ABSTRACT
Nearly all safety professionals have sat through an adult learning course and were taught this basic principle: Adult learning is most effective when it is experiential (Merriam & Brockett, 2007). In my experience, many safety nerds tend to follow this axiom well for others, but forget to apply it to themselves. Most of us can think of at least one peer who writes safety programs that apply to tasks they do not understand; it might be a safety professional who writes a ladder safety program but has never actually used an extension ladder, or who writes a forklift safety program, but has never actually driven a forklift. I spent some time in the Army as a combat engineer, and I shudder to think of what our instructions for complicated explosive demolitions tasks would have looked like had they been written by a physics expert who had never actually blown something to bits with C4.
