• 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 AND WORST 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
  • Psychosocial Safety
    • What is Psychosocial Safety
    • 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 / FIFO / Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?

Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?

December 27, 2022 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

Originally posted on February 17, 2015 @ 9:19 AM

Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?


They say that the repetition of something makes people confirm that it is true. Is the case with safety discourse? As this blog site looks at the power and rule of the empire of non-sense we might ask, what is ‘the force’?

More and more I observe the perpetuation of nonsense as truth in safety. I have listed some examples.

  1. The promotion of risk aversion as a good and healthy thing in safety is astounding. The idea that risk is evil and to be eliminated stands in stark contrast to the necessity for risk in all of life as critical to living as human and learning. The more organisations talk about risk elimination, the more they reduce avenues of creativity, imagination and innovation. Surely a slow death to existence.
  2. The de-coupling of humans from safety discourse is inherent in the preoccupation with safety on hazards. There is nothing so mind numbing as a ‘hazard hunt’. It is as if one can read the mind of the human engaging with that hazard. A hazard hunt could be an imaginative exercise, but we killed that off in the previous point.
  3. The language of ‘common sense’ surely is foundational to the promotion of non-sense. Rather than advocate for creating sense-in-common or creating ‘common knowledge’ safety has this weird belief that safety is natural and instinctive. (See Kinesthetic Safety ). This sense-in-common is what Weick calls ‘consensually validated grammar’.
  4. Surely there is nothing so non-sensical as the language of ‘zero harm’ and ‘beyond zero’ or ‘zero plus’. Coupled to this illogical language is also the idea that one can make hindsight foresight. In the human world the declaration that ‘all accidents are preventable’ is perhaps the most non-sensical. The argument that accidents are necessary and positive is well made by Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes. A world with no mistakes is not a human world and the denial of fallibility is surely non-sense.
  5. With the devaluation of words and symbols in safety (‘its only semantics’) safety has now so misused words that meaningless words are now accepted as making sense. In reality the word has been humiliated in safety so that a value doesn’t mean a value, zero doesn’t mean zero and risk doesn’t mean risk. Safety more than any other discipline I know now is situated in a crisis of meaning.
  6. Safety no longer needs to define words or intent but makes words all a matter of ‘opinion’ and self. In this way safety makes behaviourism culture and measurement reality. Rather than focusing on the most valuable things that we can’t measure safety has shifted the discourse into measuring things we value least. This is surely non-sense.
  7. Another characteristic of the empire of non-sense is the confusing of goals and motivation. Safety now has a collection of quantitative non-goals as end points (absolutes which can never be achieved in this world), surely a statement of non-sense. The only trajectory of non-sense goals can be an end point of frustration and failure. Yet, the safety industry continues to parade the idea that the counting of data and love of zero will bring a better finality. Whilst the rest of us know that perfectionism is a delusion and mental health disorder.
  8. The strategic ignorance of trade-offs and by-products in decision making is more evidence for the empire of non-sense. Wishing away contradictions and evidence doesn’t mean the emperor is not nude. A classic if how tier one organisations define harm. The jury is out on all the harm caused by FIFO and DIDO practices yet the masquerade continues. More non-sense for the empire.
  9. The confusion of what we value with the how of valuing is more for the empire of non-sense. In the end safety continues to prioritise the focus on objects over subjects. Safety is made an end in itself rather than a means to an end (care, tolerance, respect, trust, humanizing).
  10. In safety words and symbols now become self serving and ends in themselves, critical thinking is not encourages in a culture of compliance and compliance is god. Driven and primed by framing and priming in absolutes, safety seeks total obedience because disobedience is risky and fatal.
  11. Another confusion is that training and indoctrination have been substituted for learning and education. The confusion of content for knowledge and data for significance is the foundation for this confusion. It is now unimaginable that safety could ever retreat from the preoccupation with LTIs, TRIFR and injury as the representation of safety, a bizarre non-sense. Since when did absence of something become the demonstration of something else?
  12. Safety talks so little of ‘wisdom’ and ‘discernment’ and is so noisy about ‘controls’, mostly control of others (the silly ones). The constant talk of stupidity as a cause of un-safety is deafening. There has been an accident easy, go searching for the stupid moment and call it ‘root cause’. This enables and gives comfort to simplistic dismissiveness as cause. Rather than understand the real process of human judgment and decision making (determined through social psychology), safety has substituted meaningless language such as ‘be careful’, ‘don’t be stupid’ and ‘target zero’ as leadership by slogans and three word aphorisms.
  13. Safety has also allowed the docile acceptance of this invasion of non-sense because large corporates promote non-sense through religious-like sophistication. The Bradley curve (DuPont ) that suggests that ‘natural instincts’ are wrong and anti-safety is one example. How did such religiousity and denial of suffering creep into the safety sector without critique, surely evidence of the priority of compliance over critical thinking (point 10). Since when did the idea of fundamental corruption in human nature get a guernsey since the church thought up original sin?
  14. The promotion of the vice of intolerance and a virtue is yet another example of the rule of nonsense in the empire. Safety simply calls something that it is not, repeats it with excess and makes it truth. In reality, intolerance is the foundation of all broken relationship. The language of intolerance is not a humanizing language but a language of discrimination and terror.

