In the modern laboratory, safety is usually treated as a problem of information: we write the chemical hygiene plan, build the training module, post the signs, and assume that once people know the rules, they will follow them. It is a tidy theory, and according to Jonathan Klane, mostly wrong. Klane, who has directed safety for hundreds of research labs, advises as a principal consultant with the global sustainability consultancy ERM, and is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University studying how stories shape risk perception, has spent years on a question most safety programs never ask: not what people know about risk, but how they feel it. Speaking at the Lab Manager Leadership Summit, he put it bluntly: "Information never changes behavior. We know stuff, but it doesn't affect us." If a lab manager wants people to act differently at the bench, the most powerful tool available is not another data sheet. It is a story.
Why risk is felt, not calculated
The premise beneath Klane's argument is that risk is not a number waiting to be discovered. "Risk is a human construct, it's not a natural phenomenon," he said. "We created the concept, the idea of risk." Hazards exist on their own; danger exists. But risk only comes into being when a person perceives a threat to something they value, and perception runs on emotion far more than arithmetic.
This is where most lab safety efforts misfire. They are built for a rational actor who weighs probabilities and chooses accordingly. Real people do not work that way. "If you think that people consider risk via an analytical, logical, step-by-step" process, Klane said, "sorry to disappoint you, they don't. It's very much driven by how we feel." He pointed to his own chest as he said it; the heart, not the spreadsheet, is where risk decisions get made.
For lab managers, the implication is direct. A risk that is statistically minor but emotionally vivid will command attention, while a genuinely dangerous routine that feels familiar will be ignored. Understanding that gap in risk perception is the first step toward communicating safety in a way that lands.
The brain is a survival machine, not a calculator
To explain why feeling outruns logic, Klane reached back about 100,000 years. Picture standing on the savanna, he said, looking across a sea of grass, when suddenly there is a gap in the blades. Could it be a predator? The humans who stopped to calculate the odds did not pass on their genes. The ones who ran did.
Jonathan Klane, MSEd, CIH, CSP, CHMM, CIT, storytelling consultant.
"Your brain is a survival machine, that is what it is trying to do," Klane said. It does not always do it well, but its purpose is to keep us alive, and it evolved to treat possibility as if it were probability. That ancient wiring still runs the show in a modern lab, which is why people are terrible at one of the most important distinctions in risk. "Humans struggle differentiating possibility from probability," he noted. We did not evolve to compute likelihoods; we evolved to react to what might happen.
That same survival brain is also a relentless storyteller. Klane has heard the claim that anxiety makes the brain a bad storyteller and rejects it. "No, the brain is an awesome storyteller. It's just not telling you a story that's very helpful. It's scaring the crap out of you." The lesson for managers is not to fight the brain's narrative instinct but to feed it better material: stories that make the right behavior feel as urgent as the imagined threat.
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Narrative beats data as a lab safety tool
If people are wired for stories, then the most effective approach to risk communication is to stop fighting that wiring. This is the heart of Klane's thesis, and storytelling is grounded in his doctoral research as much as his field experience. "Humans are wired for stories, and risk is a human construct, and stories are one of the best ways to communicate, and especially about risk, because you easily communicate perception."
That last word is the key. A control chart can tell a researcher that an exposure is dangerous; it cannot make them feel the danger. A story can. Neuroscience research backs this up: character-driven narratives trigger the brain to release oxytocin, which heightens empathy and, in one study, left viewers less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors a story depicted. When Klane describes a microwave containing hydrofluoric acid that exploded with such force that the door could no longer be opened, no one in the room reaches for a probability table; they picture the blast. The narrative carries the perception of risk in a way a statistic never could; it shapes risk perception directly, which is what ultimately governs how people behave.
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There is a practical sequence here worth naming for lab managers:
- Data informs, stories move: Use numbers to establish what is true, but use narrative to make people care enough to act.
- Stories transmit perception: A well-told account conveys not just what happened but how dangerous it felt, which is what actually shapes behavior.
