 And so all of this introduction to say that what we think is needed is a paradigm shift to a more expanded focus for occupational safety and health. As I mentioned, this broader view would be both in a vertical sense as well as a horizontal sense. And this expanded focus is going to require some changes we think so at least some modifications of the way that we do things. For example, requiring new skills and competencies for the different occupational safety and health professions, which I'll get to in a minute. So, back in 2019, the University of Texas School of Public Health Southwest Center for Occupational Environment Health which is a NIOSH ERC joined with NIOSH into a U13 Cooperative Agreement funded by CDC NIOSH, which we wanted to advance the state of shaping the future to ensure worker health and well being. And we focused on three main areas research training and policy. This was a cooperative agreement and it really has been one of the most is this paradigm shift this expanded focus for occupational safety and health, and it consists of a series of activities workshops conferences and other dissemination activities. And this is addressed to a broad interprofessional audience that goes beyond employers workers in the academic community, and really engages many other stakeholders including human resources personnel worker representatives sociologists anthropologists economists. It says three critical areas of expanding the focus of occupational safety and health as it affects research training and policy application. In 2019 with a couple of foundational papers in which we proposed the expanded focus framework and then undertook a systematic review. These papers were led by Paul, and this is the first of them this was the one where we described the model that I presented earlier with the vertical and horizontal expansion. This is the second paper in which we performed a peer review, assuming a systematic review of the peer review and great literature is delving into the world of what was really something new to me which is scenarios and future futures research which is more often been applied in economic analyses than actually an occupational safety and health, but we use this review to identify different future work scenarios, and then look at the potential hazards and opportunities that each of these scenarios could comport notes beyond the scope of today's talk to get into those scenarios but the they did this paper along with the the previous one I mentioned did provide the foundation for our work on this grant. So, in preparation for a large international conference that was ultimately held in 2021 pandemic not was standing. We conducted in 2022 preparatory workshops, each of which brought together a broad inner professional audience of national and international experts. One of these was held in person in February 2020 was still in the early days of the pandemic, and we could still do things in person, and it focused primarily on future work, and this expanded focus would impact the way that we train occupational safety and health professionals. And this was followed later in June. And so we ended up now here the pandemic was in full swing so we had to do this one virtually do the due to the pandemic, but this one was centered on how the future work would shape research and professional practice. The papers were published the summaries and they do contain a lot of detail in terms of the recommendations and that they came out of them but basically the objectives of these two workshops was first of all to examine how the future work would impact how we train the occupational safety health professional workforce to be ready for the future, and how we conduct occupational safety and health research and policy making to identify gaps and needs in these areas and, and to use all of this information to inform the agenda of our international conference, which was going to be held initially in person in Houston in 2021. Now, ultimately, that conference, which was called expanding occupational safety and health and international conference or X Fosh for short is in three different ways of pronouncing this so far X for us. I just, I just call it the X watch which was so last December, virtually, and it involved 140, 159 participants from 11 countries, and a total of 97 presentations and a variety of formats plenary sessions, plenary panels, speeches, abstract presentations round table discussions, etc. And so what I'd like to use the balance of my time today is to talk a little bit about what emerged from this conference. Because we do think that some of this information, hopefully a lot of it can be useful to inform the next steps as we start tackling some of the challenges that the future work presents. So, at this point in time, and again led by Paul, we're now drafting a final manuscript that summarizes the main themes that emerge from the X Fosh conference listed here. In all we identified nine major topics, which you can read I'm going to go through each one of them and a little bit more detail in the next few slides. These are the nine topics, but what was common to all of them, what was cross cutting to all of them was that each one of them. We identified three themes that cut across online topics, because given the multiplicity of work and non work determinants of health and well being the need to approach these issues. Using a systems thinking approach became evident. Secondly, recognizing that the broad spectrum of stakeholders with an interest in keeping workers safe goes beyond the traditional occupational safety and health disciplines of medicine and nursing and hygiene and safety. And so that illustrates the need for adopting a more transdisciplinary or more in a professional approach that gives voice to all of these stakeholders. And finally, the need to. This is of what came out in the different oral presentations plenary sessions keynote speeches and that we've been pulling together to organize it in a way that that can be helpful. So in the category of worker inequalities there was a lot of talk about the disproportionate health impacts on vulnerable worker populations that have only been more made more obvious during the pandemic. The problems associated with increasing income gap inequalities between workers