Originally posted on June 24, 2014 @ 11:22 AM

Spud Head Safety Diagnostics

What is a Spud Head? FIND OUT HERE

I was at a conference last week where people were presented with supposed diagnostics that could determine in someone was a risk taker. The general idea was to run people through the diagnostic tool, and weed out the risk takers. Or, use the diagnostic in the selection process to keep risk takers out of the business. Everyone one around was taking note, how could they get their hands on this excellent tool. I looked around and I seemed to be the only one cringing at this spud head message.

I have written about this before

https://safetyrisk.net/safety-eugenics-and-the-engineering-of-risk-aversion/

https://safetyrisk.net/risk-psychometrics-spin-and-snake-oil/

But there seems no shortage of people who don’t think about the trajectory of this kind of thinking.

I turned to the person beside me who seemed pretty keen on the idea and asked them, would Richard Branson get a job in this company, clearly no. You see, there are always by-products for goals and trade offs for absolutes, if we take risk takers out of organisations what are we left with? No imagination, no play, no learning, no creativity and what could be best described as a ‘spud head’ workforce. Safety eugenics is dangerous stuff and potato heads everywhere should smell it, name it and reject it. Dumbing down the workforce is no solution for managing risk.

The sign below was sent to me recently from a building site, someone thought the cause of accidents and incidents was stupidity. This is simplistic spud head thinking. Intelligence has little to do with how we make decisions. Otherwise people with high IQs would have less accidents. Until one develops a potato head understanding of fallibility and stops speaking spud head perfectionist language, this kind of attribution and projection of cause will simply get worse. Helped along by the perfectionism of zero that floods the workplace. When the person who puts up the sign makes their next mistake, does that mean they are stupid?

Of course when you don’t understand safety, have been dumbed down to ‘real risk’ so that people don’t think, they can’t discern risk because risk has been made evil. There is no learning without risk. Spud heads think anyone who takes a risk or makes a mistake is an idiot or stupid. This is all orthodox spud heads have left, they don’t understand human decision making, they don’t understand social psychology, they don’t understand human fallibility and think anyone who does something wrong or makes a mistake is simply an idiot. Wow, that will make a change culture, now everyone will be safe because we have kept the idiots off site. Unfortunately, such thinking is anti-human and delusional. If mistakes are the results of a lack of intelligence then just increase the training regime and mistakes will stop. This too is spud head ideology, this is not how fallible people make decisions.