- Stories are memorable: People forget the permissible exposure limit; they remember the colleague whose experiment "sneezed" on them when the sash was up.
Metaphors and the language of risk
Closely related to storytelling is Klane's insistence on metaphor. Given a choice between a metaphor and a literal analogy, he is unequivocal: "Always use the metaphor, much more powerful than persuasion." A metaphor does not merely describe a hazard; it reframes how the listener perceives it.
His favorites are vivid by design. A fume hood sash, a colleague once told him, is like "a salad bar sneeze shield, only in reverse," the point being to keep the barrier between you and an experiment that might, at any moment, react and "sneeze." When a piece of shrapnel from an exploded solid rocket motor lodged in a building at neck height, a coworker insisted they label it "jugular height." That phrase did more to convey the stakes than any incident report. "Metaphors are really important," Klane said. They are how abstract risk becomes something a person can see and feel.
For lab managers, this means the words chosen in a safety conversation are not decoration; they are the mechanism. The right metaphor can make a quiet, insidious hazard feel as real as a visible flame.
Lead with the human, not the hazard
The storytelling lens changes how a manager should handle the moments that matter most: after something goes wrong. The instinct is to interrogate the cause. Klane argues the first move is human, an approach that aligns with OSHA's guidance on incident investigation, which urges employers to treat events as preventable "incidents" rather than random "accidents" and to investigate close calls without rushing to assign blame. "What's the very first thing you always say when you go for the follow-up?" he asked. "Are you okay? How are you?" not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
He is equally firm about what not to say. Lab managers often reach for the dramatic warning that a person could have died. Klane rejects it. "No one knows what it's like to die," he said, and invoking it does nothing to change behavior; it only frightens. The same logic applies to the language of investigation. Repeatedly asking "why" puts people on the defensive; he watched an early interviewee freeze with "the deer in the headlights look" under that question. His substitute is gentler and more revealing: ask "how" or "what." "How did this happen? Because that's so relatively benign."
In practice, that points to a few simple rules for the conversation after something goes wrong:
- Ask "Are you okay?" first: Check on the person physically, mentally, and emotionally before turning to the cause.
- Don't say "you could have died": Dramatic warnings frighten without changing behavior.
- Replace "why" with "how" or "what": "Why" feels like an accusation, while "how did this happen?" invites an honest account.
- Aim for the story, not a defense: The goal is to learn what actually happened, which only emerges when people feel safe enough to tell it.
This is storytelling in a different key: creating the conditions where people feel safe enough to tell you the truth about what happened, rather than constructing a defense.
Building a culture where stories can be told
None of this works in a lab where speaking up is punished. The most powerful risk story in the world is useless if no one feels safe telling it. Klane points to the research of Amy Edmondson on psychological safety, whose counterintuitive finding is that the most effective teams report the most incidents, not because they are less safe, but because they are open enough to surface what others would hide. The same instinct shows up in how seasoned leaders build a lasting safety culture: they go first, sharing their own stories so others feel safe to do the same.
That openness is itself a storytelling practice. "Resist rebutting," Klane advised. "Conversation is best when it's open." The manager who shuts down a near-miss account with "that won't happen here" teaches the team to stop sharing. Conversely, the lab manager who treats every close call as a story worth hearing builds a reservoir of exactly the material that keeps a lab safe. Culture, in the end, is made of the stories a lab tells about itself.
What this means for lab managers
The key takeaway is not to abandon data, controls, or training. It is to recognize their limits and to add the lab safety tool that has been missing. Klane's closing charge to lab managers is to make storytelling a habit: share stories and invite them in return, because for a species that perceives risk through narrative, a well-told account of what went wrong, or what nearly did, may be the most effective safety intervention available.
The shift is subtle but profound. It means a lab manager stops asking only "Does my team know the rules?" and starts asking "Does my team feel the risk?"—The first question is answered by a quiz. The second is answered by a story.
