• 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
      • 500 OF THE BEST 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
    • 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
  • 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 / ALARP / The Triarchic Mind, Risk and Safety

The Triarchic Mind, Risk and Safety

January 31, 2021 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

The Triarchic Mind, Risk and Safety

clip_image002So much of how we think about decision making is centred on the brain. The common misconception is that the brain is a mainframe computer that directs actions. This is how binary reductionist thinking operates. The human will is centred here in the brain, that way ‘safety is a choice you make’. Unfortunately, that’s not how humans make decisions. The reductionist tradition is simply a construct attributed to a worldview founded in Descartes and Newton as Dekker so clearly illustrates in ‘Drift into Failure’

Human thinking is not just fast and slow, it is not binary and certainly not black and white. Norrtrander’s research in ‘The Use Illusion’ makes it clear that the unconscious travels at least 10 billion bits a second and that rational mind travels at 10 bits a second. Rational thought is slow and non-rational thought is superfast and then there is everything in-between. We know about this unconscious activity first hand through our dreams, daydreams and ideas that seem to rush into our mind without control. The mind is very different from the brain.

It seems somewhat scary to some that there are things beyond our control. If there is any word that dominates the safety industry it is this word ‘control’. What distresses safety most of all is when things happen and all the controls in place didn’t work. We would do well to take a ‘Brief Tour of Human Consciousness’ with Ramachandran.

The history of technology is also the history of complexity. We are now so interconnected that one trigger can create an avalanche of unintended by-products. Networks are so complicated that computers can now put the stock market in a tail spin in seconds and minutes before a human can intervene. How strange that business is driving for autonomous driving cars when the thing that drives chaos in the market is computers in automaticity. So in dissatisfaction with human automaticity we are simply shifting automaticity to computers. The fundamental agility of human judgment and decision making can never be overtaken by a computer unless that computer has all the autonomy of a human. Somewhat of a contradiction really.

Of course the real enemy of the self-driving car is the human. It seems the adaptability and unpredictability of human life is something that cannot be sustained by pure rule compliance (http://www.safetydifferently.com/rules-who-needs-them/). The challenge is, how can we give self-driving cars the mind of human decision making. How can we solve the apparent weakness of human automaticity by making computers more human and automatic???

All of the religions in the world understand that human decision making is much more than brain activity. All in some way acknowledge that humans have at least three centres of mind not one. I illustrate this often in my presentation on One Brain Three Minds (https://vimeo.com/106770292) and in the illustration attached.

One Brain Three Minds from Human Dymensions on Vimeo.

This idea of three or more centres of decision making was discussed recently in the New Scientist . Sternberg also talks about this in his educational work ‘The Triarchic Mind’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchic_theory_of_intelligence ).

The reality is that a host of non-rational factors influence decision making, especially how humans organize and through social arrangements. It seems at the time that many of these things ‘emerge’ and are beyond control. Mostly high risk things emerge in the workplace because safety is consumed with a binary and behaviourist attribution to the management of risk. The idea of human and social holism is completely missing in the discourse of the Safety industry. Culture is not understood as ‘the collective unconscious’ (Jung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious ) but rather as the assembly of rational decisions based on values, habits, systems and behaviours. If we want people to be more risk intelligent we have to step beyond this rationalist binary projection as an explanation as why people do what they do.

Humans are not just the sum of inputs and outputs. Decision making is not just something controlled in the brain. Human decision making is not just ‘fast and slow’. Humans are not just ‘predictably irrational’. Ethics is not just some black and white sifting process. Risk is a subjective process not a forensic process just like love, hope and faith are not something a computer can ever ‘feel’ nor something humans can ever measure.

Unfortunately for those seeking total control in safety, no amount of matrices, colours or mythical coloured calculators add one squat to how we make decisions about risk. If anything they simply endorse the absolute subjectivity of ALARP and due diligence. It is only the binary safety world that wishes that decision making was rational and mechanical, then it could get to zero.

Perhaps it would be good to leave the last comment to Bateson:

‘It seems that every important scientific advance provides tools which look to be just what the applied scientists and engineers had hoped for, and usually these gentry jump in without more ado. Their well-intentioned (but slightly greedy and slightly anxious) efforts usually do as much harm as good, serving at best to make conspicuous the next layer of problems, which must be understood before the applied scientists can be trusted not to do gross damage. Behind every scientific advance there is always a matrix, a mother lode of unknowns out of which the new partial answers have been chiseled. But the hungry, overpopulated, sick, ambitious, and competitive world will not wait, we are told, till more is known, but must rush in where angels fear to tread’. (Bateson and Bateson, 2005, ‘Angels Fear, Towards and epistemology of the Sacred’).

