CLLR–Quarterly Newsletter–April 2022

The theme for this newsletter is Success and Strategy. The newsletter challenges thinking on assessment, evaluation, tyheories of learning and attributed success.

How do you know you are being successful? How do you know if what you do is effective? Is your strategic thinking driven by a clearly articulated philosophy so that expected outcomes are supported by a clear ethic? Or is success just decided by numerical outcome? What method are you using for assessment? What is your assessment criteria?

We know from work in Education, Teaching, Learning, Pedagogy and Curriculum that there are 6 traditional forms of assessment (there are more), these are:

• Diagnostic assessments
• Formative assessments
• Summative assessments
• Ipsative assessments
• Norm-referenced assessments
• Criterion-referenced assessments

Diagnostic assessment assumes parrot learning, determining recall of data as learning. For example, being able to recall your times table. This doesn’t really mean one is successful at times tables or that one understands multiplication. Parrot learning doesn’t require usefulness, application, contextualization of thinking, it just assumes that repetition is learning. Often this form of assessment seeks to ‘benchmark’ data recall against the data recall of others and attributes success to comparative rankings.

Formative assessment involves building a composite set of qualitative sources to evaluate learning. This form of assessment can use discussions, portfolios and reflections to build a composite sense of knowing.

Summative assessment tends to seek standardization across an area of knowledge such as NAPLAN. This kind of assessment creates a mentality of ‘teach to the test’ and doesn’t take into account many variables in either learning style, context or personality. Summative assessment and standardized testing in general is anti-learning and anti-educational as is well articulated by Prof. Ken Robinson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY).

Ipsative assessment uses a comparative change in results with oneself and relies on self-motivated learning. This kind of assessment tends to work best with why the system calls ‘high achievers’ which usually means the person is most suited to the system and its methods of pedagogy, curriculum and structure.

Norm-referenced assessment seeks to compare an individual to the average for a group. This kind of assessment tends to believe in the myth of its own objectivity and is biased to one type of knowing/learning. IQ tests are a classic example of this form of assessment. Such texting has been used in the past to marginalize groups and cultures according to reductionist definitions of knowing.

Criterion-referenced assessment measures outcomes against defined criteria and proposes a certain level of result in order to ‘pass’.

The elephant in the room in all these approaches to assessment is the unnamed assumptions about valid knowledge. The elephant in the room (https://www.amazon.com/Search-Missing-Elephant-Selected-Essays/dp/0956263186) is the assumption about learning itself and what is assumed about valid knowing.

We know from historical records that the white settlers of Australia saw Indigenous people as non-human. Australia was declared ‘terra nullius’ (nobody’s land) and remained the legal principle on which British colonisation rested until 1992, when the High Court brought down its finding in the Mabo vs Queensland (No. 2) case. When white settlers saw Indigenous people they interpreted them as being ‘primitive’ because they didn’t meet their expected criteria for productive assessment. By white attribution, Indigenous people did nothing, wasted time and failed on ‘performance’. Such is the subjectivity of how all performance is attributed. When one deems performance by use of time, quantitative outcome and productivity no one seems to question the subjectivity of the criteria. It was very easy according to Binet’s IQ test to demonstrate that Indigenous people failed the test. This is
because the test dismisses the validity of semiotic, poetic, verbal, artistic, communal, environmental and embodied ways of knowing.

When one dismisses Poetic and Semiotic ways of knowing and elevates Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) over other ways of knowing, it is easy to demonise certain cultural ways of knowing according to how assessment criteria are defined. Unfortunately, without critical thinking many people accept projected outcomes of certain STEM ideology as if findings and numerics are objective and neutral.

In the risk and safety industry I see this all the time in attribution and assumption that only STEM ways of knowing are valid and measureable. This view never mentions the many possible theories of learning available (https://www.teachthought.com/learning/learning-theories-teachers/) and supposes that learning is objective and measureable. The best way to challenge the risk and safety myths of learning is to ask the question: ‘what theory of learning are you talking about?’ What theory of intelligence are you interested? What assessment criteria are you accepting as valid?

