In the final newsletter for 2022 let me wish you in the risk and safety world, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
The last few years during the pandemic have been such a trying time of suffering for many, as well as much frustration and distress for such suffering. So, our best wishes for this year are perhaps even more so for a better year in 2023.
How unusual to see then the world of risk and safety use the pandemic to try and empower itself into relevance through the power of PPE and faux expertise? It has been so disappointing to watch on as countless checklists and paperwork were produced to anchor the pandemic to the work of the safety industry. How strange an industry that baulks at accepting Transdisciplinarity and trust across the disciplines and professions.
Of course, Covid-19 has not disappeared and many are fatigued by it all which is why there is so much silence about it in the media.
Yet, what the pandemic teaches us is that we are fallible vulnerable people and all the projections of immorality (in zero) are an illusion. Nothing brings us down to earth more than our own mortal bodies. And this is not a negative thing but rather ought to generate hope in mutual respect, empathy, social resilience and love.
There is so much need for grace in the world, in the face of much mis-information, hate and conspiracy. Who would have thought that a symbol of birth to death in a life of humility could be such a semiotic beacon for us in how we might live?
Theme – Emotions, Feeling and Risk.
The theme for the last newsletter for 2022 is Emotions, Feeling and Risk.
The best way to understand the emotions is by using a hyphen to show its underlying meaning. E-motions are the unconscious dynamics that move us.
The energy that drives our motion (e-motion) produce the many feelings we have that give us an awareness in hindsight of why we do what we do.
It was Karl Weick who stated: ‘How can I know what I believe until I see what I do’.
It was one of my favourite philosophers (Soren Kierkegaard – (1813–1855) who stated: ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’.
How strange then this world of risk and safety that has an obsession with prediction, fear of uncertainty and psychosis with the word ‘faith’.
Emotions, Feelings and Risk
There is so much excellent research about on the nature of the human emotions, here is a selection of some of my favourites:
• Johnson, M., (1987) The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press. London.
• Damasio, A., (1994). Descarte’s Error. Emotion, Reason, and The Human Brain. Penguin, London.
• Damasio, A., (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harvest Book. New York.
• Damasio, A., (2003). Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Harvest Books, New York.
• Johnson, M., (2007). The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics and Human Understanding. University of Chicago Press. London.
• Pfeifer, R., and Bongard, J., (2007). How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, A New View of Intelligence. A Bradford Book. London.
• Slovic, P., (2010). The Feeling of Risk, New Perspectives on Risk Perception. Earthscan. London.
• Damasio, A., (2010). Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain. Random House. New York.
• Maiese, M., (2011). Embodiment, Emotion and Cognition. Palgrave. New York.
• Johnson, M., (2017). Embodied Mind, Meaning and Reason. How our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding. University of Chicago Press. London.
• Damasio, A., (2018). The Strange Order of Things. Life feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Vintage Books. New York.
• Damasio, A., (2021) Feeling and Knowing. Making Minds Conscious. Penguin, London.
The first and most important point to note is that the emotions are NOT the enemy of Reason. Indeed, creating this binary-dichotomy has not served us well in understanding personhood, relationships or social being, in relation to risk.
Neither does it make sense to declare the emotions the enemy of risk and safety, yet this industry, that fears uncertainty and fallibility, speaks so little about what it is to be a human person. It is as if by declaring humans a machine (the sum of inputs and outputs) in some kind of behaviourist dream, that all hazards and risk will be controlled.
I read recently with amusement a paper by Hopkins (2019) that tries to argue that ‘structures create culture’, a wonderful concoction for the validation of Safety Management Systems to even ‘over-ride’ national (often religious) culture – in the name of Safety. Such is the characteristic of safety that wishes to dismiss The Unpredictable Workings of Culture – (Lotman – 2013).
In The Strange Order of Things Damasio states:
‘Feelings contribute in three ways to the cultural process:
1. as motives of the intellectual creation
a) by prompting the detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies;
b) by identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort;
2. as monitors of the success or failure of cultural instruments and practices;
3. as participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time.’