at different levels and a lot of presentations on non standard work arrangements so things like associations between temporary contract work and ill health about the negative benefits of unemployment and health about cash transactions or working in the gig economy and research that's related linking that to adverse impacts on health. Many of the presentations talked about refocusing what I mentioned before which is this greater centering on well being and decent work, and recognizing that work as a social determinant of health goes beyond the workplace. The second theme and there were many, many presentations now this is addressed. What type of training on both in the workshops as well as in the conference, but some of the points that that that I think came out pretty consistently was the recognition that we need to train professionals in adopting a more holistic approach. If we're going to reorient things to worker well being that since occupational safety and health by definition is based on prevention, we need to need to be proactive in anticipating hazards related to the changes that the future of work will bring. I mentioned before that the cross cutting themes were, you know, system science and the need for more transdisciplinary approaches to problem solving that has to be taught it doesn't come necessarily naturally. So we have to look at ways of incorporating some of this new knowledge and skills into the training of occupational safety and health professionals. We have to do it in a way that doesn't overburden existing curriculum nor abandon or place or give second priority to traditional occupational safety and health hazard but rather building on them as I mentioned earlier. The recognition that there are newer ways of learning that are that are emerging and that the work on health. Currently we don't do a lot of that in our traditional programs and this is certainly an area that's becoming increasingly important. With respect to anticipated changes, and these are just birds eye view comments that anticipated changes on how we conduct research in this era of the future of work and professional practice. Again, the important of recognizing that stakeholders go beyond just the the usual occupational safety and health disciplines requiring greater transdisciplinary. It's likely that we're going to have to learn new research methods and so exploring alternatives to things like traditional randomized community trials. Using techniques such as participatory research which allows the incorporation of broader base of other stakeholders techniques called realistic evaluation or contribution impact analysis that were papers presented on all of these identifying evidence based approaches that benefit the workforce health and safety but not only in the long term but also in the short term. There was a lot of talk about the need to balance in research long term cohort studies with shorter term studies that lead to actions at a short at a shorter time interval. It's critical if we're going to have the different stakeholders by into this expanded focus not everybody can wait, you know, 10 or 15 years for a cohort study to be completed. Consistent with the expanded focus model we need greater integration of work non work related and steep contextual factors, shifting from a one employer model to a working life continuum approaches was mentioned earlier and examining the effects of work organization employment arrangements on health and well being. There were several presentations on tools to measure well being we had presentation from thinking about the expanded focus requiring a shift from the traditional biomedical framework that has served us well. Undoubtedly up until now but with this expanded focus. There, there were cases made to move to more of a bio psychosocial frame the need to define measure and operation on operationalize new concepts and variables, both exposed hazards and risks on the future of work and increasing rates of adverse mental health effects and cost. A lot of these risks were exacerbated during the pandemic. There's been a lot of work looking at the impact of work organization or precarious employment on on mental health. And many of these things are occurring in the context of some social to the social economic racial and gender disparities to begin with. Another theme was skilling and upskilling and improving job quality, recognizing that the interface between technological advances and worker ability to adapt, assimilate, learn some of these skills sometimes does create tensions but at other times can be beneficial that there are unforeseen new job that we can't even imagine just yet looming around the corner due to the future of work that skilling and upskilling can affect both blue and white collar workers. In some cases, job loss, job losses in the skilled trades because replacement by automation or white collar jobs replaced by technology, but these issues go beyond skills and include impacts on job wages and job quality. There were also some presentations on a positive note the interventions that seem to be effectively addressing some of these challenges such as the union construction model that was presented by Chris came to the CPWR, which is built on peer to peer collaborations and interventions and climate change several presentations on the on the importance of expanding or including climate change as a theme and determinant of worker health and safety. We saw what we're seeing constantly that workers are among the first to be adversely affected by climate change through more serious exposures earlier appearance of health effects. And as you're listed here we all know them everything from extreme weather events to vector born diseases, emerging industries and changes in the built environment and that these deleterious effects occur and they occur, differentially in certain occupations and industries but also many of these occupations and industries are also aligned or correlated with certain social and economic inequities that make them even worse. So these things does need to be included in the curriculum of the occupational safety and health professional of the future. The pandemic clearly accelerated a lot of the changes that we saw and I've mentioned a lot of these already. Finally, there were