Safety Craziness This Month

Some pretty crazy safety stuff has landed in my inbox so far this month. There is always a steady trickle, but for some reason, this month has been a little bit special. These two were my favourites:

Where Are the Safety Heroes?

To quote the from this article from Safeopedia’s Newsletter:

Takeaway: We need to shine the light on safety heroes. We need safety role models to emulate, and they deserve recognition for keeping others safe. This is what real heroes do: they protect others.

Heroes are an essential component of any good movie or story. We love seeing:

Captain Kirk protecting his crew

Yoda protecting Luke as a Jedi master

Professor Charles Xavier protecting his X-Men and students

Harry Potter protecting his friends and classmates

Katniss Everdeen protecting her friends and loved ones during the Hunger Games

And we don’t just love seeing protectors in movies; we also need them in real life. Help us identify them and share their story.

In theology this is called the messiah complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex (perhaps he isn’t a Safety Hero – just a very naughty boy?). We’ve written about this crazy Safety Hero myth before:

The Hero Myth in Modern Management

A terrific essay by one of my fellow Students undertaking Graduate Certificate in The Psychology of Risk at ACU – published with permission What is the ‘Hero Myth’? How is this Evident in Modern Management and Leadership Discourse? Unit 2 Essay – Graduate Certificate in the Psychology of Risk, Australian Catholic University. Lecturer: Dr Robert […]

The Zero Hero is Here to Save The Day!

Dr Rob Long’s recent article Forecasting Safety resulted in some great debate both here and on other forums. In this article Gabrielle discusses the language of zero and how it may have the exact opposite affect to what was maybe well intended. The people who take the time to read and have the courage to […]

You don’t Need to be a Hero to be a Safety Leader

You don’t Need to be a Hero to be a Safety Leader “When a meeting between two people truly takes place, when there is just you and me and we are interacting in a very real and honest way, dropping agendas and stepping into a wide space where the air is fresh and competitors become […]

Injured Workers Become Super Heroes

Injured Workers Become Super Heroes???? Well its been a while since we heard from Hazardman (see Hazardman Wont Save You), the super hero able to control human behaviour, able to remove all risk from the workplace in a single bound….. perhaps he has finally succumbed to the effects of overdoing Zero Harm (like others poor […]

MAKE YOUR SAFETY PROMISE TODAY

Safework NSW is asking as to “Make a start in improving health and safety in your workplace by following 3 easy steps:”

Talk to your workers about what a safer workplace might look like.
Make your safety promise
Turn your words into actions

You can find more details HERE. It seems like only 4 companies have made the promise in the last 2 weeks (73 for the whole campaign) – who would have thought? Perhaps there are no brave safety heroes out there?

This campaign prompted Rob Long to write:

But you Promised?

But you Promised? When you don’t know what to do about safety chose a dumb down binary discourse. Here is the latest from Safework NSW http://www.safetystartswithyou.nsw.gov.au/safety-promise There’s nothing more reliable for dumb down than the core principle: ‘It didn’t work last time so, lets do it again’. Beller (Beller, S. (2002). Conditional promises and threats […]