Overcoming Safety Indoctrination
When I do training, so much of the first day is about unlearning much of the safety mis-education that has been fed to safety people by curricula that is simply nonsense. It is amazing how people are so sponge-like and lacking critical thinking in the safety sphere. No wonder when the ideology of compliance is so deified that people accept this stuff uncritically. What is worse, the regulators, institutions and peak bodies perpetuate this nonsense. For example. This week whilst in an international workshop people tried to prove that the coloured risk matrix was both objective and scientific. Of course it is neither. In Greg Smith’s words: ‘it is the most dangerous tool in safety’
18. DIAGNOSIS from Human Dymensions on Vimeo.
If ever there was an urgency in safety it is a curricula of critical thinking. This is unlikely unless Safety steps out of its cocoon and gets to know a bit of critical and cultural theory. Somehow I can’t see neo-Marxism getting a look in or poststructuralist critique getting a go.
Captured in all the metaphors attributed by Safety as either science or objective measures is this mish-mash of religious-like commitment to binary mumbo-jumbo. Then when I challenge this in class you want to see everybody try to defend it and then admitting they have never thought it through. This stuff is never questioned by the safety sector. And the curriculum just keeps perpetuating it.
Just look at what plagues the safety curricula and all of it needs to be eradicated:
- Binary language
- Positivist ideology (Scientism)
- Reductionist ideology
- Materialist ideology
- Metrics ideology
- Eugenic ideology
- Checklist ideology
- Fallibility denial
- Bow ties
- Pyramids
- Curves
- Carrots
- Risk matrices
- Swiss cheese
- Safety as policing
- Monologue methods
- Hindsight logic
- Heroics and messianism
- Safety 1 & 2
- Hierarchy of control
- Crazy rhetoric eg. ‘all accidents are preventable’ and ‘safety is a choice you make’ being the classics.
- Closed models of systems thinking
- Focuses on ‘paper systems’
- Prioritising systems over people
- The focus on objects, the list is huge
Unfortunately, most safety people don’t know they have not been mis-educated and indoctrinated. Even the founders of this stuff listed above is mostly disowned by those who developed it!
The truth is ‘All accidents are acceptable’. You have no choice, when an accident happens you must accept its existence. This is the reality of fallibility https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/ There is no great wisdom in talking nonsense to people. Acceptance is the first stage in building resilience and the final stage in the psychology of grief.
We must accept accidents rather than delude ourselves they will not happen. I wonder how many zero crusaders buy insurance, an instant admission that they don’t believe in zero. Zero requires a special form of schizophrenia, denial of fallibility while living fallibly.
Unfortunately in the binary world of safety people think that acceptance is endorsement. Again, an indoctrinated form of logic, as idiotic as the question ‘how many people do you want harmed today?’. When we demolish this nonsense in training everyone is surprised, they have never heard of any of this before. Such is the deficit mis-education in safety.
After two days of challenging many of these sacred cows it is amazing how liberating it is for safety people to become critical thinkers. Now, they can venture forth with no checklist and think, converse and observe with the blinkers off! Then, in comes the feedback, they see new ways of tackling risk, new ways of engaging people and new humanising ways of tackling risk.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- Safety Cosmetics - October 18, 2021
- The Myth of the SWMS Manifesto - October 16, 2021
- Visual Thinking and Risk - October 15, 2021
- Zero is a Delusion - October 12, 2021
- A Semiotic Understanding of Culture - October 10, 2021
Peter says
This is the worst safety related article I have ever read. Safety is clearly not this good Doctor’s background. I would agree critical thinking is important, as it should be in all aspects of life. But so are many of the other aspects associated with being a safety professional. Balancing, perhaps more like juggling, governmental regulatory bodies, corporate ideology, legal liability, with real world working knowledge of the tasks being performed is a difficult undertaking. There are various tools used to help us in a endeavor to keep our team members safe while at the same reducing the likelihood of government fines or legal liability claims.
The idea that safety people are mindless sheep is just insulting. Most have worked their way up from preforming the actual job. Sure some strictly went to school got a degree, but most have practical experience.
All accidents are acceptable. Wrong!! If you believe this you have no business being in safety. Accidents are inevitable but not acceptable.
Rob Long says
Thanks for the complement and confirming the thesis of the blog. Clearly safety is not a profession, the evidence is overwhelming, including your response.
Mindless sheep, hmm, I didn’t say that but perhaps I should have. The acceptance of the coloured matrix alone but countless myths are evidence that the industry normalises nonsense as effective. However, zero and the denial of fallibility stands out as the most delusional of all. Here we have a global industry turning zero into a religious spiritual force and then wonder how an industry could be so dumb.
So if an accident is inevitable then you have to ‘accept’ that it exists. If accidents exist then zero is delusional.
Accepting reality is not a problem. Acceptance is foundational to moving away from delusion and living in reality.
In the real world we accept fallibility, accept accidents, accept harm, accept the development of resilience so that we can move on and learn. If an accident comes your way, you accept that it has happened and move forward. This doesn’t mean that I have to like it.
BTW, all people have a background in safety.