And at the foundation of all e-motion is the principle of homeostasis, the energy and drive for the sustaining of life, being and meaning. And we see this drive for homeostasis in all of nature. Others also name this drive for sustaining life as ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘allostasis’.
How strange then to stand in denial in risk and safety to propose that humans have a natural propensity for harm (Bradley Curve)? How strange to propose the ideology of zero in the face of the human and collective unconscious that embodies the energy for a self-sustaining future?
This is why the safety industry doesn’t want to talk about fallibility and the e-motions, the unconscious person or an ethic of risk. This is how the obsession with safety proposes that it has the right to ‘over-ride’ the culture of others in the name of being the saviour over harm.
Damasio (2018, p.19) states this:
‘Feelings and homeostasis relate to each other closely and consistently. Feelings are the subjective experiences of the state of life—that is, of homeostasis—in all creatures endowed with a mind and a conscious point of view. We can think of feelings as mental deputies of homeostasis.’
This is why we so easily are ‘overcome’ with emotions and seem ‘out of control’ when the right social context triggers an automatic response to something or someone. But this is not the case. All e-motions help us participate in life, being and living. All decision making is infused with e-motion. This is the drive that makes us move (learn) stimulated by pre-conscious desire.
There is nothing more fundamental, more basic and powerful than the powerful ‘force’ of an e-motion.
Damsio (2018, p.58) states:
‘The triggering of emotive responses occurs automatically and non-consciously, without the intervention of our will. We often end up learning that an emotion is happening not as the triggering situation unfolds but because the processing of the situation causes feelings; that is, it causes conscious mental experiences of the emotional event. After the feeling begins we may (or may not) realize why we are feeling a certain way.’
Whilst we like to imagine we are in control of these e-motions, the truth is, it is not the case. It only takes a piece of music or a thought of someone at a funeral to cry uncontrollably. This is because the human person is the integration of body, heart, gut and brain as a Mind (person). There is no separation of ‘brain work’ from ‘body work’. We feel our way into being.
The human Mind (person) is nothing like a computer because the essential quality of being human is experiencing life through the fallible feeling body.
Therefore, how important would it be in an industry consumed with the actions and enactments of people in the face of risk to try and understand the nature of human emotions, feeling and embodiment? Apparently, this is of no interest. In the face of the safety engineering/behaviourist construct, all is controllable and manageable depending on having enough effort and the right system. Just do a search anywhere in the risk and safety industry for a discussion on ‘emotions’and ‘feelings’. What do you find? Similarly do a search for ‘behaviours’, what do you find.
One of the big challenges that faces risk and safety is trying to explain why people so as they do (Deci, Higgins). Then out of the quest for control, the industry concocts the notion that decisions are rational and controlled by the brain, when this is NOT the case.
Often what happens in Incident Investigations is the construction of outcomes to suit the engineering/behaviourist assumptions of the industry and how the industry indoctrinates people. We see so often in incident investigations the projection of wrong thinking and the solution as better and more ‘programming’. We see in Hopkin’s projection that ‘culture is created by structure’ a similar projection so that events can be explained by poor structure or in the case of Cooper (https://safetyrisk.net/culture-is-not-a-product-nor-a-construct/) not enough ‘observable degree of effort’.
Whilst the safety industry focuses on hazards and controls it has no need to explain the emotions, embodied learning or the unconscious. The industry has a focus on the rational dimension and the idea of the brain-as-computer that invokes action (motion) by will, effort and rational drive. So much of the industry is captivated by this naïve idea that the brain drives decision making and that decision making is conscious and dis-embodied. In the light of research, neither of these assumptions are true.
If we really want to investigate events with integrity and engage with people humanly, we must come to grips with the fact that most decision making is unconscious and triggered by the e-motions.
