The Risks of Experience vs Inexperience in Safety

Sometimes it’s not best to have the most experienced person or group on the job and at other times it’s not best to have the least experienced person or group on the job. This is the quandary we are faced by social context, learned over-confidence, lack of knowledge and experience and, hubris-desensitization learned by constant repetition of the same task.

It is unwise to generalise about who is best for a job without first knowing the social psychological condition of the group or person. Undertaking work is neither neutral or objective. A highly experienced worker or group that have become desensitized to risk can in fact be riskier than an inexperienced person or group who are more psychologically anxious about what they don’t know.

You can’t know who is best for the job unless you know the person or group and have some expertise in social psychology to help determine the nature of risk. You certainly don’t get such knowledge from engineering or the safety curriculum. Both of these groups are highly inexperienced when it comes to analysing risk, and this can be dangerous. Both groups have no education in anything to do with the social psychology of risk (https://safetyrisk.net/engaging-learning-in-spor/ ).

It doesn’t matter how much paperwork, app checklist or iAuditor you fill out, none of it can tell you if the participant or group is desensitized to it. None of it can tell you the social-psychological condition of the worker or group.

It doesn’t matter how much you repeat the word ‘zero’ or ‘professional’, without skills needed to engage with people, evaluate their social-psychological condition, you simply won’t know where the greatest risk is. None of this is in any safety curriculum globally.

The foundation of SPoR is to equip people in risk and safety with the skills, knowledge and experience to best evaluate who is best for the job. How can you provide safety advice if you can’t discern where the risk is?

Understanding the social-psychological condition of a worker or group can only be understood through extensive education in visual and verbal learning. Visual and verbal learning involves no paperwork. This includes extensive un-learning of trust in paper systems to manage risk. SPoR provides new and more effective methods (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/spor-and-semiotics/) for tackling risk than the naïve idea that risk is managed through paperwork and checklists.

No-one who does traditional safety can explain to you how a checklist improves sensitivity to risk or in fact can desensitise people to risk. Constant checklisting actually drives the opposite of what is desired and this is amplified in the Minds of those most experienced in their work. Here are some straight facts about what currently happens in safety.

• No amount of traditional safety can prove safety (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHl8JZtNG2o).
• No amount of paper-safety can demonstrate if workers understand the risk or are desensitized to risk (https://www.amazon.com.au/Paper-Safe-triumph-bureaucracy-management-ebook/dp/B07HVRZY8C).
• No amount of counting injury rates, policing PPE or safety meetings can demonstrate if workers understand the risk associated with their work and how to manage them (https://safetyrisk.net/whats-the-alternative-to-traditional-safety-spor/).
• No amount of analysing psychosocial hazards helps one scrap in tackling the foundational ideologies that drive abuse, dysfunctional relationships, bullying, power abuse, psychological game playing, sexual abuse or social psychological factors that drive harm.
• There is no connection between the comprehension of risk and the repetition of paperwork.
• No amount of rejuggling paperwork through useability mapping (https://safetyrisk.net/paperwork-and-usability-in-tackling-risk/) makes a scrap of difference to the comprehension of risk. Re-designing paperwork is just more paperwork-approach to risk.

The best way to tackle these challenges is through knowing workers and having skills in engagement and knowledge to understand the social-psychological condition of the working group. In SPoR, we help advisors and managers in risk through education in engagement skills and methods that help get to the foundation of issues. Here is what happens in a typical SPoR journey.

1. We usually start by teaching people how to undertake iCue listening. This is learned through an understanding of Workspace, Headspace and Groupspace.
2. Once people understand how the human person as Mind makes decisions (through One Brain Three Minds education) we help them move away from rationalist/behaviourist methods that project success onto the ineffectiveness of traditional safety methods.
3. This often happens by assessing current traditional safety methods and their effectiveness and, adding in better methods that create understanding about risk and the social-psychological condition of working groups.
4. At the same time, we help organisations jettison zero and any discourse built on the nonsense idea that safety is connected to injury rates.
5. We then jettison the idea that safety is about behaviours and systems and help people move to a more ecological understanding of the workplace and its dynamics. This includes skill development in engagement, listening, helping and professional ethics. By this stage people learn that SPoR works (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety-book-for-free-download/).
6. We do this by educating people in a realistic understanding of culture and the wicked problems of risk and learning. Improved cultural understanding improves the targeting and effectiveness of change.
7. We then upskill people to understand personhood, ethics, personality and enactment in risk through a range of methods that assist visual and verbal learning.
8. Once people learn to connect better with others, develop advanced skills in observation and understand the dynamics of the unconscious, they begin to feel the benefits of the journey in SPoR. This then drives a greater energy to learn and develop advanced skills in iCue engagement.
9. This process takes up to 2 years in time and includes a constant wrestling with the ineffectiveness of traditional safety systems and learning to integrate SPoR Methods into a new approach to safety and risk.
10. It is at this stage that people simply want to learn more and more from the SPoR curriculum (https://cllr.com.au/elearning/).

With this knowledge managers and advisors then begin to understand the challenges of risk and the trade-offs and by-products associated with the experience/knowledge and risk dynamic. This is when much greater insight is gained into the dialectic between experience, knowledge and risk and so by understanding social-psychological dynamics can improve safety in an organisation and on site by positive methods that work.

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Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

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PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.