presentations, mainly by our NIOSH colleagues especially Jessica Strighton and Sarah Feltler on an initiative that NIOSH launched called strategic foresight which basically an action oriented planning discipline that evolves from an area called futures studies and strategic management and that creates well informed future scenarios to help test current strategies as a step towards creating transformational change. NIOSH has developed a foresight framework. Historically this approach has been underutilized in occupational safety and health, but NIOSH did have several presentations on their work in this area and we should expect to see a lot more of this coming from NIOSH and other venues in the near future. So to summarize, protecting the workforce of the future is going to require a more holistic view of the hazards that they experienced and their range of adverse effects. To do this, we're going to need a paradigm that is supportive of this expanded model, probably something like the biopsychosocial model that NIOSH has been doing a lot of work on which can serve as a foundation. Worker well being as an overarching NIOSH construct. Sounds really good but there's work that needs to be done. I mean right now, although we're getting closer to using it in a meaningful way, we need to complete the transition from well being simply being a descriptive aspiration to more of a measurable variable that can be useful in research or as a goal, a target, a benchmark, an indicator in policy and practice. Critical to workforce protection and worker well being is going to be a greater focus on mental health whose burden is only increasing now and in the future. A lot of this to employers and many large employers are starting to realize the benefits of attending to some of the non-traditional workplace health and safety responsibilities that they have going beyond that and really targeting more wellness and well being overall. I've mentioned this several times there's a need for a cross cutting incorporation of systems thinking transdisciplinary and four side approaches in the curriculum. We are going to need new training methods and approaches to meet the demands of an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce since reliance or as reliance on traditional OSH degree programs and training gives way to a need for more on or more training in a rapid manner, possibly in the form of short certificates or even short bullets using social media. And finally, future research and practice require broader stakeholder view to support a more transdisciplinary approach that includes disciplines outside the traditional OSH paradigm to better understand work organization and employment models. And so what I tried to do was to give everybody a flavor for some of the work that we've been doing and and I guess laid down some of the themes and issues that emerge from the work that we've done these various workshops and conferences in the hopes that they will be helpful to you and that will inform the next steps and I'd like to thank you for your attention. Thank you George. That was a rich presentation with a lot of ideas. Hopefully we'll get to unpack some of them further in the Q&A section session. I'll turn it over to Dr. Sarah Feltner. Sarah is the director of the Office of Research Integration at NIOSH and with Sarah I believe too will be Jessica Strite or Jessica participated in the presentation. So I'll turn it over to you Sarah and we'll come back after that with questions and answers. Thank you Paul and thank you George for that summary of key themes from the, I say, XFARASH workshops and conference and the recommendations embedded therein for the future of Occupational Safety and Health. And I'm pleased to be here today with Jessica Strite from the NIOSH Office of Research Integration to join in the discussion. We're excited to share with you today some of the results of a future looking foresight project that we recently completed at NIOSH. We thought that given the theme of this meeting, it would be good to bring into our discussion consideration of the key drivers of change that we believe will influence the future of Occupational Safety and Health. Understanding these drivers and how they might play out across different future scenarios provides an opportunity for the Occupational Safety and Health field to consider future oriented policies and programs that are robust in the face of disruptive change. The NIOSH foresight project looking at the future of Occupational Safety and Health was designed and conducted by the Office of Research Integration in 2021. In collaboration with a few dozen scientists and policy planning experts from across NIOSH divisions and offices. This project was designed to look at the future of Occupational Safety and Health and consider the implications different future scenarios might have for OSH research, training and practice. This project also helped us test a systematic method and approach to strategic foresight, which George briefly mentioned, and assess its utility as a tool to help us think about and prepare for the future. Our focus today is on the key drivers of change that emerge from this project. The full project was presented in the January 2021 installment of foresight Friday at NIOSH, and the recording is available on the CDC YouTube channel Occupational Safety and Health Playlist. To identify the key drivers of change, we first completed a systematic horizon scanning exercise to look for, collect and analyze information about how the future might be different. We then synthesized that data into different categories, which gave us a better understanding of the driving trends, issues, plans and projections known collectively as tips that might influence the future. We then identified thematic clusters that represented key developments that would likely affect or shape the future of Occupational Safety and Health, and we called these clusters drivers of change. We found 244 relevant scanning hits that resulted in the identification of 119 different tips. From those eight thematic clusters emerged as key drivers. These include advanced technology, climate and energy issues, data security, the generation of new scientific knowledge, social credit systems, non-standard work arrangements, virtual work, and