There has been quite a lot of discussion recently (on LinkedIn particularly) about some stuff that I thought we’d mostly kind of moved on from – zero harm, counting injury metrics and the like.
I would like to believe we are a bit more sophisticated than that and when somebody threw one of my quotes back at me from Challenging the Safety Quo this week, I thought it might be worth sharing it to see if we could lift the conversations back up a bit.
This is not about making it hard for people to understand. But my view is that you only get to easily understandable outcomes by navigating through the complexity, not by trying a simplification short cut.
Let me know your thoughts.
There is a need to make a paradigm shift from safety as a thing we do, to safety as a multi-faceted concept. From something fixed and pre-determined to something that is flexible, subject to interpretation and context-specific. From something known to something worth exploring.
As ever, subscribe for more random musings.
This is the issue exactly! Far too many people are trying to put things onto “automatic” and skimming the surface to avoid having to think things through (and genuinely understand them) – and shift the responsibilities further down the line, then have the audacity to refer to themselves as “leaders” when things go pear-shaped! Like so many other things in life, you get out of it exactly what you are willing to put into it. There’s definitely a LOT more complex psychology in the way of making sense of risk and managing it sensible.
Note: the Regulator also plays an important role in making risk management understandable, practical and relevant. As long as they sit in a perspective of “all care and no responsibility”with 20/20 hindsight and quick to wag their finger at people when something goes wrong, they continue to be part of the PROBLEM rather than offering genuine solutions.
I can’t help but feel that the regulatory context around workplace safety is a major contributor to the problem / challenge that you highlight Craig. When we try and mechanise something as complex as safety, by breaking it into “component parts” that should work together as a system, I feel that we can lose sight of the real world complexity – that ideally we need to try to understand. But, if we need a regulatory threat to drive workplace leaders who might otherwise not value the wellbeing of their employees, then I struggle to see another way to avoid that “simplifying” problem.
Is this at the intersection of “real world practicality vs theory” ?