No Hope for Safety One of the fascinating things about culture in safety is an extraordinary satisfaction with a lack of definition and a phenomenal acceptance of assumptions about critical issues. For example, you won’t find discussion anywhere in safety about the nature of Hope, nor the nature of Faith for that matter. This is […]
STEM
The Mythic Symbology of Safety
The Mythic Symbology of Safety One of the strange contradictions in the world of safety is between the positivist materialist paradigm that dominates the WHS curriculum/texts and the mythic symbology that dominates safety discourse about the activity of enacting safe-work. How strange that one should use language and images associated with the mythology of Greek […]
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Mapping Social Influence Strategies
Mapping Social Influence Strategies People who train in STEM-only industries like those in risk, safety and security tend to be naïve and mis-educated about the nature of social influence. A search through any of the texts in risk and safety curriculum on the marked indicate strong influences of STEM-only behaviourist thinking. In the risk and […]
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Anchoring Safety to Objects
Anchoring Safety to Objects Anchoring refers to a human bias that ‘holds’ to a view or position based upon how it was introduced and ‘sunk-cost’ associated with commitment to that position. Anchoring acts as a ‘fast and efficient’ heuristic that short cuts any need for challenge, questioning and debate and so empowers compliance. You can […]
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Safety Surveying What You Already Know
Safety Surveying What You Already Know I received a post this week from someone who had conducted the typical orthodox safety survey. There are many such surveys on the market, all infused with STEM-only assumptions about materialist-rationalist safety. As I looked through the survey results and analysis there was nothing stated or measured that organisations […]
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Transdisciplinary Safety
Transdisciplinary Safety In the latest issue of The Risk Magazine in the Future of Risk Edition (No. 3 March 2018, p.44) I argued that the future of risk must embrace transdisciplinarity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transdisciplinarity ). It is interesting that the binary view that currently dominates safety even interprets this transdisciplinary call as an ‘either-or’ view. A transdisciplinary […]
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Making the World fit the Safety Worldview
Making the World fit the Safety Worldview One of the drivers of the work of Martin Heidegger was his reaction to the determinist and reductionist view of Rene Descartes . The Cartesian worldview understands the world in an atomistic way, reducing certainty down to first causes. This is the view that dominates the archetype of […]
