How to Tackle Risk You Can’t See
So often in strategic planning and goal setting people can’t see the trade-offs and by-products they are putting in place. You can’t see what you don’t know. We saw this with the recent research into traffic safety messages (https://safetyrisk.net/study-reveals-an-unexpected-side-effect-of-traffic-safety-messages/ ).
The trouble is the industry of safety is so poorly mis-educated and indoctrinated that it thinks that the behaviourist/engineering worldview sees all. Of course, it doesn’t. Furthermore, such a worldview creates enormous blindness to trade-offs and by-products in strategy (https://safetyrisk.net/essential-elements-for-a-safety-strategy/ ), planning, goal setting (https://safetyrisk.net/goals-and-vision-in-safety/ ) and perception. Safety doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and is blind to what it should know, but it doesn’t want to know it.
You will never get ahead of by-products and trade-offs in risk from the safety mono-disciplinary worldview. The best way to tackle the psychology of goals, strategic thinking and trade-offs in risk is from a Transdisciplinary worldview (https://safetyrisk.net/transdisciplinary-thinking-in-risk-and-safety/ ). That is, from a worldview that gives value to many worldviews and disciplines that don’t see the world like safety. This is the foundation for Envisioning Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/ ).
When your only lens for looking at the world is safety, you won’t see much. In all my years in Education, Learning, Curriculum and Pedagogy I have never witnessed an industry more closed, fearful and afraid of learning. Even when it talks about learning tams and learning it isn’t about learning!
Having worked and studied across many disciplines I have never seen a curriculum so narrow as safety. No wonder safety is so surprised when by-products from strategy come back and bite them. I wonder how many more years it will take for Safety to wake up to the fact that zero doesn’t work and creates more dangerous by-products than it thinks it solves!
A Transdisciplinary view doesn’t fear what it doesn’t know because it trusts and validates the knowing of other disciplines equal to its own. Transdisciplinarity validates the idea that other worldviews and disciplines can see things that safety cannot see and visa versa. Such a view doesn’t privilege one view over another nor insist on a hierarchy of knowing (eg. science over metaphysics). Such a view knows how to converse and listen to disciplines and worldviews it knows little about.
Goodness me, just think about it, one might even design and strategize approaches to risk that might work (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/ ).
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- Working Out What Makes Sense in Safety - May 9, 2022
- How to Tackle Risk You Can’t See - May 6, 2022
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- Safety Silences – Video Series - May 3, 2022
Andrew Thornhill says
Thanks Rob, in my work I am regularly exposed to safety systems developed by safety teams with very limited diversity in their knowledge, experience or skill sets. Perhaps this stems from the limited recognition in industry that safety is complex – with social, political and people elements to it – that we can only start to tackle with a level of openness to what other disciplines can bring to the table. One example of the don’t know what you don’t know factor I see weekly is safety inductions and training (and most safety systems for that matter), developed with no consideration of learning design or effectiveness – which are invariably long winded, crammed with content in an attempt to cover everything and in a documented format only (still!). What is universally measured and valued is compliance (i.e. the % of staff who have completed the induction/ training), not effectiveness (did they understand anything? Can they apply this new knowledge?) nor the viewpoint of the participants or their willingness to apply what they are being asked to do. The don’t know what you don’t know factor (or in some cases, arrogance) is reinforced when a staff member is then found to be not following the procedure – the staff member must be choosing to flout what we covered in the induction or training (with “but we covered this with you in the training” the typical line of questioning) and the staff member therefore deserving of some punitive response. Still, safety knows best.
Rob Long says
So true Andrew. All the Act and Regulation requires re inductions is that you have one. It seem irrelevant to safety that it is ineffective. Similarly, all this talk in safety recently about learning that is never defined and sprouted about by engineers as if learning is a component in a process.
Why is it that safety is so keen to expose its ignorance ax if it is qualified to venture into unknown disciplines. It’s so embarrassing and unprofessional.
It is as if conversing with other disciplines is sone kind of evil.
Just look at the AIHS BoK, you could hardly get anything more narrow in discipline than that. Safety knows best.