the diversifying workforce. We believe that these drivers will be influential forces shaping the future of OSH, and I'll describe how what these drivers might look like as they play out in the future in the next two slides. Advanced technology has dramatically increased productivity. While it allows for highly customizable work environments, it also threatens to outpace the rate at which workers with obsolete skills can be retrained, or the rate at which systems can be built to cope with new hazards created by reliance in these new technologies. Climate change is encouraging companies to move towards more sustainable and efficient processes that will affect both infrastructure and work practices. These trends will likely create new hazards and risks for workers in multiple industries, while impacting the way occupational safety and health activities are performed. Data security needs driven by new data collection and communication technologies has led to an increased need for cybersecurity worker data oversight. There's a growing need to ensure personal data are secure and protected while leveraging the benefits of enhanced data connectivity to improve health and safety. The current knowledge generation paradigm will fundamentally change to address a lack of trust in government information. Federal agencies will be challenged to disseminate prevention strategies that can protect and promote safety and health in the future of work. Consumers of research products will drive funding decisions and demand a broader research benefit base that uses communication formats that meet the demands of the communities they serve. Social credit is a trustworthiness algorithm by which data on social standing can be used to reward or punish behaviors of both workers and organizations. Companies that demonstrate high corporate responsibility to promote people, planet and profitability on equal terms will be sought after by workers. Non-standard work arrangements will be the new normal and people engaged in or available for work will face challenges associated with new arrangements in the ever evolving hiring practices. There will be an increased acceptance of workers with more fluid employment histories fueled by an emphasis on skills over pedigree and company loyalty. Virtual work means that work is no longer limited to a physical location. Workplaces are now ubiquitous and work is defined by what you do, not where you go each day. And finally, the workforce continues to change as demographics and employment patterns shift dramatically. Education systems must develop new strategies to prepare future workers, while simultaneously helping current workers upskill and reskill to meet growing talent needs. Increasingly sedentary work and the blurring of work and professional life boundaries continue to affect workers physical and mental health, resulting in an increased need for OSH to address all aspects of employee health and well being. And now Jessica will walk us through our analysis of how these drivers might interact in the future, briefly described the four scenarios that this project generated and discuss the strategic issues and themes embedded in the future scenarios. Jessica. Thanks Sarah for that great summary of the scanning work that we completed and the driver development that we went through. So after we defined each of the eight drivers, our next task was to consider how they might relate to and also influence one another. And central to this activity was constructing what's called a cross impact matrix, which is an analytical technique that's used in foresight to explain how drivers of the future might interact with one another. And so the goal of the cross impact matrix is to identify drivers that have a significantly disruptive impact to ensure that those are represented in the scenarios that you develop. The cross impact exercise also can help to identify drivers that we might consider excluding from the scenario building process, such as those that have a completely neutral impact or those that seem to be more secondary products associated with one or more other drivers. So the slide displayed here provides the results of our cross impact evaluation matrix for the eight drivers of the future of Osh that Sarah just described. We used a scoring scheme that identified each driver as having a strongly reinforcing impact, a reinforcing impact, a neutral impact, a contradictory impact, or a strongly contradictory impact on every other driver from our set. And so when completing the matrix, the driver name that's displayed as the row label was considered the influencing factor, and the driver noted in the column was the dependent factor or the one being influenced. Our assessment indicated that all eight drivers had sufficient impact to continue into the scenario building process. And it also highlighted advanced technologies in the virtual workplace as two of the most strongly reinforcing of the eight drivers and suggested that these were likely to play a key role in the future for occupational safety and health. So we carried all eight drivers forward and use them to construct for complimentary scenario stories for the future. The blueprints for these four scenarios come from extensive cross cultural futures work conducted by the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies, which was led for many decades by Dr. Jim Dater. The details for each scenario then were derived directly from our project scanning and synthesis work that Sarah described earlier. Each of our scenarios is written as a narrative of around 400 to 600 words with a summary abstract as well. But for the sake of time today, we'll provide you with just a brief description of each scenario. So the continuation future is essentially an extension of the present without any major changes over the next five years or so. In this future boundaries related to work locations, employment arrangements, work hours, the interface between work life and personal life, and the human machine interaction all continue to blur. The collapse future on the other hand tells the story of a world in the next five to 15 years where failure to adapt coupled with a lack of both trust and resources forces people and organizations to rely on the self to the detriment of worker health and