Building Safety That Sticks: How Matt Barnes Redefined Culture at MD&A

Every safety leader dreams of building a culture that runs on trust, not compliance checklists, one where people don’t just follow the rules but own them. But the hard truth is that most organizations never get there.

They swing between extremes: rigid, top-down systems that suffocate initiative, or vague “values-based” programs that leave workers guessing where the line actually is. Both lead to the same outcome: disengaged teams, hidden risks, and leaders buried under metrics that don’t tell the real story.

In the latest episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sat down with Matt Barnes, Director of Environmental Health and Safety at MD&A, to unpack how he rebuilt a safety culture from the inside out, one that works across turbine specialists, field crews, and repair facilities without losing sight of human ownership.

What Matt has done at MD&A isn’t just a set of policies; it’s a blueprint for turning safety from a compliance exercise into a leadership movement.

Defining the “Box”: Values That Empower, Not Restrict

Early in our conversation, Matt introduced a framework that every safety professional should write down: define the box, then let people work inside it.

At MD&A, this meant clearly articulating the company’s core values, principles like “Do the right thing,” but leaving the “how” up to each division.

That one shift changed everything. Instead of pushing a single, rigid playbook across turbine overhauls and repair facilities, Matt permitted teams to design their own safety solutions, as long as they stayed aligned with MD&A’s core principles.

It sounds simple, but it solved one of the industry’s most entrenched problems: rigid safety programs kill engagement, and loose ones create liability. Most companies either tell workers to “find the box themselves” (too vague) or “never step outside it” (too rigid). MD&A struck the middle ground.

When people understand the boundaries and trust that leadership values their judgment, ownership follows naturally. And ownership is the difference between safety on paper and safety in practice.

The Power of Incremental Change

There’s a dangerous myth in organisational change that transformation happens through bold leaps, sweeping initiatives, or shiny new software. Matt disagrees.

At MD&A, he learned that incremental progress compounds into massive, sustainable results, while “big-bang” transformations almost always collapse under their own weight.

When he first joined in 2013, it would have been easy to launch a complete EHS overhaul. Instead, he started small, one improvement at a time, one trust-building moment at a time.

Over the years, this steady approach built what he calls “momentum of belief,” a culture where employees stopped seeing change as disruption and started recognizing it as progress.

The framework is deceptively simple:

1. Take your biggest wish (say, cut incidents by 50%).
   
   
2. Break it into smaller, solvable obstacles.
   
   
3. Focus on being incrementally better tomorrow than you were today.
   
   

That’s the difference between change that burns people out and change that sticks.

As I put it during our conversation, it’s like facing a horizon: keep walking in the right direction, one step at a time, and you’ll eventually get there.

The Hidden Cost of Silence

When Matt joined MD&A, the company had just one near-miss report in an entire year. To most leaders, that might sound like a success. To Matt, it was a red flag.

“One near-miss doesn’t mean we’re safe,” he told me. “It means people are too scared to speak up.”

That insight flips a common metric on its head. In reality, low reporting numbers don’t signal safety; they signal fear, distrust, and hidden hazards. At companies where people don’t report near-misses, leaders are effectively flying blind. Problems don’t disappear; they just go underground until someone gets hurt.

Matt’s solution wasn’t punitive or flashy. He spent years building a reporting culture deliberately, layer by layer, creating infrastructure, communication channels, and psychological safety so workers could admit mistakes before they became incidents.

It worked. Over time, near-miss reports skyrocketed, not because risk increased, but because trust did. And that’s when real safety begins: when your people tell you what’s wrong before it hurts someone.

Learning to See Energy; Not Just Risk

Matt’s safety philosophy was shaped early in his career at Alcoa, a company legendary for its approach to hazard prevention. There, he learned to ask one question above all others:

“Where’s the energy?”

In other words, where’s the force that could hurt or kill someone, electrical, mechanical, thermal, or gravitational,  and how do we control it?

At MD&A, this question became the foundation of a proactive, preventive approach.

By pairing near-miss data with energy analysis, Matt’s team could identify potential serious injury and fatality (SIF) events before they happened.

It’s a simple mindset shift, but it’s a game-changer for risk managers and EHS professionals drowning in lagging indicators. If you focus only on what’s already happened, you’ll always be one step behind. When you start looking for the energy, you get ahead of the curve.

Attracting the Right Safety Talent

Culture doesn’t just affect incidents; it affects hiring.

Matt pointed out that many organizations struggling to attract or retain safety professionals are looking at the wrong thing. They chase candidates who can enforce rules, when what they need are leaders who can think, adapt, and earn trust.

MD&A’s framework, empowering autonomy within defined values, naturally attracts the latter. Practitioners who want ownership thrive there. Bureaucrats who just want to enforce policy don’t.

That’s not by accident. It’s by design.

The result is a safety organization that scales because it trusts its people to make good decisions,  not because it adds more layers of oversight.

What Real Progress Looks Like

By the end of our conversation, one thing was clear: what Matt built at MD&A isn’t a program; it’s a mindset. He didn’t start with software, slogans, or scorecards. He started with trust, incremental change, and clarity of values.

That’s why it works.

For leaders overwhelmed by shifting regulations, resistance, and endless pressure to “boil the ocean,” this approach is permission to slow down, start small, and focus on what matters.

Define your box. Move one step at a time. Celebrate honesty. Look for the energy.

It won’t make headlines overnight,  but it will make your people safer, your culture stronger, and your organization far more resilient.

Key Takeaways

• Define the Box: Clarify your non-negotiable values, then let teams solve problems their own way within them.
  
  
• Build Incrementally: Sustainable change compounds through small, consistent improvements,  not sweeping overhauls.
  
  
• Reward Reporting: High near-miss numbers mean trust is working; low ones mean your people are afraid.
  
  
• Focus on Energy: Ask where the potential harm lies, and prevent it before it happens.
  
  
• Hire for Ownership: Great safety cultures attract thinkers, not enforcers.
  
  

Safety leadership isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about building systems that help people make the right call, even when no one’s watching.

That’s what Matt Barnes has done at MD&A. And that’s what we can all learn from.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management featuring Matt Barnes here:

Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3LPtFg3
Spotify: https://bit.ly/3LHFPaO
YouTube: https://youtu.be/HWXyRfJjc7k