• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

SafetyRisk.net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE
    • Slogans
      • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
      • When Slogans Don’t Work
      • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
      • 500 OF THE BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
      • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
      • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
      • Safety Acronyms
      • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
      • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
      • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
      • Safety Slogans List
      • Road Safety Slogans 2023
      • How to write your own safety slogans
      • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
      • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
      • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
      • Safety Slogans for Work
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • Free Hotel and Resort Risk Management Checklist
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • Social Psychology Of Risk
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Dr Long Posts
    • ALL POSTS
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no Hierarchy of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • THEMES
    • Risk Myths
    • Safety Myths
    • Safety Culture Silences
    • Safety Culture
    • Psychological Health and Safety
    • Zero Harm
    • Due Diligence
  • Free Learning
    • Introduction to SPoR – Free
    • FREE RISK and SAFETY EBOOKS
    • FREE ebook – Guidance for the beginning OHS professional
    • Free EBook – Effective Safety Management Systems
    • Free EBook – Lessons I Have Learnt
  • Psychological Safety
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • Managing psychosocial hazards at work
    • Psychological Safety – has it become the next Maslow’s hammer?
    • What is Psychosocial Safety
    • Psychological Safety Slogans and Quotes
    • What is Psychological Safety?
    • Understanding Psychological Terminology
    • Psycho-Social and Socio-Psychological, What’s the Difference?
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • It’s not weird – it’s a psychological safety initiative!
You are here: Home / Robert Long / It’s Always About Paperwork

It’s Always About Paperwork

January 8, 2021 by Dr Rob Long 2 Comments

It’s Always About Paperwork

safety pulpitOh, I get it. It’s not the problem of excessive paperwork, it’s just that you haven’t been filling it out properly. This is the core message of Useability Mapping (https://www.aihs.org.au/events/usability-mapping-masterclass ). The problem is not about paperwork itself but rather the method in completing it. You couldn’t make this stuff up and Safety rolls right along constructing more obligations, more paper-based extras and 4th tier compliances  (https://safetyrisk.net/sin-eaters-for-safety/ ) that have no bearing at all on the management of risk.

The wonderful work of Greg Smith in Papersafe really captures the heart of the problem with the Safety psychosis with paperwork.

No matter what method you use to fill out paperwork none of it makes anyone safer. Work done doesn’t occur on paper, it occurs out on the job where real people walk and talk and tackle risk. Whatever you decided to construct in paperwork usually bears no reflection on reality or is outdated the moment it is written.

The problem isn’t the way paperwork is filled out, it’s the fixation and psychosis with paperwork itself. SWMS don’t keep people safe, risk assessments don’t keep people safe rather it’s the conversations that these things reflect that have some chance of helping workers tackle risk. The more volumes of paperwork that are generated contribute nothing to safety. What is put into paperwork most often bears no resemblance to how workers really make decisions (https://vimeo.com/471823469). Paperwork isn’t a defence in court (https://vimeo.com/162034157).

3. PAPERWORK from Human Dymensions on Vimeo.

What we learn from the sciences of human cognition, learning, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and social psychology is that paperwork is not a solution but the foundation of the problem. Any research at all in these sciences would show that method of paperwork completion is a furphy. Paperwork is the Safety anchor that weighs down this industry under the delusions that it has some relevance to decision making. Then when something goes wrong Safety brings in all the auditors and engineers to see what went wrong in the paperwork rather than the problem with paperwork itself. This is what the Dreamworld inquiry was about (https://safetyrisk.net/an-engineering-dreamworld/ ). This is the nonsense of the Brady Inquiry (https://safetyrisk.net/brady-review-nothing-new-no-way-forward/ ). It couldn’t possibly be that the addiction to paperwork has created a toxic culture and that this is the source of why things go wrong.

