Declaring What is By What Isn’t, HOP as Traditional Safety

One of the things Safety does best is declaring what is, by what isn’t and, when it comes to Safety, it seems believing one’s own lies is par for the course. I see this in HOP when reading Conklin’s book The 5 Principles of Human Organisational Performance.

Of course, as in all traditional safety, the focus is on performance. Safety has been on this wagon for 50 years eg. Tarrant (1980) The Measurement of Safety Performance. The only thing that has changed over these years is a slight variation in linguistics but the focus is exactly the same – managing the performance of humans, error and organisations.

Just like Heinrich (1931), Conklin declares a set of principles as ‘truths’ and declares that these are a ‘shift away from traditional thinking’ (p. 9). No, they are not! Then he explains there is no model for ‘safety differently’ (p.9) which is a clear give-away and so, because these principles are declared ‘truths’, they must be so. When they are not. Such a perfect discourse for an industry unable to think critically.

So, with first rambling in uncritically babble about Deming, Conklin comes up with 5 so-called Principles of Human Performance (p.21). These are:

There is no evidence anywhere in this book to validate these claims to truth and like most claims in Safety Differently (SD), S2, RE, NV and HOP everything rests on assertion and slogan. So, let’s look at a few of these 5 assertions.

Error is not ‘normal’, its actually rare. On most days we would declare as ‘normal’, we are error free. Yes, humans are fallible but we function quite well in a fallible world with fallible people in fallible systems and also buy insurance for the rare moments when something goes wrong. Insurance companies bet on people NOT making claims on their policy. So, you can see in the linguistics of this ‘principle’, it is a false claim.

Blame fixes many things. This is how the court system works. People are brought to court to face accountability and the court or legal enquiry orders actions to be taken as a result of finding who or what is to blame. The truth is, blame fixes things.

Learning is most often NOT deliberate. Most learning is unconscious, intuitive, incidental and unintentional. If one looks at how children learn language up to the age of 5 years of age or, how we learn through mimesis, most learning is NOT deliberate. So, if you think learning has to be deliberate, you’ll have to purchase a HOP product, at the HOP price.

Systems do NOT drive outcomes. This is the problem with finding half-truths then declaring them to be true. This demonstrates the real fixation of the HOP movement; the focus is on outcomes, performance and systems. Most outcomes are NOT systemic but rather ecological, unconscious and organic.

How Leaders act and respond do NOT count. This statement demonstrates a traditional top-down traditional safety focus but this is not how most organisations move. Most leaders I have met admit they are powerless to affect the frontline and feel powerless to influence culture.

So, we see how simple it is in safety to declare something to be true, when it is not so.

These so called ‘principles’ are NOT truths (p.120) but assertions built on a concocted myth that somehow safety is being done ‘differently’.

In most cases, the linguistics of Safety Differently, S2, RE, NV and now HOP is sloppy and hardly masks the traditional safety focus on measuring performance, systems focus and outcomes. For example, in Conklin’s book there is no discussion of personhood, ethics, moral meaning, relationships, care, power or helping. The discussion on learning is never defined but by context is about traditional training.

Running a few slogans together is neither a methodology or a method.

None of this is new, even the SD slogan, ‘people are not objects to control but resources/solutions to harness’ is a statement of double control. Indeed, I am not an object or resource to ‘harness’ thanks. I gave my harness away a long time ago and now use it on my dog. If you can’t even select the right metaphor, what hope is there?

Then, if you can tolerate the excesses of myths in this book and get to p.60 you find out that: ‘our accounting systems make us do it’. Yep, just more traditional safety: measurement, objects, systems and performance, but never the real meaning of ‘performance’ (https://safetyrisk.net/what-do-you-mean-by-performance/).

When you declare what is, by what isn’t, it is usually called ‘propaganda’ (https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Ellul_Jacques_Propaganda_The_Formation_of_Mens_Attitudes.pdf).

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Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

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PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.