Just found this interesting article Posted by Marie-Claire Ross – HERE
Other similar resources:
- Advice for New and Aspiring Safety Professionals
- Skills, Advice and Tips for Experienced Safety Leaders
The Future for the Safety Professional
In the Industrial age, factories in the western world broke down tasks into smaller tasks so that low paid, uneducated workers could follow simple instructions.
Compliant staff carried out mind-numblingly boring jobs and factory owners had what they wanted – an obedient low-paid workforce. Employees were effectively “cogs in a machine” as Seth Godin points out in the book Linchpin.
Some 300 years later we moved into the Information Age where jobs that required logical, linear and left-brain capabilities thrived. Employees were encouraged to think and do. Lawyers, accountants and even safety professionals did well in their ability to manage rules, play with numbers and reports.
As Daniel Pink says in A Whole New Mind, “the knowledge worker has been the well-educated manipulator of information and deployer of expertise.”
Yet, accountants and even lawyers are finding that their computer-like tasks of creating or sifting through information to create documents can be done much cheaply by contractors in India and the Philippines. Any automated jobs that a computer can perform, no longer have much currency in this new work economy. It’s not enough to be able to fill out a tax return or the requirements for a legal document.
Likewise, in the past, the role of the safety professional was collecting hazard and associated risk data, analysing it and determining corrective action. Then, developing and maintaining the safety management system, while creating safety documents and training materials to educate others to keep safe.
In this new world, we’re moving away from left-brain centric jobs to more right-brain focused empathetic, innovative and expressive capabilities. The traditional role of the safety professional is not enough, new right-brain skills are required. We’re charging full steam ahead into the Conceptual Age.
The New Safety Leaders
READ MORE HERE: http://www.digicast.com.au/blog/bid/101103/The-Future-for-the-Safety-Professional
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