I received heaps of positive feedback about my Newsletter (https://safetyrisk.net/quartely-newsletter-spor-news-april-2025/ ) yesterday that featured the theme: Is AI Safe?

One executive leader stated that:

The worst example is the so called ‘predictive analytics’ tools. I have seen how these change Supervisors decision making. The data becomes more important to them than what they can see and feel. These tools distract those in safety advisor roles from spending time with people. They spend more time puzzling over dashboards and reports, wondering what it is good for x.

One of the strange characteristics of an industry not preparing people for the workplace is Safety, that thinks ‘telling’ is communication. Policing regulation and PPE have nothing to do with safety. Trying to predict human behaviours and human decision making is delusional. Predictive analytics is mythology.

Whenever I conduct a language audit in an organisation, whether with leaders or managers and, ask what they associate with the idea of safety, the last words I ever hear are about ‘listening’, ‘care’ and ‘learning’. This language is simply not associated with what people think safety is about. The data from the MiProfile survey (https://www.humandymensions.com/services-and-programs/miprofile/) with over 60,000 respondents confirms this.

When I look at the safety curriculum and what is popular at safety conferences it seems that the popularity of every trend, gimmick, fad, tech-bias and marketing ploy of safety is about everything except the basics. Fancy constructing a fad chock-a-block with slogans marketing ‘performance’ in safety as if there is something ‘different’. (HOP).

The basics of safety are: engaging with people, listening, caring and learning, not performance. Indeed, a focus on performance inhibits the basics in safety. The basics of risk and safety are facilitating conversations and listening to how others tackle risk. Of course, none of these basics are in the safety curriculum. How professional.

Just imagine a school teacher who thought that schools would be much better without children or the nurse who thought that hospitals would be better with out people.

A few years back I met a safety person in a manufacturing plant that had been there for 10 years and had never walked the floor. His office was high above the machines and making of products and he had a panopticon of vision. All he had to do was look at the surveillance cameras or look down from his window and he could ‘mark down’ or issue a warning through an SMS. When I suggested he might walk the floor and talk with people he was puzzled. He’d been doing a great job in safety for 10 years!

In SPoR, we get called upon all the time to deliver to organisations our foundational program Safety Observations and Conversations (https://www.humandymensions.com/services-and-programs/mirisc-workshop/). It seems crazy to have to teach people how to ask open questions, listen and discern meaning from people talking about the risks in their work. It seems crazy that people simply do not know how to facilitate a conversation. Even when I look at the use of the word ‘conversation’ in the safety sector, it’s NOT about conversation, its about telling. Even when I look at some of the books on the market, using the word ‘conversation’, they are not about conversation.

Books about the ‘art’ of conversation that focus on Technique (efficiency) are NOT about conversation. There is nothing efficient about a conversation indeed, a good conversation takes time and many skills in: patience, grace, sacrifice and suspending agenda in listening. Any books that focus on the ‘techniques’ of listening are often NOT about listening.

• Lecturing others is NOT dialogue.
• Telling is NOT listening.
• Hearing is NOT listening
• The beginning of listening is not Technique but orientation.

If you think safety is about reporting on injury rates or focusing on ‘performance’ you will never connect in conversation. If you call training ‘learning’ you will never ‘connect’ with anyone.

One of the best books I have read recently on leadership and conversation is by Aneta and Brian Darlington: Real Meeting, Leadership is Time and a Simple Cup of Coffee. You can order the book here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/real-meeting-a-book-on-being-in-leadership/

I have been in many organisations that hold endless meetings with no ‘Meeting’. If there is no i-thou in the meeting, then there’s no ‘Meeting’.

All of this stuff that’s floating about in workplaces about AI (https://safetyrisk.net/is-ai-safe-two-videos/), saving time and efficiency is anathema to the basics in conversation. I don’t care whether you have predictive analytics to the rafters or Bayesian babble to a broadcast box, if you cannot connect, listen and converse with people, what you are doing is a complete waste of energy for safety.

People are not equations. Relationships are not ‘factors’. Human decision m

aking has nothing to do with ‘conditional probabilities’ or ‘distributed algorithms’. Indeed, all you have to do is read Madsberg Sensemaking, The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm to ditch that mythology (https://archive.org/details/sensemakingpower0000mads).

As long as Safety continues to maintain these myths about Technique, Technology and performance, there will be no conversations or listening, just more myth making and faith in AI.