The most important thing when something goes wrong in safety is not to question the foundations of safety but to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic. It can’t possibly be that the ideology of safety in itself is at fault. It couldn’t possibly be that paperwork is the cause of the problem. No, paperwork is the saviour of the zero cult, you just have to learn how to fill it out properly then your injury rates will come down. (as if injury rates have anything to do with safety?) How strange this cult of zero that seeks infinity in paperwork.

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Rob
Dr Rob Long

Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Dr Rob Long

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual) - January 23, 2023
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk - January 23, 2023
  • What is SPoR? - January 23, 2023
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety - January 23, 2023
  • Afraid to Let Go of What Doesn’t Work in Safety - January 17, 2023
Dr Rob 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.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Robert Long, Social Psychology of Risk, Zero Harm Tagged With: papersafe, paperwork, swms

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Rob Long says

    January 8, 2021 at 2:09 PM

    Keith, I wrote a reflection on Document Usability and am not surprised that the AIHS have committed to such a commercial product https://safetyrisk.net/the-template-trap-and-paper-safety/
    You could drive a truck through the holes in that document as well as its dangerous assumptions about bureaucracy. The the AIHS selects it as a commercial product to support, hmmm says much about the integrity of the AIHS as a promoter of select products.
    It’s a strange contradiction to address ‘safety clutter’ by then endorsing paperwork as a solution by developing a technique to fill it out.
    The psychology behind the concept of useability is non-existent and ignores a great deal about reading comprehension known to educators and literacy and linguistics experts. It shows it’s true colors when it describes useability as some kind of ‘science’ and ‘useability engineering’ (ha ha ha). ‘useasbility engineering applied to documentation’. Ah yes, its much more about engineering than a psychology of education and learning. Interesting that no educators have come anywhere near this stuff and you would consult either Provan or Rae on the matter but that’s how safety supports its assumptions that it doesn’t question.
    None of the work in this document has a foggy clue about reading comprehension, psychology of education or learning. As usual Safety doesn’t take a Transdiciplinary approach in anything, just more engineering and STEM-only thinking. And of course no mention of Semiotics, Poetics, Linguistics, Discourse Analysis let alone any mention of the human unconscious or how the human Mind works.
    This document is what you get when you throw engineers at the Discipline of Education without a clue about the socialpsychology of education and learning. Strange, not an education degree in any of those sited in the document.
    Mind you wonderful fodder for my Module on Linguistics where we tear this to shreds https://cllr.com.au/product/linguistics-flyer-unit-21/ Happy to send you a module outline, BTW none of my sources in education and the psychology of learning for my module are cited in this AIHS document nor any of the world experts on literacy, learning or linguistics.
    Fancy embracing this stuff and having no cognizance of Chomsky, Ricoeur, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva, Halliday, Lakhoff or Fuchs, astounding. The word ‘hermeneutics’ doesn’t even appear in the document.
    As usual, the AIHS anchors to mickey mouse safety in its imagination that it is making a contribution to the wicked problem of risk.

    Reply
  2. Keith says

    January 8, 2021 at 12:16 PM

    Thanks for the blog Rob, good info. I read the AIHS document some months back on Documentation Usability etc. Any thoughts on this document? It touched on topics that I hadn’t known prior (how a person reads a document etc), so was of some value. Not sure I would attend a masterclass for the topic but. Cheers Keith
    https://www.ohsbok.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/12.3.3-Documentation-Usability.pdf

    Reply

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,495 other subscribers

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

SAFETY MYTHS SERIES

The Mythic Symbology of Safety

Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics

Safety Mythbusters

Don’t Be Emotional! Another Safety Myth

Tackling the Challenge of Heuristics in Safety

The Myth of Normal

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Rob long on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Matt Thorne on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Anonymous on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Jason on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Admin on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Gustavo Saralegui on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Rob long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Wynand on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • simon cassin on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Matt Thorne on Free Online Workshops
  • Rob long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Brian Edwin Darlington on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Risk Diversity on Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Rob Long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Risk Culture Builder on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Mark Taylor on All Things Must Pass in Risk

