The trouble is, by-products created by slogans mislead and drive systems that dehumanise people. Traditional safety is good at this. Here are a few examples:
Blame fixes nothing: Of course, blame doesn’t disappear but it shifts to a new location called ‘just culture’. This game with words creates an illusion that something ‘different’ is happening when it isn’t. What this does is create a new distraction so that critical elements of relational living are NOT the focus. Just do a language audit of anything in HOP and analyse what it never speaks about. All HOP really achieves is an income stream for a few academics and the shifting of rhetoric. This is why it keeps evolving new brands (S2, SD, RE, NV & HOP) in search of a methodology.
Context Drives Behaviour: Another classic slogan that distracts from the real game. As in all traditional safety, the focus is on behaviourism. The reality is: social reality drives decision making that then appears as behaviour. What this slogan does is anchor safety to its long-held tradition of adoring behaviourism. The slogan distracts away from the complexities of decision making and anchors to behaviours. Just more traditional safety with not a clue about the gap between context and behaviour.
All Accidents Are Preventable: This is one of the traditional safety classics and is simply not true. This is why you never see any discussion of fallibility in traditional safety. It doesn’t know what to do with the fundamental condition of: mortality, vulnerability, imperfection, uncertainty and fallibility (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/). Head-in-the-sand safety is so good at silences (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-culture-silences/). The best way to remain ignorant is to advocate not to talk about what matters. Eg. ‘don’t talk about safety culture’.
We Believe People Are a Solution to Harness: This is just one of those classic shifts in spin. What happens here is that one slogan is swapped for the same slogan: People are ‘not a problem to control’ but a ‘solution to harness’ is the same slogan. The focus on harnessing people is a focus of control. The purpose of the harness metaphor is the control. Just more traditional safety.
Safety is a Choice You Make: Of course, a classic version of free will philosophy and complete silence on determinism. This is what Safety does best, it omits the full story, it avoids the dialectic. The truth is we are caught between the forces we have no control over and the limitations of choice within social reality. Most of what happens to us by circumstance is beyond our control. Yet, this is what traditional safety loves, a simplistic slogan to foster righteousness.
Drift into Failure: The first question we must ask of this slogan is: what have we drifted from? And why is the focus on failure? The reality is that in fallibility the human condition is always in imperfection. We don’t drift into imperfection; we are born into imperfection. And yet, this rhetoric assumes there is a place of non-failure. Non-failure is only ever temporary for fallible humans, just as safety is only ever a moment in time. (This is why Weick never suggested that a HRO existed as Hopkins asserts). Yet, the illusion of ‘drift’ appeals to the simplistic formula that failure evolves from success. Just more traditional safety focused on the negative.
Slogans are one of the things we study in Semiotics, Linguistics and Poetics in SPoR. We bring all these three together in our Module 20: I Think Therefore I Write (https://safetyrisk.net/i-think-therefore-i-write-study-module/).
Slogans and memes have a powerful effect to push people to binary simplistic thinking to beliefs that are simply not true. And yet, if you challenge slogans in safety you are quickly made anti-safety.
This is what slogans do, they create political alliances that have nothing to do with the lack of meaning in the slogan.
Slogans are NOT a methodology but have a hidden methodology that is not declared in the slogan, based on silence on critical issues. This is powerful because people seek simplistic beliefs in safety and slogans provide a kind of certainty, but they are not true. They then go running around in the Emperor’s New Clothes shouting out ‘human and organisational performance’ as if it is something new! When in reality, its just traditional safety with new spin. Traditional safety has always been about human and organisational performance, that’s why it’s so bogged down in itself (https://safetyrisk.net/is-safety-narcissistic/) and unable to move.
If you are interested in a methodology that is different in reality with a different, positive, practical and constructive in methodology and methods (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/spor-and-semiotics/) then you can start your free studies here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/4233556
Or download your free books here: https://www.humandymensions.com/shop/
Dr Rob Long
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Matt Thorne says
I look forward to the next cohort of writers Rob and hope to see some posts here!