  • 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)

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual) - January 23, 2023
  • Foresight Blindness, Hindsight Bias and Risk - January 23, 2023
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk - January 23, 2023
  • What is SPoR? - January 23, 2023
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety - January 23, 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: ALARP, Robert Long, Social Psychology of Risk Tagged With: dekker, irrational, rational, triarchic mind

Reader Interactions

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below Cancel 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 7,495 other subscribers

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

SAFETY MYTHS SERIES

The Mythic Symbology of Safety

Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics

Safety Mythbusters

Don’t Be Emotional! Another Safety Myth

Tackling the Challenge of Heuristics in Safety

The Myth of Normal

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Linda McKendry on Posture Myths and Holistic Ergonomics
  • Rob long on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Matt Thorne on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Anonymous on Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Jason on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Admin on How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Rob Long on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Gustavo Saralegui on 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Rob long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Wynand on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • simon cassin on To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Rob Long on Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Matt Thorne on Free Online Workshops
  • Rob long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Brian Edwin Darlington on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Risk Diversity on Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Rob Long on No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Risk Culture Builder on No Good Reason to Follow Reason

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Footer

VIRAL POST – The Risk Matrix Myth

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

  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • 500 OF THE BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • Safety Acronyms
  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS, CHECKISTS, REGISTERS, TEMPLATES and APPS
  • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity

Recent Posts

  • Welcome to the Nightmare, Safety Creates its Own Minefield (as usual)
  • Foresight Blindness, Hindsight Bias and Risk
  • Getting the Balance Right in Tackling Risk
  • What is SPoR?
  • How Bias Inhibits Learning in Safety
  • Afraid to Let Go of What Doesn’t Work in Safety
  • When You Don’t Know What to do in Safety, Have Another Blitz!!!
  • Gloves and Glasses Compliance
  • A Case of Desensitisation – What Would You Do?
  • How to Leave the Safety Industry
  • The Mythic Symbology of Safety
  • Dark Waters, The True Story of DuPont and Zero
  • 400,000 Free Downloads
  • Am I stupid? I didn’t think of that…
  • Don’t Look Now Safety, Your Metaphor is Showing
  • Ratio Delusions and Heinrich’s Hoax
  • To Err is Human, You Better Believe It
  • Culture as a Wicked Problem, for Safety
  • Safety Leadership Training
  • Cultural Orientation in Risk
  • The Stanford Experiment and The Social Psychology of Risk
  • Objectivity, Audits and Attribution When Calculating Risk
  • Records of safety activities: evidence of safety or non-compliance?
  • Zero, The Seeking of Infinity
  • Safety Leadership Essentials
  • What Can Indiana Jones Tell Us About Culture
  • Safety as a Worldview
  • The Loathing of Limits
  • Culture Cannot be Framed Through Safety
  • Free Online Workshops
  • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
  • Book Launch – For the Love of Zero – in Portuguese
  • Advancing Backwards in Safety
  • The ‘Noise’ of Safety, Silence and Practicing of Mindfulness
  • All Things Must Pass in Risk
  • I’m just not that into safety anymore
  • Sticks and Stones and the Nonsense of Zero Harm
  • Courting Infallibility in Safety
  • Indicators of Risk
  • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
  • No Good Reason to Follow Reason
  • Just as Well Culture Doesn’t Listen to Safety
  • What Are the Benefits Of Social Psychology of Risk?
  • Short-Sighted Lenses by Safety
  • Is Safety the Empire of Non-Sense?
  • No Wonder Safety is Confused About Culture
  • Building High Performance Safety Cultures
  • Understanding iCue, a Visual, Verbal, Semiotic Method for Tackling Risk
  • On Culture and Safety
  • Focus on ‘Meeting’ people, not legislation – a path to risk maturity

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

An Social Ecology of Resilience

Beware of Hazardous ‘OINTMENT’

Toilet Roll Safety

Shock and Fear in Safety

What You Profess in Safety

Utopian Language and the Quest for Perfection in Safety

Looking Forward, Looking Back

People are not Rats–Moving Beyond Behaviour Based Safety

Safety, Ethics, SPoR and How to Foster the Abuse of Power

Zero ‘Arm

Social Psychology of Risk Doability

The Idealization of Humans and The Zero Delusion

I Wasn’t Thinking Mr Spock

Chronic Unease is Not Enough

Due Diligence Workshop Sydney 20,21 February 2019

Please Don’t Try to Fix Me – I’m Not a Machine

The Allure of Submission

Safety Holistically a Case for Change

Could Understanding Grey Be The Silver Bullet

Accidents Happen Because You Don’t Put Safety First

The Deficit Focus and Safety Balance

Centre for Leadership and Learning in Risk (CLLR)–Study Calendar

Zero as Morally Wicked

Risk vs Hazard vs Safety

Keep Discovering

Emotions, Bias and Heuristics in Risk

Paperwork and Usability in Tackling Risk

What’s Your Resilience Profile?

My thoughts during a walk in the Forests in Vienna

Amping it Up in Safety

iCue Diagnostic, What is Your Risk iCue?

Safety is the Wrong Anchor

Free Safety and Risk Lunch n Learn

Forecasting Safety

The Domino Delusion in Safety

The Village Effect

Hind-sight, Risk Savvy and the Unexpected

The Ethics of Safety

Risky Conversations, The Law, Social Psychology and Risk

The Trajectory of Zero Vision

More Posts from this Category

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 7,495 other subscribers

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY?

What is Psychological Safety at Work?