Damasio (2018, p.81) states:
‘All mental faculties intervene in the human cultural process, but in the last five chapters I chose to highlight the ability to make images, affect, and consciousness, because cultural minds are not conceivable without such faculties. Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes, but require image making. As for the creative intelligence responsible for the actual practices and artifacts of cultures, it cannot operate without affect and consciousness. Curiously, affect and consciousness also happen to be the faculties that got away, forgotten in the throes of the rationalist and cognitive revolutions. They deserve special attention.’
Unless the safety industry moves from its rationalist/engineering/behaviourist foundations, it will continually provide the right answers for the wrong questions. A new trajectory needs to be developed that seeks to respect a Transdisciplinary approach to knowing and decision making that takes seriously the power of the e-motions and the unconscious.
Free Courses in 2023 – Registration of Interest
Dr Long is proposing some free courses for the first half of 2023. If you are interested, you can register by email to robertlong2@mac.com
Please DO NOT register for a course just because it is free.
If you do not attend the first session of the course you will be instantly eliminated from the list. Only register for the course because you want to learn. Registrations are limited to 50 participants.
Registrations for the first course will close on 3 January.
Dr Long will create a common list from registrations and will communicate with the group about watching videos and pre-reading.
The first module on Offer is Module 15 on Culture: https://cllr.com.au/product/culture-leadership-program-unit-15/
The module will run Zoom sessions every Tuesday at 9am (Canberra time) starting on 21 February and with sessions at 9 am and each following Tuesday at 9 am for 5 weeks. This means that the last session will be on 21 March.
Those interested can start by reading Dr Long’s blogs on culture and culture silences:
• https://safetyrisk.net/category/safety-culture-3/
• https://safetyrisk.net/category/safety-culture-silences/
Similarly, it will be helpful to have read some of Lotman:
• Universe of the Mind, A Semiotic Theory of Culture (https://monoskop.org/images/5/5e/Lotman_Yuri_M_Universe_of_the_Mind_A_Semiotic_Theory_of_Culture_1990.pdf)
Second Free Module – An Ethic of Risk
The second free module on offer is module 17 (https://cllr.com.au/product/an-ethic-of-risk-unit-17/) on Ethics and Risk.
The module will run Zoom sessions every Tuesday at 9am (Canberra time) starting on 28 March and with sessions at 9 am and each following Tuesday at 9 am for 5 weeks. This means that the last session will be on 25 April.
Registrations for this Module close on 3 February.
Dr Long will create a common list from registrations and will communicate with the group about watching videos and pre-reading.
Please DO NOT register for a course just because it is free. This wastes the place that others might want.
If you do not attend the first session of the course you will be instantly eliminated from the list. Only register for the course because you want to learn. Registrations are limited to 50 participants.
Research – Emotions and Feelings Are Not Controlled by Propositions
One of the ways the risk and safety industry seeks to control things is by setting forth propositions to manage what is unknown. It doesn’t matter that these propositions are not true (eg. safety is a choice you make, all accidents are preventable, zero harm). The creation of the propositions gives the ‘feeling’ (security) that everything is under control.
In this way the industry can believe in prediction and control. Under the invention of the brain-as-computer the risk and safety industry can control all things and relegate the emotions to an irrelevant object. This is the power of reductionism.
The trouble is, such a construct is NOT a reality. The nature of the unconscious and the power of emotions and feelings are not irrelevant to the way humans make decisions. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Human emotions and feelings are central to understanding why we do what we do.
For this reason, one can’t discuss emotions and feelings as a separated part of being human. Such reductionism is a delusion. Unless we understand the human person holistically, as the embodied integration of all things: higher brain, brain stem, limbic system, nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and cardiovascular system, we will never tackle risk effectively or comprehensively.
As Claxton (Intelligence in the Flesh) so rightly states:
‘the brain doesn’t issue commands, it hosts conversations’.
