• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

SafetyRisk.net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE
    • Slogans
      • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
      • When Slogans Don’t Work
      • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
      • BIGGEST COLLECTION of WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
      • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
      • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
      • Safety Acronyms
      • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
      • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
      • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
      • Safety Slogans List
      • Road Safety Slogans 2023
      • How to write your own safety slogans
      • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
      • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
      • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
      • Safety Slogans for Work
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • Free Hotel and Resort Risk Management Checklist
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • Social Psychology Of Risk
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Dr Long Posts
    • ALL POSTS
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no Hierarchy of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • THEMES
    • Psychosocial Safety
    • Resiliencing
    • Risk Myths
    • Safety Myths
    • Safety Culture Silences
    • Safety Culture
    • Psychological Health and Safety
    • Zero Harm
    • Due Diligence
  • Free Learning
    • Introduction to SPoR – Free
    • FREE RISK and SAFETY EBOOKS
    • FREE ebook – Guidance for the beginning OHS professional
    • Free EBook – Effective Safety Management Systems
    • Free EBook – Lessons I Have Learnt
  • Psychosocial Safety
    • What is Psychosocial Safety
    • Psychological Safety
      • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
      • Managing psychosocial hazards at work
      • Psychological Safety – has it become the next Maslow’s hammer?
      • What is Psychosocial Safety
      • Psychological Safety Slogans and Quotes
      • What is Psychological Safety?
      • Understanding Psychological Terminology
      • Psycho-Social and Socio-Psychological, What’s the Difference?
      • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
      • It’s not weird – it’s a psychological safety initiative!
You are here: Home / critical thinking / The Seduction of Templates, Set and Forget

The Seduction of Templates, Set and Forget

September 10, 2021 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

The Seduction of Templates, Set and Forget

imageImage Source

One of the favourite activities of Safety is downloading and sharing templates. This is promoted by the idea that paperwork is an end in itself. Once the paperwork is completed in comes ‘set and forget’, nothing to worry about except the next version updates!

One of the downsides of downloading templates is the fear of not getting risk assessment right. This makes the user reliant on the designer of the template and teaches the user/safety person that their own experience, intuition and competence is not good enough.

I was speaking to a highly experienced safety person yesterday who had been indoctrinated with this Mentalitie. We were working through the iCue Engagement process (https://safetyrisk.net/icue-diagnostic-what-is-your-risk-icue/ ) that essentially starts with a blank page, and it became clear that one of the first things he had to unlearn was this mythology that heaps of detail in analysis makes for good safety. The opposite is the case. The other thing we had to tackle was this deep lack of confidence that template-thinking infuses into safety people.

It is so hard to let go and trust your own competence, when you have been indoctrinated by an industry that tells you some form designed by an engineer/technicist is the ‘gold standard’.

So, we chatted for an hour or so and as part of the conversation I listed all the omissions from the typical iCam investigation (https://safetyrisk.net/deconstructing-icam-useful-or-useless/ ). We discussed the bias of the iCam method (https://safetyrisk.net/the-bias-of-method-design-in-risk/ ) that had been made ‘orthodox’ in his organization.

This is what safety does. It grabs some flawed method and makes it ‘orthodox’, teaching the user that their own intelligence, intuition, capabilities and experience are not good enough.

All this template mythology collective dumbs down the industry more deeply, from a base of grow miseducation.

The more this acceptance of this kind of deemed ‘orthodoxy’, the less the user thinks critically, improves perception, insight and discovery. And if it ever goes wrong and it goes to court, most often all this safety junk’ will be used against you (https://vimeo.com/162034157). There is no regulatory requirement that any particular method of risk assessment is ‘orthodox’.

But it is so hard for Safety to ditch deemed orthodoxy in non-compliance, even though what has been made orthodox is completely useless.

Isn’t it strange that this industry has emerged where the most important thing is that a process has been ‘done’ rather than a process has been done well? When it comes to court, Greg Smith will tell you that you would be better off with nothing than a bad process that will be used in evidence against you.

This is what Greg Smith talks about as ‘The Dangers of Safety Bureaucracy’ (https://novellus.solutions/podcast/the-dangers-of-safety-bureaucracy/ ).

