The Safety Control Delusion One of the profound realizations of parenting is that you cannot control your own children. One of the stark realizations of marriage is that you cannot control your partner. Yet, here is Safety pushing all this delusional nonsense about ‘controlling’ others. There is a massive contradiction in the rhetoric of Safety. […]
Understanding Harm Minimization
Understanding Harm Minimization As much as Safety might wish it, the real world is not binary black and white. Sometimes the most caring thing to do in a fallible world with fallible people is simply keep harm to a minimum. Harm minimization is the course of action that puts care at the centre of intelligent […]
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Complacency and The Wayward Mind
Complacency and The Wayward Mind The issue of complacency is a preoccupation of the risk and safety industry yet one can find little research in the sector beyond the excessive use of the label. It seems once we have declared something as ‘complacency’ we somehow know what has occurred. Usually complacency is interpreted as laziness, […]
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Risk Culture and Cultural Risk
Risk Culture and Cultural Risk When the risk and safety industry defines culture it doesn’t consider critical aspects of culture. The most common definition is that culture is ‘what we do around here’ which fits in nicely with the behaviourist-cognitivist worldview that dominates the sector. So people in the risk industry role up to training […]
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Paper Safe is not Due Diligence
Paper Safe is not Due Diligence Next Due Diligence Workshop: Due Diligence Workshop Sydney 20,21 February 2019 I met Bob yesterday, a Construction Manager deeply shaken by an incident that happened on site with the possibility of multiple fatalities. Like many incidents in building and construction, he was lucky. The culture of the building and […]
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Zero Suicide and the Discourse of Denial
Zero Suicide and the Discourse of Denial One of the most unhelpful and ignorant approaches to suicide prevention is evidenced in the Zero Suicide movement (https://zerosuicide.sprc.org/ ). We see in this insane delusion with the zero discourse the: denial of death, denial of fallibility, denial of human freedom, the demonsiation of pain and suffering and, […]
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The Advisor as Skilled Helper
The Advisor as Skilled Helper The idea of ‘helping’ is essential to the professions (Susskind & Susskind., The Future of The Professions 2015). However, the absence of the language of ‘helping’ in the safety industry is not surprising. When the goal is zero and the activity is counting where is the motivation for ‘helping’? One’s […]
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Zero, A Framework for Psychological Bullying
Zero, A Framework for Psychological Bullying There can never be an Ethic of Risk as long as the safety industry is wedded to the ideology and discourse of zero. How can one be moral to another person when one denies fallibility in goal setting? Of course zero is not a SMART goal anyway! (See Understanding […]
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There is Nothing more Imaginative We can Do in Safety
There is Nothing more Imaginative We can Do in Safety Imagination is the bedrock of any risk assessment yet the risk industry is so silent about it. When it comes to risk assessment it’s not likely that the things we already know are going to hurt anyone. It is always the unseen risks, the things […]
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Censorship in Safety
Censorship in Safety One doesn’t have to look hard to find censorship in the safety industry. Simply look at what vocabulary and semiotics are available to the industry and what is suppressed and there is the evidence. Similarly, look at the propaganda, smoke and mirrors, taboos and rituals and, censorship is easy to find. For […]