Everything humans do and think is integrated into an interaffected-intercorporeal whole. The brain cannot be separated in what it does from any other organ in the body. This is why we use the word ‘Mind’ to denote the movement (thinking) of a person. All movement humans make, including just the movement of heart rate or goose bumps, are triggered by e-motions. There is no such thing as emotionless cognition.
Emotions don’t ‘interfere with decision making.
e-Motions trigger, supplement and infuse decision making.
The best way to understand the e-motions is in this interconnectedness and this is best done semiotically. See Figure 1. Understanding the Emotions at header of this article.
By mapping a holistic and connected understanding of the emotions and feelings we are able to step away from the notion that emotions are some mystery locked in the brain. Rather, when we understand the emotions and feelings are fully integrated in both persons and the world, we then find out that Socialitie becomes the most important factor in understanding risk.
Further Reading:
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-our-bodies-do-and-dont-shape-our-minds
Too Much Motivation Affects Decision Making
Whatever ‘mood’ you are in, affects perception and decision making. This is a major finding in research by Yerkes and Dodson from the University of Geneva (UNIGE).
https://neurosciencenews.com/motivation-decision-making-21649/
We know that too much motivation or too little affects e-motion, which in trun affects perception and decision making.
Similarly, Research by Slovic and Peters (2006), for example, indicates that emotion guides perceptions of risk benefit and, that people judge risk both in terms of how they feel about something as well by how they think and talk about it. When people’s feelings toward an activity are favorable, they tend to judge the risks as low and the benefits as high (and conversely).
See:
- Slovic, P. and Peters, E. (2006) ‘Risk Perception and Affect’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (6): 322–5.
- Slovic, P., (2010). The Feeling of Risk, New Perspectives on Risk Perception. Earthscan. London.
- Slovic, S., and Slovic, P., (eds,.) (2015). Numbers and Nerves. Infor4mation, Emotion and Meaning in the World of Data. Oregon State University Press. Corvallis.
How strange then that the world of risk and safety shows so little interest in the e-motions of persons in risk? How strange that the e-motions are relegated to such little importance, as if the fallible human person is an object-centric computing machine? How strange that the e-motions are jettisoned by Safety as the enemy of decision-making? How strange that Safety dis-embodies the person so that decision-making is not understood as integrated into all life and being?
Proposed Final Visit to Europe for Workshops June 2023
This is advanced notice that Dr Long will be making his last visit to Europe (Austria and Poland) in 2023. If you wish to be on the mailing list for this event then please send your notice of interest to robertlong2@mac.com.
It is proposed that Dr Long will hold public workshops 26-30 June 2023. Dr Long is now semi-retired and plans to no longer undertake international engagements.
The two modules proposed for the week 26-30 June are Advanced Semiotics and Advanced iCue Skills. Each workshop will cost 1250 euros.
At this stage the exact location of the workshops has not been finalised however:
- If the workshops are held in Krakow the Semiotic Walk will be at Auschwitz.
- If the workshops are held in Linz the Semiotic Walk will be at Matthausen.
Please indicate in your expression of interest if you would prefer the workshops to be held in Linz or Krakow.
Competition – Find the Cat
Once again we test your perception with a find the cat puzzle. The prize this time is a free copy of the iCue Engagement Manual and link to the (passcoded) 15 training videos.
This time rather than sending your snail mail address, inlcude your email address with your entry and if you are in the first 10 correct responses, the Manual and iCue video links and password will be sent to you.
Freebies
Videos
https://vimeo.com/cllr
https://vimeo.com/humandymensions
The Law and Due Diligence
https://vimeo.com/showcase/3938199
Videos against zero ideology
https://vimeo.com/230093823
https://vimeo.com/172195306
Semiotics Videos
https://spor.com.au/downloads/semiotics/
Papers
https://spor.com.au/downloads/papers/
Newsletter Archive
https://spor.com.au/downloads/newsletter-archive/
Contacts and Websites
robertlong2@mac.com
https://cllr.com.au/
https://spor.com.au/
https://www.humandymensions.com/
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