decision from leaders sends a signal about what is acceptable and valued. Over time, those signals accumulate into patterns that either incentivise silence or encourage openness.

Below are four practical ways to shift mental models towards speaking up and reporting.

Avoiding blame is a powerful motivator to stay silent. When a worker reports a near miss, they may need to admit a mistake or acknowledge the limits of their abilities. Responding with blame will only shut down future reporting.

Separate the person from the process, and focus on understanding what went wrong rather than who is at fault. Reward honesty, not perfection, so workers see that raising concerns is valued.

Consistent rudeness, sarcasm, or condescension from supervisors erodes psychological safety over time. So, set clear expectations that civility is the baseline for all interactions.

Civility builds mutual respect and helps flatten the hierarchy that discourages some workers from questioning supervisors, even when they feel there’s a legitimate safety concern.

People who are convinced they know everything cannot truly learn. Leaders and supervisors need to practice humble enquiry. Accept that you don’t know everything and avoid jumping to conclusions when you think a worker has made a mistake.

Instead, use open questions that invite explanation, such as “Can you walk me through what happened?”

Asking first shows curiosity, not criticism. Even if your initial impression was correct and the worker made a mistake, the question signals that you’ll listen to workers before drawing conclusions.

This approach encourages workers to share concerns in the future and creates opportunities for leaders to learn as well, because there will be times when the worker knows more than you.

Reporting must be seen to matter. Thank workers who raise concerns, and share how their input has led to change – even small improvements. This closes the loop and builds trust that speaking up is worthwhile.

If you want to explore these ideas further, our online Near Miss Training for Managers course is a practical next step.

It explains how you and your supervisors can use near miss reporting as an engine for learning and improvement.

The course explores ways to shape workplace culture so that workers feel able to speak up, while also offering practical advice on setting up an efficient reporting system that works for both you and your employees.

It also reveals the one mistake too many organisations make that instantly limits their ability to learn and improve.

A version of this course is available for industrial workplaces, with a sister version tailored for office environments.