 

In many ways the safety juggernaut seems unstoppable. I know some who think the best way to change is to do so from within, there is no evidence that this strategy works. My suggestion is that one has to get off the juggernaut to best discover its trajectory. Step outside the safety indoctrination empire and look at it afresh from another discipline. After all, safety simply validates the safety empire. Those inside cannot even talk about it without using safety orthodox language, numbed to criticism and analysis. ‘The force’ is really subversion not inversion and this blog site is full of tips to get you started. If you are interested in more maybe the Post Graduate Program in the Psychology of Risk (http://www.humandymensions.com/post-graduate-studies) is for you.

 

  • 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)

  • Not Just Another ‘Hazard’ - February 3, 2023
  • How to Be Oriented Towards Psychosocial and Mental Health in Safety - February 2, 2023
  • Free Download – Real Risk – New Book by Dr Robert Long - February 2, 2023
  • ISO 45003 and What it Cannot Do - February 1, 2023
  • Harming People in the Name of Good - January 31, 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: FIFO, Risk Aversion, Robert Long, Simplistic Safety, Social Psychology of Risk Tagged With: common knowledge, common sense, risk aversion

Reader Interactions

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 7,499 other subscribers

RECOMMENDED READING

viral post – iso 45003 and what it cannot do

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

Psychosocial Safety and Mental Health Series

Not Just Another ‘Hazard’

Psychosocial Safety, Is it possible to make it culturally normal?

How to Be Oriented Towards Psychosocial and Mental Health in Safety

ISO 45003 and What it Cannot Do

The KISS of Death in Safety

Behavioural Safety is NOT a Foundation for Tackling Psychosocial and Mental Health

The Worst Approach to Psychosocial Problems is an Attitude of ‘Fixing’

The Language of ‘Hazards’ and Psychosocial, Mental Health

Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)

No Good Reason to Follow Reason

More Posts from this Category

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Matt Thorne on Psychosocial Safety, Is it possible to make it culturally normal?
  • simon p cassin on Psychosocial Safety, Is it possible to make it culturally normal?
  • Hurak Learning on How to Be Oriented Towards Psychosocial and Mental Health in Safety
  • Rob Long on An Advanced Understanding of Culture – A Video
  • Paul Gentles on An Advanced Understanding of Culture – A Video
  • Brent Charlton on The KISS of Death in Safety
  • Rob Long on The KISS of Death in Safety
  • Brian Edwin Darlington on The KISS of Death in Safety
  • Brian on The Language of ‘Hazards’ and Psychosocial, Mental Health
  • Jaise on The Language of ‘Hazards’ and Psychosocial, Mental Health
  • Rob Long on Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics
  • Linda McKendry on Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics
  • 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

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

  • 500 OF THE BEST AND WORST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • Proving Safety
  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • ISO 45003 and What it Cannot Do
  • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • NATIONAL SAFETY DAY/WEEK IN INDIA 2023
  • How to Be Oriented Towards Psychosocial and Mental Health in Safety
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity

Recent Posts

  • Not Just Another ‘Hazard’
  • Psychosocial Safety, Is it possible to make it culturally normal?
  • How to Be Oriented Towards Psychosocial and Mental Health in Safety
  • Free Download – Real Risk – New Book by Dr Robert Long
  • Proving Safety
  • ISO 45003 and What it Cannot Do
  • Harming People in the Name of Good
  • An Advanced Understanding of Culture – A Video
  • Risk and Safety Maturity
  • The KISS of Death in Safety
  • SPoR, Metanoia and a Podcast on Change with Nippin Anand
  • Behavioural Safety is NOT a Foundation for Tackling Psychosocial and Mental Health
  • The Worst Approach to Psychosocial Problems is an Attitude of ‘Fixing’
  • SPoR Comes to Vienna June 2023
  • The Language of ‘Hazards’ and Psychosocial, Mental Health
  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • The Visionary Imagination – Louisa Lawson
  • Heaven ‘n Hell and the Safety Religion
  • Confirmity in Conformity
  • Numerology and Psychic Numbing
  • Thinking of Mortality
  • Safety is the Wrong Anchor
  • Foresight Blindness, Hindsight Bias and Risk
  • 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

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

Happy New Year and the ‘Good Life’ Paradox

The Emperor has no Clothes – Beyond Behaviour-Based Safety

Bridging the Disciplines for Better Outcomes

Safety and Risk Culture Cloud

Safety and Non-Neuroscience

King of the World – Why is Sociopathy and Psychopathy so prevalent ‘at the top’?

A Professional Ethic of Risk

Resilience and Safety

Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink – Improving Safety the SMART Way

Social Sensemaking – Free eBook

Risk Intelligence, Thinking and Decision Making

The Paradox of Positivism for Safety

Do Not Go Gently, SPoR and the Civility Myth

Social Psychology of Risk – Body of Knowledge

Understanding Habit, Habituation and Change

The Link Between Think and Blink

Why we make mistakes

Selling Out Safety

Complacency and The Wayward Mind

Hoodwinked by Heinrich

Safety Can’t Control Nature (or People)

Free Poster–Risk

The Ethics of Safety

The Dynamics of Dehumanisation

What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?

Human Dymensions Newsletter–October 2014

Critical Thinking and Questioning in Safety

Shopping for Safety

The Bias of Method Design in Risk

Perfectionism in Safety and the Denial of Humanity

Four Indicators of Toxic Safety Culture

Face-to-Face Safety

The Tension of Opposites and Binaries in Risk

Selective Harm for Rio Tinto

The Curse of Dataism

Adverse Events: Eliminate or Anticipate?

Understanding Psychological Terminology

Mental Health, Risk and Safety

The New Enemy of Safety – The Unconscious

Safety Myopia

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 7,499 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?


WHAT IS PSYCHOSOCIAL SAFETY