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Footer

VIRAL POST – The Risk Matrix Myth

Top Posts & Pages. Sad that most are so dumb but this is what safety luves

  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • 500 OF THE BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • Safety Acronyms
  • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity

Recent Posts

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk
  • What is SPoR?
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Afraid to Let Go of What Doesn’t Work in Safety
  • When You Don’t Know What to do in Safety, Have Another Blitz!!!
  • Gloves and Glasses Compliance
  • A Case of Desensitisation – What Would You Do?
  • How to Leave the Safety Industry
  • The Mythic Symbology of Safety
  • Dark Waters, The True Story of DuPont and Zero
  • 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Am I stupid? I didn’t think of that…
  • Don’t Look Now Safety, Your Metaphor is Showing
  • Ratio Delusions and Heinrich’s Hoax
  • To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Culture as a Wicked Problem, for Safety
  • Safety Leadership Training
  • Cultural Orientation in Risk
  • The Stanford Experiment and The Social Psychology of Risk
  • Objectivity, Audits and Attribution When Calculating Risk
  • Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Zero, The Seeking of Infinity
  • Safety Leadership Essentials
  • What Can Indiana Jones Tell Us About Culture
  • Safety as a Worldview
  • The Loathing of Limits
  • Culture Cannot be Framed Through Safety
  • Free Online Workshops
  • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
  • Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Advancing Backwards in Safety
  • The ‘Noise’ of Safety, Silence and Practicing of Mindfulness
  • All Things Must Pass in Risk
  • I’m just not that into safety anymore
  • Sticks and Stones and the Nonsense of Zero Harm
  • Courting Infallibility in Safety
  • Indicators of Risk
  • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
  • No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Just as Well Culture Doesn’t Listen to Safety
  • What Are the Benefits Of Social Psychology of Risk?
  • Short-Sighted Lenses by Safety
  • Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?
  • No Wonder Safety is Confused About Culture
  • Building High Performance Safety Cultures
  • Understanding iCue, a Visual, Verbal, Semiotic Method for Tackling Risk
  • On Culture and Safety
  • Focus on ‘Meeting’ people, not legislation – a path to risk maturity
  • The Moral Harm of the Zero Cult

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

A Scaffolder’s Journey in SPoR – A Podcast

Why Safety Doesn’t See Things

Scenario Learning in Risk and Safety

By What Method Do You Tackle Risk?

What or Who Is Safety?

Safety-1, Safety-2, Safety-3

Safety Utopia as Abuse

Is there “Common Sense” in safety?

Numerology and Psychic Numbing

Thinking About Harm

The Illusion Of Opposites

Dumb Ways to Discourse, a Failed Approach in Safety

Shock and Fear in Safety

How Risky is Your Safety Spin?

How Effective Are Your Conversations About Risk?

Ways in Which the Workplace Harms Us

The Different Levels of Wrongness!

The De-Ethicization of the Object in Safety

Something Different To Safety

Military Metaphors in Safety

Due Diligence Workshop Sydney 20,21 February 2019

Why Metaphors Matter in Risk

The Dynamics of Dehumanisation

Stand Behind The Yellow Line – Do Engineering Controls Affect Risk?

Who is Responsible?

Who Gives a Toss?

A must watch risk and safety video

Humanising Workers Compensation (Sydney Workshop)

CLLR Christmas 2016 Newsletter and Competition

There’s a Hole in Your Investigation.

Selling Out Safety

Safety Career Highlight

We Are Such Experts….

The Art of the Open Question

What Can Safety Learn From Desire Paths?

Rhetoric and Reality in Safety

Traditional Safety

A Poetics of Safety

Celebrating 1000 Blogs on Risk

Free Download – Real Risk – New Book by Dr Robert Long

More Posts from this Category

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,495 other subscribers

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY?

What is Psychological Safety at Work?