Conversational iCue
The past 20 years the most successful program for the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) has been the Safety Conversations program. It doesn’t matter where I go in safety this shows up as the greatest need. It is simply a fact that most safety people have never been trained in the fundamentals of conversation, helping, listening and open questioning. There is nothing in the WHS curriculum or AIHS BoK that even attempts to get the fundamentals of conversation right. When one’s paradigm is control, injury rates and objects, there is simply no foundation upon which to build skills in conversation.
People who seek to control others can never ask open questions.
The beginning for effective conversations about risk is to shake off the very foundations of safety itself.
It is not the job of Safety to save others. Safety doesn’t save lives (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-people-dont-save-lives/). Nothing more prohibits the opportunity for an open conversation that the arrogance and superiority of ‘Safety saves’.
The beginning of helping others tackle risk is to NOT seek to control them. This is the starting point for a safety conversation.
The job of a good safety conversationalist is to help others better tackle risk. This cannot be practiced from a foundation in heroics (https://safetyrisk.net/no-gurus-no-stars-no-heroes-needed-in-safety/ ), salvation (https://safetyrisk.net/how-the-secular-is-made-sacred-in-safety/ ), zero (https://safetyrisk.net/learning-to-reject-zero/ ), marketing (https://safetyrisk.net/meerkat-mythology-in-safety/) paperwork (https://safetyrisk.net/its-always-about-paperwork/ ), hazards and regulation. None of the stuff that gets paraded about safety is any help in becoming an effective safety conversationalist.
The place to start any effective conversation about risk is to ‘suspend your agenda’ and approach the other in humility. This is before anyone opens their moth or asks anything. No-one is interested in how much regulation or procedure you have pumped into your head.
You can’t build a conversation on a paradigm of control, power and objects.
You will never become a good listener from the arrogance of ‘Safety saves’.
So, the start of the Safety Conversations program is about unlearning well before learning skills in listening. Safety will never move forward in effective conversation until it drops much of the standard rubbish that gets paraded about the safety space as essential.
No-one in the field of work gives a toss about injury rates, paperwork and the spruiking of regulation. If you want to kill off any hope of conversation then just make sure your first question is about risk assessment paperwork. And no amount of ‘small talk’ is helpful either, and this is also a common safety myth.
After some considerable work in unlearning safety myths (https://safetyrisk.net/standing-on-the-myths-of-safety/ ), one is then ready to start learning how to ask open questions, how to listen, how to facilitate and ‘help’ others make decisions about risk. If this is not your goal and style then you’ll just be another mindless safety ‘teller’. Safety is not about telling, it’s about helping, and without effective conversations about risk, it’s not likely that anyone will be ‘helped’.
In SPoR we call the ability to be an effective conversationalist your risk ‘iCue’ (https://safetyrisk.net/concept-mapping-risk-icue/). Your iCue is your intelligence quotient in understanding risk and helping others to understand risk. When anyone first starts in SPoR, this is what we do: unlearn safety myths and re-learn the basics of conversational iCue. In the 20 years we have been doing this we have found that it works (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/).
Dr Rob Long
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Brent Charlton says
Nothing gets safety people more up for a fight than telling them they don’t save lives. Phil LaDuke even came to my aid in the virtual beating I was taking for that one!
Rob Long says
When Safety enters the discourse of soteriology it makes itself religious. Who doesn’t save lives? Why does safety claim this role for itself? and here’s the tough one, where is the evidence? How can the absence of something be the proof of something else, even by the measurement of safety? I save lives because there are no injuries or fatalities in my workplace, is that it? No wonder Safety loves this language of heroes and mega-stars, a wonderful distraction from the language of helping and care and the everyday. Delusional.
Brent R Charlton says
I fight constantly against the idea that the absence of accidents proves safety. It simply doesn’t. My doctor doesn’t claim I don’t have heart disease and pat himself on the back for a job well done based on the fact I haven’t had a heart attack. If he did I would find another doctor and quickly! Same with safety practitioners who crow about their lack of accidents.
Rob Long says
The real problem with this is that Safety has no interest in critical thinking or philosophy. Wherever I see the word ‘philosophy’ or ‘professional’ in safety it is never defined or articulated. Most of the time both words are used there is never any discussion of assumptions or values that underpin method. Similarly, the naive realism associated with injury statistics, this philosophy is what underpins this absurd denial of fallibility and the quest for numbers.
Here is Safety 90 years after Heinrich, still bogged down in claiming false consciousness as reality and then branding it as professional. You couldn’t make this s8&t up.
Bernard Corden says
Stuff that works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp7HYBMee00
Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall
Stuff that? s real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall