No Safety in Numbers
I was asked to present recently to a group in the USA on the fixation/psychosis of Safety with numbers. I started with the title of this blog making two points: that you are no safer in a crowd/group, dispelling the myth ‘there is always safety in numbers’ and then spoke on the history of the safety industry and why it has developed ‘numerics psychosis’.
The Bystander Effect
There is plenty of evidence in Social Psychology to dispel the myth that one is safe the more people are about. The ‘Genovese Effect’ or ‘Bystander Effect’ (https://www.simplypsychology.org/bystander-effect.html ) demonstrates that perception of risk changes when ‘Groupthink’ is present (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/groupthink ). Indeed, Groupthink in itself plays a strong role in shaping the decision making of individuals in groups. The powerful dynamics of group pressure can be simply dangerous. We see this often in mass movements and trends in politics where people can be so easily swayed by Propaganda. You can have a look at experiments in Groupthink here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSsPfbup0ac
Understanding the shaping of decision making is a principle interest for the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR). This is why we have developed a map of social influence dynamics that you can download for free here: https://spor.com.au/downloads/posters/
Whilst it is one thing to know there are hundreds of social influencing forces in groups, it’s quite another to understand how they work and in combinations to shape decision making. What this shows is that the simplistic claims of behaviorist nonsense like Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) is completely concocted BS. Most parents already know about Peer Pressure (Groupthink) when their children demand something in order to conform to their group (not the norms their parent expects). But these are only a few of the dynamics at work. One would need to understand much more of Social Psychology to understand how many of these forces affect decision making at work. Then more work would be needed and research to understand how these pressures affect judgments about risk. Of course, the mono-disciplinary WHS curriculum and AIHS BoK have shown no interest in this research for the past 20 years and so maintain a nonsense behaviourist ethic that simply doesn’t work. Poor olds safety busy counting apples in an orange grove.
Numerics Psychosis
In the second half of the presentation I put forward many slide shots of safety websites that demonstrates that all safety knows is numbers and counting. Furthermore, most of what counts in life, living and being is not counted in Safety. Safety only counts what can be counted. The things that are essential in organisations and groups like: love, helping, trust, respect, relationship, care, helping and ethics are of no interest to this industry. Safety only shows an interest in the counting of objects and objects for counting.
The very essentials of what makes for: effective relationships, communication effectiveness, sustainable organizing, political harmony, stability in institutions and envisioning risk is nowhere to be found in any curriculum anywhere in safety.
I asked the group who had all studied a degree in safety if any had received any skill development or curriculum in: observations, listening, conversation, helping skills and social psychology – not one.
Yet, all had been swamped with regulation, legislation (that they will never use) and endless bureaucracy focused on counting injury statistics, that have no relation to the presence of safety.
Of course, then came from the group that old aphorism ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ a wonderful excuse for a sad industry deluded by the idea that a number can be attributed to a value. This silly aphorism is completely false. All of the things that matter most in life cannot be measured neither counted. The most important things required in organisations that help people be safe cannot be measured nor counted.
There is no relationship between injury numbers and the creation of safety!
We then travelled back in time to realize that all of this concocted nonsense and creating belief in numbers started with the Heinrich delusion (https://safetyrisk.net/ration-delusions-and-heinrichs-hoax/ ) and nonsense ideas that were made up by insurance salesmen and engineers who had no cognizance of how their models would fix this industry to injury rates. Now this industry has evolved to this psychosis of counting and the delusions of zero that create a fixation of petty risk.
All in the group acknowledged that the industry was now broken and wasn’t focused on what they had enter safety for, helping persons tackle risk.
Sadly, the conference ended with people feeling powerless to change things. Most decried their association and other associations for making no change to the delusions of the WHS curriculum or a body of knowledge that simply deepens the false consciousness on objects and numbers.
What a sad indictment when so much is available that works: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/
Dr Rob Long
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Rob Long says
Nicholas, the focus has to be on culture and how this sets organisational ethos. Real leadership knows this is the beginning and end of safety mindfulness. This specific focus on data and possible scenarios simply draws attention away from what is most important. Safety indoctrination wins the day again. And so nothing improves.
Nicholas says
Thank you for your continued responses Rob. Sounds like the next step is to begin shifting the internal paradigm’s of leadership to move away from the hard science to softer interpersonal and intrapersonal data sets. Is there a particular metric you (or others) have found effective at generating the ‘A-ha!’ moments we need corporate leaders to experience?