Similarly, when someone in risk and safety proposes some naïve view of measureable success the question needs to be about what criteria has been chosen as a standard for measurement NOT accepting a stated outcome as if it is disconnected from a worldview or philosophy.

What we see most in the risk and safety industry is a complete devaluation of non-STEM ways of knowing eg. Indigenous ways of knowing and feminist ways of knowing.

Of course, strategy is not a simple matter. At the start of this article is a graphic showing the 12 common schools of strategic thinking (Strategy Schools), each from a different worldview and ethic. It is easy to be simplistic about strategy, learning and assessment when you have no knowledge in the area and assume that each is simple, black and white and knowable. Such is the compulsory miseducation of the risk and safety industry. Similarly with learning styles, it is so easy to project blame on others for not learning when the learning style chosen alienates workers from learning.

All theories and methods of learning and assessment are subjective and conditioned by worldview, philosophy, perception and education paradigm. All the more reason why the risk and safety industry needs to get its ethic clear and articulated before it starts venturing into a Transdiscipline in which it knows so little.

What is clear, Safety is most noisy at the point in which it is most ignorant.

It is so easy to demonstrate success or effectiveness according to naïve and biased assessment criteria. You can make any claim you want by hiding such criteria (never discussed in safety) or writing systems to a deontological ethic (never disclosed) but it doesn’t demonstrate success.

In the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) the criteria for success is the humanisation of persons. If your safety method brutalises people in order to get an outcome, then by SPoR definition, what you are doing isn’t successful. Neither is it safe. Success is conditional on an ethic. This is why SPoR validates non-STEM ways of knowing. If you want to know about ethical practice you won’t find anything helpful in STEM.

Unless persons are treated ethically, morally and educatively as they tackle risk, then no matter what the system, it cannot be successful. This is why one can’t claim differences and success by simply regurgitating traditional systems and labelling them ‘new view’.

This is why Brian Darlington and I produced the book ‘It Works, A New Approach to Risk and Safety’ (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/). The methods of SPoR work because the priority is on the humanising of persons. Unless that is the starting point for your assessment criteria of safety, then how can you claim that what you do is successful?

If you would like to learn more about strategic thinking and success I can recommend the following books;

Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., and Lampel, J., (1998)  Strategy Safari, The Complete Guide to the Wilds of Strategic Management.  Prentice Hill,  London.

Raynor, M., (2007) The Strategy Paradox, Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it. Doubleday.  New York.

Sloan, J.,  (2006)  Learning to Think Strategically. Elsevier,  Amsterdam.

The best book I have ever read on strategic thinking and learning is:

Michael, D.,  (1973)  Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn.  Miles River Press.  Alexandria Virginia

This is the first time we have been able to offer SPoR learning face to face in 2 years. Here is your opportunity to gather with some old friends and progress your education in SPoR. The dates and modules offered are here:

Workshop Schedule


MiProfile Diagnostics – 8, 9, 10 August

• Learn how to undertake Keypad surveying
• Methodology and method of SPoR surveys
• Understanding diagnostics and implicit knowing

Linguistics and Risk – 11,12 August

• Learn how Language and Linguistics affect risk
• Understanding discourse and Discourse
• Non-verbal language, gesture, bio-semiotics

Transdisciplinarity and Risk – 15,16 August

• Learn about Transcoherence
• Multimodal and embodied knowing
• Working across fields, metaphor and disciplines

Semiotic Walk and Winery Tour 13, 14 August

Register for each module 9, 16 or 22 here: https://cllr.com.au/register-to-study/

You can read more about the workshops here: https://spor.com.au/home/three-workshops-august-2022/

If attending more than one module please write to Rob and ask for a discount. Please use this email address: robertlong2@icloud.com

We had plans to start the next free online module of Introduction to the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) in early May 2022 but this has now been moved back to June.

