I have just finished three days of training delivering the most demanded program from SPoR in the past 25 years: The Safety Observations and Conversations Program. You can see a map of all the Human Dymensions services and programs available here: https://www.humandymensions.com/services-and-programs/
The training over the three days was to leading hands and safety people on large civil job.
Every safety person on the program had a passion to keep people safe and their greatest frustration was that this is NOT what Safety wants. Safety is consumed with paperwork, regulation, legislation, standards, audits, systems and knows next to nothing about people, perception, motivation, observation, culture and how to affect change in safety.
Every safety person who attended the program commented that they had never ever done a program like this before. They also commented that every concept and skill introduced was NOT taught in safety. This has been the case for the last 20 years that I have been delivering this program and continues to be so.
The Safety industry (Archetype) continues to be out of touch in all the basics and fundamentals of risk:
- How do humans make judgements and decisions?
- What is motivation?
- How does human perception work?
- Why is human observation so unreliable?
- What is the best way to communicate safety to others?
- What is the correlation between safety systems and behaviours?
- What happens when we ‘flood’ people with systems?
- Why do people take short cuts?
- Why are people non-compliant?
- What is risk all about?
- What can we do to better address the way we do safety?
The three days of training with people doing safety confirmed all the same old mythology we have known for 20 years:
- Paperwork doesn’t work
- Excessive systems flood people and create ‘tick and flick’
- Zero creates under-reporting and anti-learning
- Slogans don’t work
- Safety is not focused on people
- Safety has no idea what culture is
At one stage of the training one of the safety people showed me a phone-based risk assessment he had to do on all equipment they had on site. It was one of the best tick and flick forms I have ever seen to date. None of it had anything to do with safety and the document was so long and detailed that no-one on the job were actually doing risk assessments. Everything about the safety management system was largely cosmetic and ineffective in creating safety.
As we learned from Greg Smith a long time ago being Papersafe makes nothing safer on site.
We also know from Rosa Carrillo’s research that this gap between safety people and Safety, alienates safety people in what they want to do: https://carrilloconsultants.com/product/voices-from-the-resistance/
Yet, despite all this, regardless of offering safety people something that works for free https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety-book-for-free-download/ Safety people seem to be most happy complaining about the systems they have to use that don’t work. Or, parade about slogans and new branding about doing the same old thing (performance, engineering and measurement) (eg. HOP, New View etc.)
What a strange situation. We don’t like what we have to do, complain all day about doing it but don’t want an alternative! Or, make up some new branding and slogans to create the illusion that traditional safety is now something ‘different’.
Wash, rinse and repeat.
If you want to get off the machine cycle and learn a new method in how to better tackle risk, you can find out more by writing here: admin@spor.com.au
Prof. Robert Long
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