Rob Long says
Nicholas, many don’t realise just how much their worldview has been shaped by the behaviorist and scientist paradigm about them. Indeed, you language about soft and hard is pretty typical of such influence. There is no ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ leadership or approach to anything, there is however people/person centric approaches and non-person approaches, the pejorative language is just a creation of a worldview that attributes soft and hard to views that privilege assumptions about science and data. There is no such thing as ‘hard’ science, again an attribution of a worldview. Similarly, asking for metrics as proof is anchored to the same delusional attributions that we never accept in real life. eg. your relationships are based on faith, there is no evidence that the trust you put in another is well founded. All social life works like this, including good leadership. Good leaders know just how tenuous their work is, if they think leadership can be measured by data, they won’t last long.
This is why understanding worldviews and critical thinking is so important. The skill of critical thinking beyond the delusions of scientist and behaviorism is where to start and to do so with effective questioning eg. what assurance does this data give us that we will be safe tomorrow? How do you know that what we do in safety works? What assurance would be acceptable to a court that what we do works? You won’t get the answer to any of these questions with any of the mumbo jumbo safety trots out.
Nicholas says
Rob, I have begun to wonder if the hard realities of business are what forces safety to numbers, not an ideological failure of the safety world. I agree we only manage what we measure but I am ill equipped as a traditionally trained safety manager to explain how trust or ethics could be reasonably measured and demonstrated to improve the safety conditions of the workplace. I believe this is true but I have only personal bias and whatever qualitative measures I can stick against the wall to back up my argument.
I think part of the truth is that BBS is fundamentally much easier and cleaner to manage and present to higher-ups. It naturally drives more manager – associate engagement which I believe is the only part of BBS approaching a value add or secret sauce. I can easily measure if someone is maintaining good posture, but I don’t have a scalable data-driven method to measure how much peer pressure they are feeling to work faster or more efficiently which they are willing (knowingly or unknowingly) to accept more personal risk to achieve.
Rob Long says
Nicholas, I think you underestimate the power of ideology. The ideology/semiotics of zero is far more powerful than the mechanics of business. Business moves mostly by pragmatics and could be easily shifted as its core business is dominated by economics/profit. Just look how business is shifting now on climate change.
You are right however, Safety has no need for ethics or critical thinking when it can be anchored to zero and measurement. So, most people who undertake a safety qualification are ill equipped to do much more than count. The engineering assumptions of Safety simply apply attributions to the validity of quantitative measures, that is not how we live in the real world where most things that matter cannot be measured.
Again, the acceptance of behaviourism and scientism are attributions accepted by the mono-disciplinary view of safety. There are plenty of other valid views, but they are never countenanced by the ideology of compliance, politicized by compliance. Zero only accepts one view and assumes that the only reality is a number.
The only reason BBS is attributed as working is a strange attribution that behaviours can be measured, which they can’t. You actually can’t ‘measure’ good posture without context, there is no neutral or objective ‘rule’ or ‘measure’ for posture. This is just one way in which the ideology of behaviourist thought has captured the safety industry into false consciousness. Measures are only thought of as objective and measureable if you accept and don’t challenge the delusions of behaviourism and the many accepted models of safety that are all concocted rubbish. Take any of this mumbo jumbo to the courts and you will be laughed at by a proper profession.
Nicholas says
Rob, thank you for replying to my post. I agree with the main thrust of your point and I think my earlier response could be boiled down to: a lack of meaningful quantitative measurement that has predictive power related to incident severity or frequency has resulted in safety persons desperately clinging onto qualitative models of questionable to laughable validity and reproducibility.
This led to the realization that I have a significant gap in my skillset, namely the ability to translate the qualitative measures or evaluations (I still can’t put a KPI on trust, try as I might) into quantitative analysis which the business leaders use to make decisions. Is the path forward to convince the Operations / Business crowd that the qualitative measurements are superior to the quantitative ones, or should we seek to attach more discrete quantitative measurements to the existing qualitative measurements?
Rob Long says
Nicholas, the quantitative vs qualitative debate hinges on strong biases and mythology based in Scientism and Behaviourism, Even the idea of validity by repetition is an assumption of th scientific method myth and what it considers valid.
My point is, this is not a binary competitive thing but rather finding balance in a dialectical way so that we are not trapped into validating one form of knowing over another. This includes the crazy idea that numbers are objective and narrative/stories/images are not. All data is interpreted according to philosophical assumptions. It’s just that safety has been indoctrinated over a long period of time to reject qualitative ways of knowing and invalidate non-measurable ways of knowing.