safety. The new equilibrium future is another alternative future that's situated within that next five to 15 year timeframe. And this is a world that's controlled by the idea of things being remote and demands for new research on worker centric arrangements, remote work and the human machine collaboration strongly influenced the allocation of Osh resources. And transformation is our most distant of the four futures envisioned over the next 16 years and beyond transformation represents a fundamental change to the current way of doing things. And so in this advanced tech world, mental health and data protections become central elements of an expanded Osh paradigm. Research is driven by population need and industries achieve what's known as one world health to sustain global workforce well being. So after our team finalized to these future narratives, we took a deeper dive into the eight drivers and the force scenarios that we had constructed to consider their implications for the future practice of occupational safety and health. This exercise led us to identify five major strategic issues and themes that were relevant to the future of Osh that might help operationalized planning and action. These include workforce mental health as a central occupational health outcome, virtual work arrangements and associated policies. Our future approach to Osh research in general, the importance of developing and sustaining connections and partnerships and ever increasing data security demands that can impact Osh research and practice. So collectively, our eight drivers of change and these five key issues and themes can be used as inputs during the development of strategic options intended to help the Osh community prepare for the future. And since foresight by definition is not a one and done activity, we can continue to monitor these eight future drivers and these five key issues and themes noted today, as we also search for new signals of change as part of a strategic approach to preparing for and influencing operations for Osh. And so with that Sarah and I would like to thank you for your time and attention today. We certainly hope that you found this quick overview on driving forces for the future of Osh to be helpful. And we look forward to receiving your questions and comments on this work. Welcome back everybody. We're here to moderate this next session which is entitled the Osh professional of the future. And I can't think of a more critical topic that we're going to lead off with today than this. Because as we think about the future of occupational safety and health, it matters really very very little. As many people, the professionals prepared to lead that future to nurture it to grow it to vocalize it really to share it with others. As many of you know, our field has not always had the visibility or the voice that the workers, we serve really need and really depend on us for. I think it's critical that we sharpen our skills when it comes to communicating our importance to the people of our society. Workers need us they expect us to be there they expect us to be their champions for their own safety, health and well being. And I think the future occupational safety and health professional among many other tasks has to be a great communicator of vocalizer of the tremendous burden that these workers face and how we can go about improving that struggle. Our speaker today is really dedicated to this cause and he has promised to provoke us perhaps be a little controversial, which we definitely love. So as we get started I'll just remind you you may enter a question into the chat today at any time you like, and we'll lead off with those questions from the chat. You also may raise your hand and get in queue for a verbal question at the end of the presentation. So with that, let me turn the floor over to our next speaker, someone well known to all of you. Dr Lee Newman Lee welcome today. Hey thanks Casey just a sound check and you're gonna be okay. Yes, loud and clear. Great well hi everybody. Yeah I, I don't know what I signed up for here but we'll see how it goes I've had a little trepidation actually even taking on this topic. But maybe I'm qualified because you know I actually, you know never got any formal training in occupational safety and health and came sideways at this whole profession as I know you know there are many other people who have. So, so with, with this little bit of introduction what I what I want to do is tell you what I'd like to do over the next few minutes. I was given a broad enough mandate and broad enough title that I think I can kind of take this in a couple of directions that what we just heard and what I'd like to do is spend a little time re examining whether what we currently do is researchers practitioners and educators will meet our future needs and, and I'd like to discuss why we need to reshape our approaches and I'm going to put in the context of that is referred to as wicked problems as the vaccine problems of our society. And, and we'll talk some about the reshaping the need for future occupational safety and health professionals to acquire what I think are the truly hard skills. Let's talk about that here in just a minute. I want to start though by telling you why I have trepidation and I'm going to read a quote from column I read on Sunday by David Brooks in the New York Times, where he was talking about something he was wrong about, which actually happens pretty often. But here's the quote reality has changed but my mental framework just sits there. They prevent me from even seeing the change that is already underway. What the experts call conceptual blindness. I'm trying to address one periods problems through the last periods frameworks. I want to applaud our colleagues who spoke this morning and our friends at NIOSH for what they, what, you know, they, if we let them say it they probably say what they're trying to do is help us help cure this conceptual blindness. And so let's talk a bit more about the approaches we might take to trying to tackle what I consider to be some of the wicked problems that we're facing. So, I'm going to ask you a question it's rhetorical at the moment but may we come back to it do you think the field of Osh has maximized its impact, have we reached our potential. And secondly, what