If you are interested in learning about SPoR then you can register for the free module here: https://cllr.com.au/product/an-introduction-to-the-social-psychology-of-risk-unit-1-free-online-module/

Places are limited and if you register you will be contacted in late May regarding starting the course.

This is advanced notice that Dr Long will be conducting a series of workshops in the UK and Vienna in September 2022. Anticipated dates are 15-30 September.

In order to help with catering, accommodation, travel and venue it would be good to start a mailing list of those intersted in attending. At this stage planning is focusing on workshops in London, Edinburgh and Vienna.

The workshops will focus on: Introduction to SPoR, Semiotics and Ethics in Risk.

Dr Long doesn’t present at conferences or conventions and so this will be your only chance to catch up with him in a workshop outside of Australia.

If you wish to be on the mailing list please send your registration of interest to: robertlong2@icloud.com

The iCue Education Pack is now available, ready to help anyone promote SPoR methods in work in tackling risk.

When you purchase the Education Pack (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/icue-education-pack/)  you receive the following:

• It Works, A New Approach to Risk and Safety ($29.95)
• The iCue Engagement Manual (A4 for reproduction and Coaching) ($29.95)
• iCue Conversation Role Play Cards ($40)
• Access to iCue Video Coaching Series (19 support and training videos)
• Base Magnet Set (1B3M, WS, HS, GS set) ($5)
• Advanced Magnet Set (27 Conversation Combinations) ($80)
• SPoR and RYSK lapel pins

The video support series now contains 19 videos in three sets:

• Preparation for iCue Engagement
• Basic iCue Skills
• Advanced iCue Methodology

Anyone who purchases the iCue Engagement Pack gets access to all these videos.

If you wish to purchase multiple packs please contact Rob for a discount: rob@cllr.com.au

There are endless publications on the market offering keys to success or ‘rules for life’ (eg. Peterson 12 Rules for Life) but none talk about meaning, ethics or purpose in life. Most often the texts are flooded with assumptions about financial and material gain and so little discussion about finding ethical meaning in living. One can also be sure that such books rarely declare their own bias or worldview. How strange that people need to be told 12 rules for life. What does it say about our society that wants to be patronized with simplistic theology packaged as guidance when there is none?

Leary (How to Declutter and Unfu*k Your Mind, Build Mental Toughness, Discover Fast Success Habits, Thinking & Meditation, Mindfulness for Creativity, Slow Down the Brain and be Yourself) tells us that success is hindered by overthinking and overloading the brain. Somehow ‘decluttering’ is projected as a value in itself. Minimalism is projected as an ethically neutral value and negativity as a vice. This is similar to the ‘safety differently’ group that propose that positivity in itself is ethically neutral or even advantageous. Of course, negativity in itself is neither right nor wrong, it depends on the outcome.

Critical theory and critical thinking are thrown out with a naive approach to knowing success, so common in the positive psychology movement (Seligman). The slogan ‘safety is not the absence of negatives but the presence of positive capacities’ shifts the sense of balance regarding deconstructing damaging ideologies in safety. Strange that this view comes from a negative deconstruction of traditional safety. How odd to advocate against a deficit view of safety from a position of a deficit view of safety.

Canfield (The Success Principles) is another self-help book grounded in positive psychology that doesn’t make any mention of ethics or principles grounded ethically. The idea of ‘decide what you want’ and fulfilling ‘wants’ is projected as ‘a vision for the ideal life’. In this discourse vision is whatever you want it to be and success is achieving whatever you make it.

Then there’s Olsson’s Handbook of Success, a method to define, plan, act, persist and motivate, all packaged in the goal of ‘wealth building’.

Many discussions on success in business omit any discussion on ethics. Similarly, in discussion of success in safety. What is often projected is success in a number (zero) and any method to achieve that goal is defined as safety success. So often safety success is projected in metrics not as the ethical engagement of persons.