Isn’t it strange that a CEO would rather know injury rates than know how much they are trusted? I know which of these best generates a culture that is safer than the other. Similarly, the level of skepticism and cynicism in discourse and language also generate much less safe environments, regardless of how numerics are reported. Indeed, even the method of reporting itself can create all kinds of toxic environments that make the workplace less safe.
As for predictive power, just one more indoctrinated delusion of scientism. When it comes to knowing purpose and meaningfulness in relationships, metrics is simply unhelpful.
Nicholas says
I think executives are interested in what they can measure and use to justify performance bonuses, etc. I would struggle to sell my argument that the relative level of trust a GE wage worker places into Jack Welch has a direct impact on their chances of being involved in a safety incident or their level of resilience. What is difficult for me is convincing them a non-reproducible, difficult to scale, manually gathered, qualitative measurement is better than their current focus on engineering based measurements.
Example situation: a person is working on a ladder near a floor opening that they could fall into. If I asked a group of different associates what the risk of that task was and if it was ‘safe’ it seems the the variance of risk tolerance among a sufficiently large group of people would give such a range of responses that it would be difficult to give an answer as to what is “safe.” In contrast most companies have a height limit or other quantitative value in the equation.
Have you found any specific measurements to be good starting points in discussion or presentation of data? I actually capture some of these sentiments in e-questionnaire’s daily but have found little if any link between incidents and emotional sentiment based on my small data pool.
Caring-for-people-in-fear says
Rob, the “…fixation/psychosis of Safety with numbers” WILL not stop. Not in the USA. You can present direct evidence that this leads to MORE injury and MORE deaths and it will not matter, the cult of Zero and cognitive dissonance runs so deep.I do not believe almost anything can be presented that would change the mindset. Now this is not meant to be cute or funny but maybe if you could successfully tie Heinrich to racism (after all he did believe in eugenics) you would get people’s attention. But honestly, I think the Safety trade is so embedded in binary logic, I do not believe is hope, there is too much money and power tied to the status quo.
Rob LOng says
Thanks for your post and you may be right. Until there is fundamental reform in curriculum, ethic and body of knowledge in movement away from zero not much can change. Then of course there are the vested interests who gain politically from keeping everything as it is.
However, I don’t give up hope and perhaps one day Safety will move away from zero and grow up. Some people are listening and many are unhappy with their associations and zero ideology, but those in power simply don’t know what to do, there is no vision.
simon cassin says
Hi Rob, thank you for your blog. As always the content was both interesting and informative. I was wondering if you felt the philosophical principle of charity could be beneficial and help us consider claims and counterclaims in a more productive manner? I realise that this approach can be more time consuming and often requires a more nuanced approach to debate. Perhaps it’s the nature of common communication platforms which make this approach hard to adopt?
There appears to be a broad approach to debate and disagreement which fails to recognise the importance and benefits of this principle. I believe you quite rightly acknowledge the important contribution disciplines such as social psychology make to our understanding and development of appropriate H&S paradigms and approaches. But as you know the ecological validity and generalisation of research findings from the social sciences can be problematic.
Is it also possible that other disciplines such as philosophy and art may also have a part to play in our search for a wider and more comprehensive understanding of human existence? Having a particular interest in philosophy, I am always alert to assertions about political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, rights and obligations, linguistics etc. On many occasions I would argue that people tend to approach philosophical concepts with a non-philosophical mindset. But I could be wrong.
Thanks again Rob.
All the best Simon
Rob Long says
Thanks for the questions Simon. The language of ‘charity’ in some ways is quite antiquated and not used much these days. In some circles it is even given a pejorative tone. However, the language of helping and helping professions seems more common. Unfortunately, the ideology of zero allows no space for ‘charity’ and understands charity as weakness leading to harm. There is no tolerance in zero, no adjustment or debate in zero, its zero or nothing. That is what safety has become. This is one of the principle reasons why safety stopped learning some years ago and refuses or countenances discussion or debate. The principle of zero is anti-charity and anti-learning.
The problematising of social science is no different from any other discipline such is the nature of subjectivity and the way in which H&S has anchored itself to a worldview that assumes scientific objectivity, even safety objectivity.
Unfortunately, Safety also shows no interest in philosophy, critical thinking, debate or transdisciplinarity so, until there is movement away from zero not much is likely to change, leaving safety as an unprofessional back water.
Brian Edwin Darlington says
Great Blog as always Rob
Rob Long says
Thanks Brian, I just discuss what I see from my worldview.