Greg often talks about how this fixation with ‘paper systems’ has ‘actively undermined safety’.

And he’s right, created co-dependence on templates creates more problems than it solves. Here’s what it does:

  • It confirms the mythology that someone else can think better than you about risk.
  • That the template you have downloaded is free from design bias.
  • That the developer of the template design had a holistic worldview.
  • That the outcome of paperwork is the goal of risk assessment.
  • It distracts from the lived necessity of risky conversations.
  • It amplifies the engineering worldview focus on objects.
  • It frames a lack of trust in oneself.
  • It confirms the indoctrination of template thinking and cuts off any sense of learning.
  • It is not a defence in court indeed, it exposes one more deeply to prosecution.
  • It disconnects the user from purpose and process.
  • It makes for less safe workplaces.
  • It diminishes critical thinking indeed, fears critical thinking.
  • It reinforces the fact that safety is not a profession, that safety people cannot be trusted.
  • It normalizes engineering and safety ‘scientism’ as orthodox.
  • It hides and omits critical social psychological and cultural dimensions to risk. iCam is a classic example of such constructed blindness.

So, when we learn how to tackle risk though the simple tools of SPoR, we start with as little as possible, as simple matrix framed by Workspace, Headspace and Groupspace. That’s it!

The iCue Engagement process trusts the user, provided they can unlearn their safety indoctrination and can learn effective skills in listening, helping, establishing understanding, using open questions and visually mapping responses. Unfortunately, safety orthodoxy discourages all of these things. Much has to be unlearned but if you can unlearn the junk and jettison the template dependency, the outcomes are so empowering and make for excellent safety.

The outcome is far more valid and helpful than any checkbox system. It enables real time in-situ critical thinking that enables easy recall and testimony should things ever go ‘pear shaped’. And it eliminates all of the problems listed above that plague safety and actually make safety ineffective. This is what Mondi did and it works (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/ ). No need for bells and whistles, slogans and safety propaganda and someone else’s template! This is what everyone learns when they undertake the Introduction to SPoR module. The current module is oversubscribed, the next free module is offered at the start of 2022. You can register here: https://cllr.com.au/product/an-introduction-to-the-social-psychology-of-risk-unit-1-free-online-module/

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Rob
Dr Rob Long

Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Dr Rob Long

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

  • The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety - September 24, 2023
  • If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health - September 23, 2023
  • Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk - September 23, 2023
  • Embodied Enactivity in Safety - September 21, 2023
  • The Meaning of Myth in Risk - September 20, 2023
Dr Rob Long
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.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: critical thinking, Risk Assessment Templates, Robert Long Tagged With: icam, Mentalitie, paper safe, templates

Reader Interactions

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them belowCancel reply

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,511 other subscribers.

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Recent Comments

  • Matthew Thorne on The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • Rob Long on Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Matt Thorne on Myth Making and Why it Matters to Safety
  • Rob Long on What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Rob Long on Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Rosa Carrillo on Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Brent Charlton on Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Anonymous on What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Rob Long on Zero Hour part 6 Knowing Yourself
  • Rob Long on Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Rob Long on Book Launch – “Zero, The Great Safety Delusion” – Free Download
  • Rob long on Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote
  • Anonymous on Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote
  • Joseph D Zinobile on Book Launch – “Zero, The Great Safety Delusion” – Free Download
  • Jason Martell on Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Rob Long on Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Peter Collins on Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Rob Long on Zero Hour Part 4 – Zero and the Unconscious
  • Chiara on Zero Hour Part 4 – Zero and the Unconscious
  • Rob Long on Zero Hour Part 4 – Zero and the Unconscious

RECOMMENDED READING

viral post – iso 45003 and what it cannot do

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

Psychosocial Safety and Mental Health Series

If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health

Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk

7 Golden Rules that are NOT Golden

Why Zero Vision Can Never Tackle Mental Health

If Psychosocial Health Matters, Stop Hot Desking

Effective Strategies in Mental Health at Work

CLLR Newsletter July 2023

Playing With Mental Health in Safety is Dangerous

STOP ‘BREAKING’ PEOPLE! The notion of Psychological Safety

Learning to Learn Socially

More Posts from this Category

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Footer

Top Posts & Pages. Sad that most are so dumb but this is what safety luves

  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • BIGGEST COLLECTION of WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health
  • Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk
  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS, CHECKISTS, REGISTERS, TEMPLATES and APPS
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity
  • Free Risk Assessment Template in Excel Format