do we hope will be the impact of the next generation of Osh professionals. What are our aspirations for that next generation, and what follows from that is to think about what are the, what's the skills the knowledge the attitudes and the competencies that they're going to need and I think that's kind of the starting point for those of us who are leaders in this field to continue to wrestle with as we started this morning. You heard about some of these papers this morning. You know I knew they'd be covered, at least in part but if you haven't done the deep dive into these papers. I really encourage you to do that because there's a lot of rich, rich content here to to to draw as kind of the I'll call that many of them sort of the tactical next steps for trying to move us to our next generation of how we help create help foster future professionals in the field. This diagram you saw this morning and and I'll tell you what I love about it I love about it because it's it's an expansion. And it's also something that that has, if you just look at the design of it it has it has lines it has edges. But here's where I think I want us to go a little bit further and to realize that nothing we're talking about here has these kinds of crisp lines and edges. In fact, for us to start to reach our potential as a field, we're going to have to start addressing the most vexing problems and what have been referred to by anthropologists and sociologists as wicked problems and interestingly none of them were from Boston that can tell, but the wicked problems are ones that they can't be readily solved. They don't even have a single solution. They, one wicked problem is interacting with another wicked problem. These vexing problems require the ability to to think about social systems and politics, and, you know, geography and economics and meteorology, and as well as the conditions of the workplace which is where we feel probably most we're going to have to work and, and, you know, do our fine work. It actually this this notion comes from is credited to paper written by retell and and Weber from UC Berkeley. They actually gave a talk in 69 which I turned to a paper which I refer you to is it's an interesting notion of what is a wicked problem. The science, as they put it has developed a deal with tame problems, but policy problems cannot be as definitively described, and in our society. It's it's less obvious what is the undisputable public good. What is the definition of equity. The policies that respond to social problems cannot even be defined as completely correct or false. I think that this, this is a real challenge to the lifeblood of of we as scientists who like to define a problem and solve a problem and come up with a solution. These are beyond complex, and that's where I think I want to spend a few minutes just sort of provoking you all this afternoon to go even beyond the, the beautifully drawn lines of the expansion that Paul Schulte and George Delcos and others have articulated. I just want to refer you to a paper which conveniently just came out this year in American scientists by two researchers and educators at the Ohio State University in their department of anthropology, who, who in a provocative way say the world needs a person, they're asking the question how can we train the next generation of researchers and I would extend that to practitioners to tackle society's most vexing problems. And if you sum up that original paper that that they paraphrase from the 70s, a wicked problem is one where every problem is unique. There's no clear problem definition. There, there's going to be a multi causal multi scalar and interconnectedness multiple stakeholders will have conflicting agendas. And by the way, we are stakeholders. It straddles the organizational disciplinary boundaries that we heard about earlier today. And, and every wicked problem is connected to another wicked problem. Every solution tears through the system, and the solutions are not right and wrong, but just better or worse. And they can, it can take a long time to evaluate the solutions. In fact, the problems are never completely solved. If, if you will, what I'd like to do is set up as a straw model in the next couple of slides, the way that we very often go about with our strategy for problem solving. And, and, you know, I don't mean to pick on the hierarchy of controls but it's convenient and it's something that we use and we teach. And it gives us a very structured way of thinking about problem solving within the, the triangle within the box of occupational safety and health but represented by the blue here are the bigger problems the vexing problems of our society that are impacting how we go about addressing problems. And in fact, teaching the next generation how to solve problems that definitely impact the way that work is done. And some of these are the ones that you heard about already today and are, you know, discussed in excellent depth by some of the papers that I mentioned, one of them is technological disruption. Another one is globalization, and there are many dimensions to this and you can you can put whatever headline you want to on this but I'm just going to list out for you. Some of these, some of these large scale vexing wicked problems and suggest you that if you try to apply our conventional approaches, which constitutes a lot of our curriculum. The hierarchy of controls as just my straw model for this. It's actually pretty hard to think about how we would address the impacts of globalization, using the paradigms that we currently use the changing demographics is another one that you heard about earlier earlier today is as another vexing problem. I'll just insert here by the way well being is itself a vexing problem. Pandemics and the emergencies of the future. You think about the the COVID response I think that we all can and should, you know, take some credit for helping to elevate and help people understand the importance of occupational safety and health. There were a lot of instant experts in occupational safety and health who were doing a lot of talking about the things that are are bread and butter to us. And, and many of them were were speaking about this and in fact leading around the subject of pandemic response, because in a way they were better