For some time, it seems the formula for selling to Safety is making it binary. Make it 1 and 2, fast and slow or WAI/WAD. What is this attraction to the black/white, good/bad, light/dark and either/or formula that is so attractive to safety?

The first thing that comes to mind is, it’s simple. You don’t need some sophisticated form of research, study or intelligence to be fed a story of the good vs bad. This starts with fairy tales that are read to children as young as 6 months old. And, all of these fairy tales have the same formula of the good vs bad, the hero myth and a black vs white understanding of power. The story line is not complex and feeds the need for wanting the righteous to vanquish and succeed. This was explored in detail by Bruno Bettelheim in his important book The Uses of Enchantment in 1976. You can read Bettelheim’s book here: https://archive.org/details/usesofenchantmen00brun

Fairy tales play an important part in how we shape the beliefs of children about moral meaning. But that’s what they are, fairy tales. The same formula makes for hit movies like Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Matrix, good vs evil sells. It’s easy, it’s just the blue pill or the red pill.

In the scope of text, fairy tales are on the far right next to mis-information, propaganda and social media. We use this scope of text in SPoR to better understand what source of text we are ‘reading’.

Once we leave childhood, we learn quickly that the world is not like fairy tales. The righteous don’t win, and sometimes the things of evil succeed. We learn in High School how to deconstruct these many forms of text to understand their meaning. We do this in High School to teach children to be discerning and think critically about text. We learn that binary opposition is a linguistic and Poetic construct.

In High School we learn about belief, non-belief, faith, agnosticism, gnosis and atheism. Hmmm, no binary there.

But somehow it seems to get lost when one enters the safety industry.

It seems in safety we return back to fairy tales, jettison discernment and fall in line for anything that promotes a binary narrative. The classic is the belief in Zero ideology. The mantra for the safety industry globally is zero (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/). There can be nothing more binary, its either zero or one. Afterall, how many injuries do you want today? That question is a question of binary opposition that we should have ditched at childhood. Hey but look, safety is a profession.

No wonder when someone came out and told the safety industry there was now safety 1 and safety 2, the industry bought the scam, hook, line and sinker.

Then once the bandwagon was created, on jumped safety differently, resilience engineering (now rejected), new view and now HOP. But nothing changed in philosophy, nothing changed in methodology and there were no ‘new’ methods. The bandwagon was a collection of slogans offering a new discourse for traditional safety. Out the door went BBS and in came the ‘new view’ that had the same old view as before but with re-framed language.

One of the reasons why this trend has been attractive, is because it is binary. Old safety 1 was stereotyped as evil and safety 2 had become the new ‘good’. Work-as-imagined (WAI) was now the bad and work-as-done (WAD) was defined as the new good. So, the binary conversation now goes like this:

‘Hey I’m safety 2’… ‘I’m doing HOP safety’.

‘What does that mean?’ ‘Isn’t the P in HOP about performance?’ ‘How is that different that S1, that was about performance?’

‘ah, yes, but HOP doesn’t blame’ … ‘blame fixes nothing’

‘Really? What do you do in an incident investigation?’

‘We don’t do those, we do pre-accident investigations’

‘Really? So, your employer and regulator are happy with that?’

Conversation ends.

In the real world of risk, there is no binary black and white and, when things go wrong and one goes to court, there is no black and white there either. Indeed, in the Regulation and the Safety Act there’s no binary black and white either, its ALARP and Due Diligence.

In the real world, there’s no binary, fast or slow, there’s a myriad of in-betweens. It’s not black and white, it’s mostly grey, where one needs all those skills of discernment one was taught in High School. There is no S1 and S2 in safety, that’s just a concocted scam to create belief in whatever S2 is selling.

Binary opposition thinking is a con (https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/680ee38aead7f.pdf). And it’s a particular con that works best in Western societies, in Eastern philosophy there is little attraction to binary opposition. There’s no one god vs no god but, 3000 gods!

In SPoR, we are suspicious (Ricoeur) of anything marketed as binary. We learn to transcend the seduction of the binary in dialectic (Buber, Kierkegaard, Ellul etc).

When one learns to tackle the dialectic between binary oppositions, one learns to live in the in-between. In SPoR, we jettison the myths of fast/slow, S1/S2 and understand that risk is a wicked problem, that cannot be tamed or squeezed into a binary construct. We also learn to live between the objective and subjective. This brings a greater maturity and wisdom in thinking that makes decision making situational, diverse and contextual. Such a disposition is challenging and far from easy indeed, it’s an extremely difficult place to reside when the binary attraction is so simple and easy.

This is why in SPoR, we seek a Transdisciplinary perspective on things. We give value to philosophies that don’t just conform to Western notions of philosophy still anchored to binary thinking.

In dialectic and Transdisciplinarity we learn that hybrid thinking (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381283686_Neutrosophy_Transcends_Binary_Oppositions_in_Mythology_and_Folklore) is valid, wise and helpful. This results in methods that help hybrid and dialectical thinking, methods and conversation.

If you want to know more about this way of tackling risk in a positive, constructive and practical way, you can write here: admin@spor.com.au