Recent Posts

  • The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health
  • Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk
  • Embodied Enactivity in Safety
  • The Meaning of Myth in Risk
  • Myth Making and Why it Matters to Safety
  • Icebreakers and Games that Safety Trainers Play
  • The Power of Safety Myths
  • What Do You Mean By Performance?
  • Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Podcast – Dr Rob Long With John Morlan and The Risk Matrix
  • What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Zero Hour part 6 Knowing Yourself
  • Free Videos, Podcasts and Books on Zero
  • Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote
  • If You’re Happy in Safety, Clap Your Hands
  • Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Zero Hour Part 5 – Surfacing the Unconscious
  • Zero Hour Part 4 – Zero and the Unconscious
  • Auditing the 7 Golden Rules of Zero, A Miserable Fail
  • 7 Golden Rules that are NOT Golden
  • The Non-Golden Rules for Leadership in Zero
  • Seven ‘Golden’ Rules for Zero and Yet No Ethic
  • Why Zero Vision Can Never Tackle Mental Health
  • Is this Your Safety?
  • SPoR Workshops Canberra 18-21 September
  • The Dominance of Zero as the ‘Common Denominator’ of Safety
  • Zero Hour Episode 3
  • Goal Setting and Zero
  • Zero as a Worldview
  • If Psychosocial Health Matters, Stop Hot Desking
  • Book Launch – “Zero, The Great Safety Delusion” – Free Download
  • Breach of Faith and Psycho-Social Risk
  • Zero Harm is Never Zero Harm
  • Why Would You Want to be a Safety “Geek’ or Hero?
  • The Mental Illness of Identifying as Safety
  • Zero Hour – Zero as a place holder
  • Zero Hour – Zero as a Philosophy
  • CARING ABOUT PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
  • Care is NOT a Factor and Yes, Your Model Matters
  • Care Ethics and the Ethics of Care, in Risk
  • FEAR AND CONTROL – Dialogue in a technological society
  • Of Course, Method Matters in Safety
  • Day 12 SPoR in Europe
  • Free Study Module Following-Leading in Risk August-September
  • Effective Strategies in Mental Health at Work
  • CLLR Newsletter July 2023
  • Playing With Mental Health in Safety is Dangerous
  • The Sacred and Profane, Rituals and Semiotics, A Lesson for Safety

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

Paralysis by Precaution

Desensitization, Statistics and the Psychic Numbing of Numerics

Amping it Up in Safety

EGO is not a dirty word

Wisdom, Discernment and an Ethic of Safety

Safety Holistically a Case for Change

Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

Report on SPoR Convention 2018

Biases and Perceptions in Safety

SEEK is not a Method

Thinking About Harm

Understanding Conscience and Safety

Not Much Like Safety…

We need to make sure this can never happen again

The Primacy of Play in Learning

Forecasting Safety

It’s Always About Paperwork

Safety Utopia as Abuse

How Groupthink Works

Social Psychology Of Risk Workshops

Fear of Being-in-the-World

The Fallible Factor and What to Do About It

The Social Psychology of Risk Event Exploration (Investigation) Knowledge

The Social Psychology of Distance-Safety

Flooding is Dangerous, and I don’t Mean the Water….

Think Different, Act Differently in Risk

Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk

The Real Barriers to Safety

By What Measure? Safety?

The Psychology of Blaming in Safety

None so Blind as Those That Don’t Want to See – Due Diligence

Organising to Manage Uncertainty in an Unpredictable World

Safety as Avoidance

Shopping for Safety

Tackling the Reality of Harm

Framing Risk Through Regulation

Ethics, Morality and an Ethic of Risk

Spin, Nonsense Language and Propaganda in Safety

Trinket Safety

I Just Don’t Know

More Posts from this Category

VIRAL POST – The Risk Matrix Myth

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,511 other subscribers.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY?

What is Psychological Safety at Work?


WHAT IS PSYCHOSOCIAL SAFETY