positioned to be addressing outside of our triangle. The impacts of larger social and political issues that impacted the pandemic this will continue as we face emergencies in the future. I want to sort of mention, at least to provoke people to think about how you would fit into your curriculum, the discussion of where ignorance and disinformation plays when we try to improve the the well being of workers. We already are starting to think harder about some of these. One example is around health inequity and safety inequity. The pandemic is a good example of this. We know where the disproportionate number of fatalities occurred in the workplace and are continuing to occur in the workplace. And, and it's, it's again, disproportionately affecting people of color and, and other individuals low wage individuals, people who were frontline workers who were considered essential but not treated with the dignity that we would give to people who are essential. Economics writ large, and I'll just add as a subset of that the obsession with productivity, as though we can continue to squeeze more productivity out of individuals as though the only economic good is for us to have more people, you're able to see the slides. Okay, thank you. You know when we think about how we, how we engage with employers and with with the, the, the larger groups that control the economy. I think we have to be aware of and find a way to be trained to be at the table to address these problems. There are some others which which may be uncomfortable or some people to talk about which I think, you know, has to be front and center. And that includes things like bodily autonomy. If, if I am a person of child bearing age, and I'm working for an employer who doesn't respect and give me equal rights in terms of my bodily autonomy. What does that mean for me as an unequal worker. It means employment and my, my health and safety in a state where my equal rights are not being addressed. This impacts the work that we do whether we think it does or not. Climate change we've heard a little bit about already. Interestingly, it's only very recently that as best I can tell people in my eyes are allowed to put these two words together. So we still have a ways to go in terms of addressing climate changes impact. But there are, there are people who have been, who have been calling this out for us for years and including Paul Schulte who has probably been, in my mind, one of our real thought leaders in understanding the interaction of climate on worker health, among now many others. But if you, you know, you look at, for example, this from the Lancet. Most recently and you think about the, the downstream consequences of changing climate. Many of those are affecting workers and, and affecting workers even more than the, the rest of the of the public although what happens to workers reverberates for others as well. What do we play in this vaccine problem is my question to you. And, and the. The wicked problems don't act in isolation here is heat smoked and coven battle battery in the workers who feed America. And I know that that brother Jack Litch and, and Paul Schulte and maybe others are working on an update to the description of how climate change is producing hazards for workers and a big addition to this when no doubt is around mental health impacts structural systemic racism is absolutely a wicked problem of our society and, and plays out unfortunately in the workplace. And so we're role as educators, and as professionals in the field to addressing this in, in the workplace. And I just want to, you know, make sure that I can't dignify each of these with enough time here today but we're going to have time for Violences and other one and this can include gun violence but there are other forms of violence and we're seeing violence going up and we're going to see it compounded by climate change, climate change plus violence is on the rise. And goes hand in hand with with other on my list that I shared with you already environmental degradation, also writ large impacts, what happens in the microcosm of the workplace. And erosion of fundamental human rights. And, and I'll end this with with this one which is organizational behavior which again interacts with many the others. Again look at that tangled that tangled knot that I showed you in the beginning. Here's one attempt to address it using the triangle and, and we get part way there this is the total worker health from the total worker health website. Gosh, that that basically re frames the hierarchy of controls, and, and, and takes us one step closer, but still is is going to fall short of having the impacts that we needed to have if we stay within within the kind of defined structure that we choose. Now, industry is is already out there right so you know I said earlier that you know I'm not going to have all the answers. But you know there are a lot of people out there who aren't talking us who are struggling they're they're they're trying in industry to address these issues and we where do we play. When it comes to ESG we play here on the environmental side, and we, we play here on the social side. And if we're not training ourselves and the people who will follow us to be directly involved in issues around waste and pollution, resource depletion climate change, or on the social side employee relations and diversity and working conditions, etc. Then we're going to, we're just going to miss, miss another boat. We heard this earlier, and it's written up nicely in the future of work paper one of the future work papers that Sarah Faulkner was lead author on. And what I want to draw from this is what I would call the truly hard stuff. And you know we used to talk about the soft skills and I want us to stop that. These, this is the truly hard stuff and if it was easy, we'd all be doing it we've all be doing it well we would be using systems thinking we would be building emotional intelligence and by the way you can teach emotional intelligence you can improve people's emotional intelligence. And the ability to do transdisciplinary work, collaborative work. The, the term to sure is to talk about doing convergence research. That's actually one of the National Science Foundation's 10 big ideas is promoting convergence research. But, you