Everyday safety I wrote recently about bells and whistles in safety (https://safetyrisk.net/bells-and-whistles-and-due-diligence/) and how easily Safety is seduced into some delusional campaign of heroes and nirvana. One of the core messages of safety ought to be that there is not utopia and no nirvana. The quest for infallibility is a religious dream. We don’t need […]
Simplistic Safety
The Great Safety is a Choice Delusion
The Great Safety is a Choice Delusion The simplistic worldview about choice plagues the safety industry into the nonsense slogan ‘safety is a choice you make’. The delusion centres around an inability to consider the complexity of life and the many things one has no choice about. The only way one can come to this […]
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Safety in the Silly Season…
Safety in the Silly Season We often refer to this time of the year as the silly season. A time where we let our hair down, have a bit of fun and feel free to be a bit silly. There are parties, after work drinks, family catch ups and barbeques with friends. It’s often a […]
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And Safety Wonders Why Nobody Zero Hates It Anymore
And Safety Wonders Why Nobody Zero Hates It Anymore Just when you thought safety could not get any sillier or desperate, this is what all-risk aversion comes up with…….. My only question, to who ever thought this was a good idea, is: “have you thought through the by-products?” Us soldiers were first required to wear […]
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Dumb Ways to Die Doesn’t Work
Dumb Ways to Die Doesn’t Work The latest release of statistics from ONRSR demonstrates that the Dumb Ways to Die Strategy (DWTDS) doesn’t work. Victoria has the highest number (p.10 of the report) of suspected suicides on its network despite being dwarfed by the size of the NSW rail network. Suicide on the Victorian network […]
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The Great Heinrich Hoax
The Great Heinrich Hoax Perhaps the greatest evidence that Safety is not a profession is the acceptance by the industry of hoaxes and myths. There is no greater hoax in the safety industry than the myth that injury data or injury rates have any connection at all to causality or the management of risk. Yet […]
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Safety Craziness This Month
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: […]
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No Choice, No Say
No Choice, No Say One of the great loves of Dumb Down Safety is guilt, binary attribution and projection of deficit views of risk and safety. Unless the curriculum of WHS moves ahead in transdisciplinary way (https://safetyrisk.net/isnt-it-time-we-reformed-the-whs-curriculum/ ), it is not likely that much will change. There is no better example of the binary Safety […]
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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 […]
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Safety Isn’t Sexy, and it Shouldn’t Be!
Safety Isn’t Sexy, and it Shouldn’t Be! It’s amazing how some people in safety spend more energy trying to rebrand and market the product than reflect and change the nature of the product. Everyone knows that the word ‘safety’ conjures up associations with words like ‘dumb’, ‘embuggerance’, ‘dollard’, ‘checklisting’, ‘policing’ and ‘bullying’. If you want […]
