Robert Long

Imaginative Workers as Embodied Creators in Risk

ByProf. Robert Long

Whenever I travel about Canberra with a tradesperson in the car, it is worth listening to their language about how they describe their work. Their language is about what they do, mostly about what they created, how they created, problems they solved creatively, imagining possibilities and the satisfaction of completing work like an artist.

Workers-as-artists don’t think of their work as ‘work-as-done’, this is a HOP/S2 myth. Workers ‘think’ with their bodies, hands, eyes, touch, resonance, intuition and all their senses. Most workers don’t ‘think’ into being they ‘feel’ into being.

One reason why the HOP/S2 myth of work-as-done against work-as-imagined exists, rests on ignorance about an ethic of personhood. In the HOP/S2 myth, humans are disembodied with a brain-as-mind that directs the body. The same myth concocts the idea that imagination is locked into ‘head work’. All of the S2/HOP semiotics supports this myth. None of this is real or supported by evidence. This is why the HOP/S2 myth maintains no ethic of personhood or methodology to support their binary ideas. But they sure are effective for marketing and slogans that Safety likes.

Workers work in a ‘haptic’ sense (https://philosophy.ucsd.edu/_files/facultysites/mfulkerson/the-unity-of-haptic-touch.pdf ). That is, they work through touch. And, this is their primary learning style. It is also why they enjoy and thrive in their work.

In a similar way, workers see their work as ‘performance’, not in a HOP way, but in a dramatic way. For the worker-as-artist, their performance is in doing, not for assessment or measurement but as theatre. Elam describes all that happens in such an understanding of performance (The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama – https://archive.org/details/semioticsoftheat0000elam).

In this understanding of performance (not the HOP view), the human person embodies what they do in performing their work. The best way to wreck such performance is to measure it  (https://safetyrisk.net/if-you-want-to-wreck-good-performance-measure-it/).

The performance of workers is both haptic and a doing-thinking process. This thinking is not with the brain but rather with the body. In this kind of work, the imagination is critical. Colombetti describes this as working in ‘affective affordances’. This means the shape, space, look of the job, directs how they feel into enacting. In this way of thinking objects declare what needs to be done.

See further: Colombetti, G 2014, The feeling body: affective science meets the enactive mind, MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This way of working is about enactivity or as Prof. Karl. E. Weick would say, ‘they enact into being’. It was Weick who said: ‘how do I know what I think, until I see what I do’.

In enactivism, (Kemp, R 2012, Embodied acting what neuroscience tells us about performance, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon.) we don’t know with our brains, we know with our body, feelings, touch and other modes of sensing. This is the same in sports, dance, music, acting or any Poetic knowing (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being/).

In this mode of thinking, imagination is not in the brain, but in the enactment of the body. In this way of knowing, the human body is the text, not the written text in a computer or on paper. In this way, workers ‘read’ other workers and their work. In this way of knowing, the worker gets in ‘flow’ (https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/2418/files/2013/04/Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi-Flow.pdf) and most work is performed by intuition/heuristics. That is, workers don’t think with their brain about what they do, they know with their bodies what to do.

Indeed, when something goes wrong at work, Safety interprets error as a brain (thinking) problem, and usually sends humans back for reprogramming, as if the error was a brain problem. We see this assumption in all the semiotics of HOP/S2 thinking. This is the result of Cartesian thinking in the separation of the body from the mind.

If your understanding of personhood is disembodied then one thinks that decision-making is brain-centric (https://safetyrisk.net/the-safety-problem-with-mindlessness/). We see this often in how Safety talks about ‘mindsets’, ‘mindfulness’ and being ‘mindful’. None of this is supported by any research in neuroscience.

Most work undertaken on the job is not about brain-fulness nor is decision-making rational. Most work is non-rational, embodied, intuitive and enactive. This is why so many of the programs of Safety and safety-methods don’t work, because they are based on the assumption that the brain directs thinking-acting.

This is why the HOP/S2 myth of work-as-done against work-as-imagined just perpetuates the same myths as traditional safety. Just look at all the semiotics and it’s all brain-centric. This is NOT how humans work.

If you want to learn more about embodiment and working, you can write here for more information: admin@spor.com.au

 

Prof. Robert Long

Prof. Robert Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Prof. Robert Long
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.

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