When it comes to the marketing of success in business as also in safety, it should start and be founded in ethics (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-ethics).

One of the most important things to remember in any assessment is balance, between qualitative and quantitative assessment methods. Unfortunately, so much of risk and safety is anchored to STEM methods, and most of what surfaces as assessment is STEM biased. This means that most often qualitative modes of assessment and evaluation are devalued in favour of numerics.

This is a conscious choice but unfortunately leads to imbalance in assessment in the risk and safety industry. Read further here:

https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Quantitative-and-qualitative-methods.pdf

It is amazing that we still hear this silly mantra of ‘you can’t manage what you can’t masure’. Yet, every single value, moral and qualitative essential in living and organisaing CANNOT be measured.

This mythology of measurment particulatly plagues the risk and safeyy industry as it runs about like a chook without a head. Yet, Safety remains preoccupied with measures of injury rates despite the fact that thee masures are NOT and indicator of safety.

The idea that an LTI or LTIFR number in some way represents or is connected to any of these cultural indicators is as best fanciful and at worst dangerous. The idea of measuring LTIs as a predictor of safety culture is a delusion of the calculative mindset. For example, BP Deepwater Horizon One claimed to have millions of LTI free hours before it killed 11 people and poured billions of tonnes of oil into the Mexico Gulf. The rig owner, Transocean, was said to have had a strong safety record with no major incidents for 7 years. The reality was that a culture of denial, hubris and a fixation on measurement blinded leaders to ‘warning signs’ that generated the explosion. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdf_final/DEEPWATER_ReporttothePresident_FINAL.pdf). What the fixation on measurement did at Deepwater Horizon One was create the delusion that they were measuring culture whilst all the time leaving most cultural indicators untouched.

All assessment contains an embedded methodology that invisibly drives goal setting, work validation, anthropocentric value, understanding of learning, discipline, risk perception, cultural norms and self-confirming assumptions. Measurement discourse tends to create its own trends, dependencies and blindness to the validity of qualitative data and most data associated with culture is qualitative not quantitative. For example, measurement associated with the zero ideology drives: under reporting (necessary for learning), fixation on low level risk, punitive response and exhausting investment of time and energy into data interpretation and reporting.

If you really want a realistic mantra for understanding culture and risk it should be this: ‘you can’t always count what counts’.

Mechanistic, systems and mathematical thinking requires balance if issues of culture are to be known and influenced. Qualitative knowledge can be known but is NOT understood in the same way as mathematics, this is the challenge for the engineering and science mindsets that dominate the risk and safety industry. The social psychological understandings and non-STEM methodologies required a very different understanding of culture but unfortunatley are not considered foundational to the disciplines of science, engineering or safety. To step to the ‘next level’ requires some un-learning in mathematical dependence and some new learning in knowledge validation and thinking.

When your worldview is framed by Quanta, you apply the wrong questions to culture and similarly come out with wrong answers. Unless there is a balance of Qualia with Quanta the risk and safety industry is never likley to understand that its love of measures is driving it away from any possibility of culture change.

When one researches on the semiotics of success one realizes what images are most associated with success as a concept. Each one of these images hides an ethic and politic and conveys congruence by association and cultural attribution.

You can see a good analysis of the semiotics of success here: https://semioticsofsuccess.wordpress.com/

Here’s your chance to win a copy of Rob and Brian’s Book: It Works, A New Approach to Risk and Safety. (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/)

The first 5 correct entries will receive a copy. The puzzle is this: how many bees are there in the picture above?

Simply email you entry with your name and snail mail address to be in the competition. Prizes usually disappear in less than 30 minutes in posting the Newsletter.

Submit entries to: admin@humandymensions.com

The animals organized a school to help their children deal with the problems of the new world. And to make it easier to administer the curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying, they decided that all their children would take all the subjects. This produced some interesting issues.