know, which requires, you know, actually social skills. And really communication and advocacy, these are all things some of these are words that won't show up in print in this paper but I've embellished to include as terms that we need to be training ourselves and and there actually I think are good examples among us and I'd love to hear more about them. Quickly, I'm going to wrap up by mentioning that there was a paper that a whole group of us and a big shout out to all the people who you see on the screen here, and others who contributed to an effort that the total worker health community did going back to to come together and try to, to at least approach on some of the well being side of this of this equation, what kind of education training we needed to build capacity in, in total worker health. And I think it is applicability here, and I'm going to buzz through these slides because you've got copies of them and you're welcome to go back to them I encourage you to take a look at this paper. We talked about the need for six core competencies subject matter expertise was first and foremost and and back I want to honor the fact that we have to continue to have and build our, our technical skills in our core discipline areas there's no doubt about that. And there's no doubt that that can occupy all of our time. But beyond that we also need competencies in worker advocacy and engagement in program planning implementation and evaluation in communication and dissemination. I hope we have a discussion about what dissemination means by the way in leadership and management including how do we engage with leaders how do we communicate what we know and what we can contribute and then partnership building a coordination which is is you know translated is also the convergence research notion. And, and I'm not going to spend time in these slides, but I encourage you to go back because we break them down into into more incremental steps and then into their smaller parts. And, you know, I think it's, it's a paper which, you know, at least by analogy, I think could be applied to to some of the other training fields that we have you know it's in Colorado we have a health physics program, which at first blush seems like, you know, pretty far from the total worker health scene, but actually it turns out not to be then the same thing with our IH and our Ergo safety program. You know there's there's a lot of opportunity for us to be learning from each other and drawing on some of those competencies. I want to close with this example and this is a lesson in convergence. And some years ago, there was a recognition that you had. You had computer sciences people, and you had biological sciences people represented in purple, and in green and an interestingly, when those two seemingly disparate fields converged something interesting happen and it's something that we call genomics, and it's about the genomic revolution. It didn't come out of biology and it didn't come out of computer sciences that came out of a convergence of these disciplines and them actually developing in a deliberate way, ways of communicating with each other and finding points for collaboration and ultimately in fact for advocacy and for funding. With that, I'll try to close by drawing on from the Moritz and Kawa paper which is a channeling of the 1970s work of the anthropologists. The people that we want to be and want to become I believe look like this people who are adept at systems thinking who are ready to embrace challenges and learn new things and actually have fun doing it. Because these are, you know, it's not like you can just solve this equation and take satisfaction, I solved the equation, you're going to have to find other ways of deriving your fun in taking on these these wicked problems. Action oriented, not afraid to make mistakes because there's not going to be a single right answer sensitive to the power differentials and the dynamics that are within our organizations and external to our organizations, including for us as stakeholders and things like we we heard mentioned earlier about working within academic institutions and within NIOSH and CDC and and HHS, recognizing that we are stakeholders as well and all of this because the impact on us is is is significant. Having stamina for long term engagement and you're going to have to celebrate the small wins. We're actually pretty good at the small wins because we take a lot of hits and we have a lot of delayed gratification in our fields. And ultimately, collaborating effectively with stakeholders who come from diverse backgrounds. This is what I think is the profile of the future occupational safety and health professional. And just a nod to john Donnie from the National Safety Council, who as a way of kind of operation is operationalizing some of this talks about some examples of what in the face of the future of work, what kinds of skills and competencies. What future professionals are going to have to have how to work, lean work teams, understanding and being part of new leadership styles, doing it in a way that reduces our footprint, having higher transparency, keeping safety at the core and I don't want to lose that in this conversation. At the same time, recognizing that safety is a part of a bigger whole human, which are called total worker health, understanding that technology is going to be here to stay and and I can't. I can't predict what the future is I've got my magic eight ball here with me and even it's not proving very helpful. And ultimately, us fostering greater and I would say new partnerships. That I'm happy to turn the floor back to you Casey. I hope this stimulates some discussion for you all and if you'll think about this in terms of the wicked problems and the vaccine problems and how we become part of solving parts of that contributing to solutions as incremental and as variables they are. I hope you're with me on that journey. Thank you. The material in this video was originally prepared for and presented at a meeting of the external research and training centers funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on July 26 through the 28th of 2022. The theme of the meeting was preparing for the future of worker safety, health and well being through innovations in training, research and practice.