One of the things Safety does best is state what is, by what isn’t.
What happens most often in the closed echo chamber of Safety is that one starts with the assumption that safety is the sacred starting point for thinking and then make the world fit that assumption.
We see this typically with the likes of Hopkins (https://www.ioshmagazine.com/organising-safety-how-structure-creates-culture) and Cooper (https://www.shponline.co.uk/common-workplace-hazards/human-error-symptom-or-cause/) who don’t declare their methodology (eg. Structuralism and Behaviourism) and yet pontificate to the uncritical safety throngs who lap up what they have been indoctrinated to hear. Then any criticism is attributed as anti-safety or demonised. How comfortable and convenient. A sure way to disable learning on the pathway to zero
The best way to understand safety is not to start with Safety.
There are other valid worldviews other than Safety.
What Safety does best is; construct a worldview that suits a Safety worldview not the world as it is. This is done by being silent about Transdisciplinary views and manufacturing notions of culture that are silent about the most critical aspects of culture.
What we end up with is a mechanistic worldview that claims that culture can be controlled and that behaviours can be predicted (https://safetyrisk.net/the-behaviourist-human-and-human-being/). This then enables nonsense ideas suggested by Hopkins that culture can be over-ridden by Safety (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-gives-me-the-right-to-over-ride-your-rite/). Talk about pandering to the safety worldview. How attractive to Safety with its lust for power over others. The promises of Behaviourism and Structuralism are hollow pathways to brutalism.
Of course, none of this stuff by Hopkins is about culture, it’s about organising and systems. Fortunately, few will purchase such an academic book, just as few read academic journals so, will have little impact.
None of the nonsense that Safety puts out about culture includes any consideration of Religion. How convenient, how comfortable. Yet, for any Anthropologist, Religion is the place to start in understanding culture/civilizations. Religion is the bedrock of culture and helps understand the: rituals, mythologies, heuristics, habits, semiotics, gestures and beliefs of a culture/civilization. Safety is not interested in any of this even when people declare themselves as Mythologists!
What SPoR focuses on sits outside of structure and tackles the world as it is, not how we want it to be. The world is about dis-order, messiness, chaos and evolution. In Hopkins world, Safety is god so that structure ‘rules’ over dis-order.
In the beginning was structure and the structure ruled over the world and Safety said ‘let it be so’!
When we look at Australian Indigenous Culture we see how everything is anchored to the Dreaming and The Dreamtime. Religion takes seriously the human unconscious and dreaming. How does structure create dreaming? Indeed, how does matter, materialism and structure create the unconscious? How does one build controls and structure over the unconscious, belief and imagination? That’s easy for Safety, don’t talk about it.
The only way to think that structure could create culture is from a narrow worldview and a limited definition of culture. I have discussed Hopkin’s before.
· https://safetyrisk.net/structure-does-not-create-culture/
· https://safetyrisk.net/culture-about-much-more-than-structure/
The trouble with these worldviews (Hopkins or Cooper) that Safety loves is the trajectory and ethic.
Mechanistic worldviews applied to fallible humans can only end up in brutalism. But why would ethics be of any interest to Safety? It doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it in safety, just as long as the outcome fits your definition of safety or your definition of culture. When safety comes first, people come second and ethics come third.
When safety is your number one priority, you can over-ride the beliefs off others and devalue their culture because belief is just the outcome of structure.
The reality is, changing structure doesn’t even shift the dial on culture.
The reality is the opposite of what Hopkins preaches. Culture creates structure.
If you want to learn about a view of culture that is NOT mechanistic and doesn’t start with the assumption that safety is the starting point for thinking, you can study here: https://cllr.com.au/product/culture-leadership-program-unit-15-overseas-elearning/
Or start the free Intro to SPoR module with Matt Thorne: matthew@riskdiversity.com.au
Or download any of the free books (https://www.humandymensions.com/shop/)
Listen to SPoR Podcasts: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/socialpsychologyofrisk
Or watch SPoR videos: https://vimeo.com/cllr
SPoR doesn’t start with the outcome (safety) it starts with the process (risk).
Rob Long says
Structure does NOT create culture, Culture creates structure: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-07/maningrida-college-2023-six-graduates/103196616
Only Safety could reverse reality to suit its own worldview so that it can brutalise people through structure to create the culture of fear it wants.
Matt Thorne says
When people do not look to their Ontology/ Worldview, how can they see what is their trajectory?
The English were Colonisers, no-one doubts that, but in the effort of creating ‘ Structure” came up with ‘Terra Nulllius’.
Helping organisations understand themselves gives them knowledge of their people and purpose, that gives them structure!
Challenging a lot of people here Rob!
Rob Long says
For those looking for evidence that structure doesn’t shift the dial on culture. Try 65,000 years of the Dreamtime in Australian Indigenous Culture and the structure imposed by English colonization. The brutalism and genocide (justified as ‘structure’) of English colonization has had no effect on the Dreamtime as the foundation of Indigenous thinking and reason for being. One would think any person claiming to be a Historian would know that.