We built the machines. Then we forgot about the people using them.

The machine was poorly designed. Not the person.

Early in my career I had the privilege of working with an organization that built all of their own machinery. That single fact changed everything for me.

When I saw workers reaching too high, bending too low, twisting into positions that no human body was designed to hold for eight hours a day, I didn’t have to write a report and wait six months for a committee to review it. I could walk over to the floor supervisor and say: this needs to change. And then watch a machine get reconfigured to place the human in their most neutral, capable position.

Not the other way around.

That’s when it landed. Not as a concept from a textbook, as something I could see and feel and measure. We can design work around humans. We can change the environment to fit the person instead of forcing the person to fit the environment. And when we do, people stop getting hurt.

It sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most organizations still don’t do it.

The problem isn’t what most people think

When people hear the word ergonomics, they think chairs. Maybe a keyboard tray. Perhaps someone coming in to adjust monitor heights and hand out wrist rests.

That’s not ergonomics. That’s furniture.

Real ergonomics, Human Factors science, is about understanding risk. Knowing what the human body and brain can do, and what they can’t. Then designing systems, workflows, tools, and environments that work with our natural capabilities and protect against the conditions where we are most vulnerable.

Most organizations don’t know how to quantify that problem. So they don’t. They manage the symptoms, the claims, the lost time, the modified duties, without ever addressing the design failures that caused them in the first place.

The injuries keep happening. The costs keep climbing. And somewhere, a safety manager is ordering more ergonomic chairs.

Workers are Industrial Athletes. They always have been.

The first time I heard the term Industrial Athlete, I thought it was a bit hokey.

Then I watched what happened when I used it in a room full of supervisors and managers who had stopped listening to traditional safety language years ago.

They got it immediately.

People understand sport. They understand that athletes get injured, that rehabilitation is a process, and that through proper training and proper mechanics, many injuries are preventable. They understand that you wouldn’t ask a professional athlete to perform without warming up, without recovery time, without equipment designed for their body and their sport.

That analogy cuts across cultures, industries, and job titles in a way that almost nothing else does. I’ve been using it since the 1990s. The retention is there every single time.

Workers are Industrial Athletes. The workplace is their sport. And we would never design an athletic training program the way we design most workplaces, loading people beyond their capacity, ignoring recovery, measuring output while paying no attention to the human generating it.

The mountain taught me something the workplace couldn’t

I’ve spent my career studying what breaks people at work. I’ve spent an equal amount of time on snow, as a professional ski instructor and trainer with the Professional Ski Instructors of Canada, a former Chair and Course Conductor with the Canadian Ski Instructors’ Alliance, and an alpine ski and ski cross coach with Alpine Canada.

For a long time those two worlds lived separately in my mind.

In December 2025 I ran an experiment. I took Human Factors and ergonomics concepts and applied them directly to skiing, posted about it for 30 days on LinkedIn and Instagram. The response surprised me.

The ergonomics community loved seeing their own principles reflected back through the lens of sport. And people in the skiing world, who had probably never once thought about ergonomics, suddenly understood concepts they’d been hearing about for years, because the analogy made it visceral.

The insight that came out of that experiment was simple and powerful: it’s the same person. The human on the mountain and the human in the workplace are identical. Same body, same brain, same capacity for performance and the same vulnerability to poor design.

That experiment is what spawned this newsletter.

Who this is for

If you’re a health and safety professional tired of managing symptoms instead of fixing root causes, this is for you.

If you work in HR and you’re starting to connect the dots between how work is designed and why your people are burning out, this is for you.

If you’re a business owner who suspects there’s a competitive advantage hiding inside a healthier, better-designed workplace, this is for you.

And if you’re an athlete who spends time thinking about performance on the mountain or the field but has never applied that same lens to your work environment, welcome. You might find this the most useful thing you read this week.

Every post here will be practical, evidence-based, and grounded in three decades of real work.