The duck was excellent in swimming but relatively poor in running, so he devoted himself to improving his running through extra practice. Eventually, his webbed feet got so badly worn that he dropped to only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in this school so nobody worried about that, except the duck.

The rabbit had a nervous breakdown because the other animals said she looked like a rat when she jumped in the water for swimming class and all her hair got matted down.

In the climbing class, the monkey beat all the others to the top of the tree, but kept insisting on using his own method of getting there. This was unacceptable, so the eagle was severely disciplined.

And then the hippo came home from school and said, “Mom, Dad, I hate school. Swimming is great. But running, flying and climbing? I can’t do any of those things. Everyone beat me at running, when I tried flying i broke my legs and when I tried to climb I pulled the tree down on everyone.

The fish’s parents made an appointment for her with the principal who took one look at her progress reports and decreed, “You are so far ahead of the rest of the class in swimming that we’re going to let you skip swimming classes and give you private tutoring in running and climbing.”

The moral of the story is that greatness and success are all contingent on the assessment criteria.

Many organisations (across the globe and in Australia) are currently using SPoR methods in the way they tackle risk. The new book It Works, A New Approach to Risk and Safety (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/) documents how this work is being undertaken in Mondi Group.

Many of the programs are being delivered by associates of Dr Long with many years of expertise in SPoR. One such associate is Matt Thorne (pictured) whose home is Adelaide. Matt has studied with Dr Long for 10 years and has just started a partnership with Core Lithium in Darwin as they seek to build SPoR into the foundations of this new and exciting project. You can read about Core Lithium here: https://corelithium.com.au/ The project is still in it’s foundation stages and Matt is working with the executive team and contractors to ensure that SPoR is inplace before the first day of production commences.

There are associates of SPoR in every capital in Australia and in Calgary and Vienna. If you are intersted in meeting any of these associates please contact: admin@cllr.com.au

If you or your organisation are intersted in finding out about how to include SPoR in how you can manage risk in your organisation please contact: admin@cllr.com.au

All parents learn quickly the power of rhyme, rhythm and poetics in the life of children. Recent research by Laura Hahn at Radboud University has further confirmed its importance.

In one of her experiments, Hahn used the HPP (Head Turn Preference Paradigm) method to investigate to what extent babies are aware of phrases, i.e. verse lines, in songs. The children were seated on their parents’ lap and heard a word sequence from songs coming from the left or the right. They kept their head turned for a longer time towards songs that contained a word sequence as a full phrase. When the songs played only contained the word sequence as individual words, the babies looked away more quickly.

Children recognise all forms of poetic structure in music and song. They can be comforted and be discomforted if the music is dischordant or if the song does not rhyme. (https://cmvic.org.au/news/babies-are-sensitive-to-rhyme-rhythm-and-phrases-in-childrens-songs)

We now know that certain kinds of music and song can help us sleep. We know that calming music can change the mood of groups and that music in shops can stimulate comfort to stay longer in the store. We also know that certain music played to young people can move them on from where they like to ‘hang out’. (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/classical-music-used-to-repel-loitering-teenagers/article4263786/) Yet none of this involves quantitaive measures, most of this is observed by qualitative effect.

We also know that certain music can change our own mood, can help ‘life our spirits’ and charge our emotions. You can’t masure this effect or give it a numerical value because it is felt and lived subjectively. Each person experiences music differently and this phenomena is not common to all so, any sense of standardised measurment does not apply. When one understand the human person as embodied and not just as a computer on top of a body, then one looks very differently at all things that influence decision making, not just things that can be measured.

In SPoR we study Poetics (https://cllr.com.au/product/poetics-flyer-module-22/) to better understand the subjective nature of it’s effects on culture, thinking and decision making.

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/

rob@cllr.com.au

https://cllr.com.au/

https://spor.com.au/

https://www.humandymensions.com/