Engaging Learning in SPoR

This past week 30 people from all over the globe descended on Canberra, the Nations Capital, to learn about life, being and living in tension with risk. Some arrived after a 30 hour flight and no sleep like Billy from Des Moines Iowa, fighting to keep his body clock in sync and staying awake till evening to sleep. Others arrived and were all excited for a Semiotic Walk straight away and so we went to the National Art Gallery for a few hours before dropping them off at their accommodation. One of these people was John Sherban from Calgary and you can see pictured below:

John got off the plane and was ready to learn by observation, experience and conversation. And Canberra is such an amazing place to learn by immersion, engagement, conversation, listening, experience and walking. This is just one of the ways we learn in SPoR.

Of course, we also do classroom stuff but even how this is structured is not so much about ‘telling’ as shared experiential learning. Yes, there are presentations but even these are not didactic or ‘lectures. Any Educationalist knows that lectures are highly ineffective for learning. You can see below various ways in which we shared in learning at the venue.

Some of the best sharing and learning occurs simply by where we were situated, a community service centre. The culture of this centre is all about service, community, listening, care, helping, humility and professional engagement (https://www.commsatwork.org/). This is a place where ego, gurus, experts and power have no place. Each day, participants helped each other set up for the day and this created a sense of ownership and belonging to the place so that no matter who you were your story and experience is valued and significant.

If you want to really learn, don’t go to those conferences where they line up the professors and academics that lecture all day. Most of that stuff is just power-centric anti-learning indoctrination.

So, we gathered together for 5 days with people all over the globe practicing SPoR in the workplace. Our focus for the days was not safety, goodness me, why would you want to go to a convention with that word in the title. The convention was about people NOT controlling objects, performance, capacity, systems, hazards, counting, delusion, unethical conduct, behaviourism and all the normal goop you get at those gatherings.

Our focus for the 5 days was on Personhood and Everyday Social Resilience (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/everyday-social-resilience-being-in-risk/). You know, all those things you never hear about at a safety conference.

The best way to learn about safety is NOT to do safety. The best way to learn about safety is not to read Safety stuff. I read a so called ‘safety differently’ book the other day and it was all the same old safety stuff, regurgitating all the same old safety goop (Dekker, Conklin, Hollnagel, Rasmussen, Reason) saying nothing about life, being or living with risk.

Even though many of the people present worked in safety, none of them want to talk about safety. They wanted to learn about people, being and living in the world with the wicked problems of culture, risk and learning. None of what you read about in safety was on the agenda for 5 days.

The two days on Personhood and Resilience were broken up by a one-day Semiotic Walk. This is a day where we walk, talk, listen, eat, share, observe, question, look for semiosis in space and place, emerge ourselves in Poetics, Aesthetics and how others create meaning and purpose in their world. Some of the pics from that day are below.

A Semiotic Walk Day is a day of connecting, learning how to observe, learning how to listen and learning how to put persons centric to life, not the nonsense agendas of safety.

As the last day came to a close there was much reflection and sharing on learning and what people had experienced. This was captured not just in conversation but through iCue listening. The following pics won’t mean much to someone who was not there but capture the inter-relationships and Socialitie of what people learned.

You will notice just by the language on the boards what people learned from the 5 days focus on Personhood and Resilience.

The key to risk and safety is NOT hazards, controls, systems, performance or safety but understanding persons, relationships and living and being in the world. This is what the focus of these reflection boards are about. These boards represent such amazing conversations about how SPoR helps people engage others in the wicked problem of tackling risk. You won’t see anything on the boards about ‘fixing’, ‘telling’ or ’controls’ and you see language such as ‘faith’, ‘being’, ‘myth’ and ‘struggle’.

What a wonderful time everyone had in their journeys in learning as they return back to their workplaces energised to be more human in their work and more real in the way the orient themselves towards persons and their need for resilience.

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Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

• Safety sexism and misogyny looking for a scapegoat  - October 11, 2024
• Framing and Priming Investigations, The Manawanui Tragedy - October 10, 2024
• HOP is Traditional Safety - October 9, 2024
• Defining Safety by the Absence of Accidents, Injury and Harm - October 9, 2024
• Visual and Verbal Mapping of Risk in SPoR - October 7, 2024

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.