I received a propaganda piece this week from a company promoting a HSSEQ Observation and Reporting Program. My goodness, the nonsense Safety throws at people. At the same time, I received a note from a safety non-professional telling told me I hated Safety.
You can put both these mythologies together and it gives you are great idea of a culture of ignorance, blind compliance, unprofessional conduct, immoral discourse and delusion.
The propaganda piece started with this nonsense:
When is Safety going to get beyond this mindless concocted nonsense that has no basis in truth, research or maturity? My goodness me, let’s go back to 1931 and read behaviourist fiction from a complete goon and apply it to 2024. (https://safetyrisk.net/?s=Heinrich)
Anyone who swallows this nonsense has no sense of History, Ethics or Critical Thinking.
This nonsense sets any company back 90 years, to the dark ages when one could use the word ‘science’ as a meaningless adjective for speculative projections on philosophy, psychology and sociology with no expertise in anything. And here it is, in 2024 promoting some strange idea that counting injury rates is a measure of something???
Of course, what follows is a collection of slides of forms, paperwork, bureaucracy, systems, codes for surveillance and James Reason nonsense on ‘unsafe acts’ and ‘unsafe conditions’.
And what do we have? A nonsense semiotic of a woman flying in a trolley, pushed by a man with mouth open waiting for an accident. And look at what is important: PPE, signs and barriers, procedures and ‘horseplay’. Only Heinrich himself could think up something so stupid.
Just have a look at this goop from Heinrich (https://safetyrisk.net/deconstructing-the-myth-of-heinrich/) where the mind reader Heinrich writes about recklessness and will-full disregard from his expert qualifications in nothing. If you want to read Heinrich for yourself, please email me and I will post it to you. rob@humandymensions.com
So, I am into slide 6 of this 17 slide presentation on HSSEQ Observations and it’s all about concocted fiction, objects and petty pissy risk.
Slide 8 is of course, more nonsense and look at the semiotic.
And here we have all the old safety favourites about being -substandard’.
A few slides later and you really can’t look at much more.
It’s all about ‘telling’ in some proscriptive way as if there is some sort of formula for engaging people. But don’t forget it’s an ‘intervention’. Of course it is.
All of this is packaged in the nonsense language of ‘Just Culture’. More rubbish from Reason (https://safetyrisk.net/faith-in-reason-and-unreasoned-faith-as-safety-myth/). This includes nonsense discourse about no blame after preparing the foundation of this presentation for blame and bullying.
How strange this industry that repeats the word ‘positive’ ten times and ‘professional’ ten times and thinks it makes it so. No discussion of ethics, moral responsibility, how to care and help persons, nothing on relationships, no idea of what to observe or what culture is. Just more systems, potential, capacity, performance, systems, objects, hazards, systems, performance and oh yes, systems.
What a wonderful foundation for bullying people in the name of Safety. What a wonderful methodology for speaking about psychological safety and then ensuring it cannot happen. A wonderful presentation for bullying in the name of good and then make sure that you call it ‘professional’.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- The Subjectivity of Performance in Safety - December 13, 2024
- Hey Safety, What’s Your Worldview? - December 12, 2024
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- More Nonsense from the EHS Insight – Zero Injury Cultures??? - December 8, 2024
- Safety is an Art - December 7, 2024
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