The best way to make dollars in safety is to tell the industry what it wants to hear, then call it ‘thought leadership’ (https://ehscongress.com/#About) then mix, rinse and serve up the same old stuff again. Such is the safety code (https://safetyrisk.net/deciphering-safety-code/).
It’s so amusing to see the regurgitation of statistics as ‘thought leading’, injury rates as ‘thought leading’, Behaviourism and Structuralism as ‘thought leadership’, and ‘different’ that is no different (https://safetyrisk.net/the-safety-and-new-view-debate/).
Nothing in any of this so called ‘thought leading’ is innovative, new, creative or different. There is no proposal to DO (methods) anything remotely close to any move away from zero, systems and Behaviourism. All of this is a great recipe for more safety obesity on the same diet masqueraded through spin and appalling definitions of culture (https://safetyrisk.net/category/safety-culture-silences/ ).
Let’s just take one example, the proposition that ‘structure creates culture’. The opposite is the case, as is so often in safety propaganda and safety code. Culture transcends any notion of structure indeed, if anything, any structure or system is a sub-set of culture. When your world is too small, just make your thesis fit your paradigm.
The thesis that structure creates culture (https://safetyrisk.net/culture-about-much-more-than-structure/) flies in the face of any thinking about: chaos, wickedity, randomness, ecological reality and fallibility. Framing an understanding of culture through the lens of organisational theory or sociological structuralism, is a perfect storm to create an overburdened safety industry with more systems, more paperwork, more bureaucracy, more behaviourism and greater centralisation.
The last way we should ever think of culture is through the lens of safety, safety events or safety history. Such an approach makes culture an attribute of a system, which it is not. The same results from the puerile and amateurish adoption of the nonsense mantra ‘what we do around here’.
Organising is a sub-set of culture not its driving force. Such a thesis ignores creative and innovative thinking about culture that includes understanding of the Semiosphere (Lotman), The Collective Unconscious (Jung), Ecological meaning (Bateson), Transdisciplinarity (Ashhurst) and Wickedity (Rittel and Webber).
Just because we would like the proposition of culture to fit the small worldview of safety, doesn’t make it so.
The proposal that ‘structure creates culture’ is non-visionary, more of the same and NOT thought leadership.
If anything, to be innovative, creative and different in risk is to move away from such propositions. If that is of interest then the free Introduction to SPoR will be of interest (https://safetyrisk.net/introduction-to-spor-free/ ).