In the 80s, Van Halen added a clause to their tour rider to exclude all brown M&Ms from their dressing room, and every music group since then has included similar odd demands. What a bunch of divas! Or are they?
As band member David Lee Roth explained, the brown M&Ms were a simple litmus test to determine if the rest of the contract had been followed carefully: If they walked into the dressing room and there were brown M&Ms in the bowl, they walked out because they knew that if they could not trust the venue to protect then from fires or injuries. It was a safety measure to protect the band from harm.[1]
Today’s measure for effective safety culture is all about the brown M&Ms of our organizations: That one thing you can walk in and definitively say, “things are going well here.”
And that one thing is a tidy workspace?
Think about it. How many of us devoured everything we could about Marie Kondo’s Kon-Mari tidying methods? And there are studies about the psychological benefits of making one’s bed in the morning.[2] Is it any surprise that a tidy isolation cabinet could serve as a simple litmus test for compliance and safety standards? After all, cleanliness fights germs, and tidiness fights chaos.
By Gayle Porter
