The First Rule of the Titan, Don’t Talk About Safety Culture
If you watch the documentary Titan, The Oceangate Submersible Disaster you will know that the first rule of safety culture is to talk about safety culture. You will also know that the second rule of safety culture is not to listen to engineers tell you not to talk about safety culture.
The reason the Titan imploded was because no-one talked about safety culture.
Anyone with an ounce of awareness about culture could smell cultural toxicity in the first 5 minutes of the lengthy documentary. It was clear throughout the project that if any of the 30 plus engineers had raised the topic, they would have been sacked. Rule number one and two accomplished.
The documentary is an excellent manifestation of all that is achieved by holding to these two rules of safety culture. And don’t forget rule two, don’t talk about safety culture.
All of the critical indicators of toxic safety culture were ignored throughout this documentary which makes sense because no one on the project had any cultural expertise. They were all engineers, with no expertise in culture. When you are ignorant about what safety culture is, why would you want to talk about it. Ignorance in culture is rule one and two fulfilled.
When you don’t know what safety culture is, you can’t talk about what you don’t know. However, in safety this is the first rule, write about what you don’t know anything about.
This is why the overload of safety culture indicators on the Titan were ignored.
You can read about the Titan disaster here; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion
The first rule in understanding safety culture is to seek sources with expertise in culture. You could start by reading the free download 51 Stories in Culture, To Live and To Be The last place to seek expertise in safety culture is in safety.
The second rule is to make sure you talk about safety culture as much as you can. Silence about safety culture is a clear recipe to cultivate ignorance in safety culture. Ah yes, the safety way.
If you want to learn about safety culture in an open, positive and constructive way you might like to join the free module series being delivered by Dr Long in July (https://safetyrisk.net/register-for-free-spor-module-on-culture-starting-july-2025/). One thing you can be sure of in this module is, we will break both rules in safety culture and talk about safety culture. If you want to register you can put your name in the list by writing here: admin@spor.com.au
Prof. Robert Long
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