Every profession and occupation has its weird stories, the “you wouldn’t believe it” stories. Occupational health and safety (OHS) is no different. There are stories of a degloved penis, complications from piercings in private places or chemical burns on private parts that reinforce the important of washing hands thoroughly after touching chemicals. Such stories can be…
[This article from 2015 was previously password-protected and is now available to all] Recently a couple of media outlets referred to a report produced by Citi into workplace safety issues related to the top 100 companies on the Australian stock exchange. The report, “Safety Spotlight: ASX100 Companies & More” (not available online), provides a useful…
The Safety Institute’s National Convention was given a youthful injection this morning by the presentation of Dr Jason Fox (pictured below, with beard). He challenged our thinking and our occupational health and safety (OHS) future, even though the sound quality was not as good as it could be leading to some of his words being missed.
One of the most visible changes in this conference is the presence of women on the speaker panels. Each of these panels has illustrated and reinforced the need to change from the usually safety conference speakers, who are experts and important to listen to, away from the male-based (but changing) stereotype of the safety profession to which many speakers have referred. The SIA is trying to provide gender diversity but it, like so many other organisations, is not there yet in its transition from old to new and from past to future.
Panel member Jen Jackson (pictured) was not included as a speaker but she showed enough thoughtful contribution and personality that a presentation on safety communication would have been useful. She complemented the speakers and panel well and her response to her exposure to the safety profession would have generated a fresh external perspective.
I have written before that I think some speakers, experts and academics should be read rather than heard. Dr Fox is a vibrant speaker but twenty minutes, as Drew Rae has pointed out in a comments sections of this blog, does not allow nuance, discussion or debate. I have read some of Dr Fox’s GameChanger book and that media format allows for reflection and thought but try to see Dr Fox present on change first. He is a terrific multimedia knowledge package..
I can’t blog about the content of the second conference session as I need to listen back to it so as not to simply reiterate the talking points and audio grabs. But this session was lively and benefited from the mix of expertise from Andrew Hopkins, Jason Fox, Peter Baines, Siobhan Flores-Walsh and Jen Jackson.
Culture and safety culture are misunderstood and abused terms, according to Professor Andrew Hopkins speaking at the SIA Safety Convention in Sydney today. His perspective as a social scientist reinforces many of the speakers on disruption at yesterday’s sessions. If culture is the characteristic of individuals, culture is transferable or portable outside the workplace but…
What do you do when the first speaker at a safety conference makes a strong argument that occupational health and safety (OHS) activities are likely to be automated out of existence within twenty years? Dr Drew Rae opened the SIA Safety Convention with just such a statement. This was reinforced by Andrew Harris of Laing O’Rourke who provided video evidence of an artificial intelligence that could identify that a worker was not wearing the required personal protective equipment.
The Convention’s theme is disruption as this is one of the current business buzzwords and safety people think disruption is a positive experience. But it is possible that disruption will erode the OHS profession IF that profession continues handling its knowledge and supporting its members in the same way.
At the Eric Wigglesworth Memorial Lecture on 5 September, Dr David Borys further disrupted the OHS profession by questioning its knowledge base and although an academic himself and a major participant in the Safety Institute of Australia’s Body of Knowledge, advocated a Body of Evidence rather than a Body of Knowledge. What this also did was cut across the core structure of the SIA which is wrapped around academic education. Borys was very disruptive in a polite way.
The first session of this conference confirms the understanding that the best safety thinking comes from outside the safety profession. The future of the safety profession will come from how the safety profession responds to change and several speakers have mentioned extinction.
It’s a good start to this conference.
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is usually taught around various safety theories that can include pyramids, icebergs, dominoes, cheese and damaging energy. All of these theories were useful at some point in time to identify a new perspective, to counter an ideology or to explain why people cock-up. But which OHS theory has stood the…
Recently SafetyAtWorkBlog reviewed a safety book of terrific content but poor presentation. Last week I received an Australian book which presented different issues. “Risky Conversations – The Law, Social Psychology and Risk” has been written by Dr Robert Long, lawyer Greg Smith and consultant Craig Ashhurst and is the fifth in a series of books about risk. The title is accurate as the book is essentially a transcript of conversations between the authors but reading is complicated by videos of these conversations also being available on-line through a password available to purchasers of the book. The authors seem to have tried to do too much with the information they have.
Format and Marketing
Freelance writers in this new world of computer technology and social media are advised to maximise their media opportunities when attending a conference or interviewing someone. An interview can be recorded for its video and its audio. The interview could be photographed and the audio could be transcribed. All of these formats can come from a single interview. It seems that Long, Smith and Ashhurst have followed these opportunities by writing a book and producing videos of a three-way conversation recorded over several days but why offer both media formats to the book’s purchasers, when the information is the same? Why incur the cost of videoing a conversation that could have been conducted over a teleconference?
One reason may be that Long is much in demand as a speaker at conferences and an adviser to companies that are looking for a fresh way to look at safety management, and he cannot be everywhere. Andrew Hopkins undertook a similar option when he partnered with FutureMedia in the wake of his successful book on the Longford disaster.
The package of information may be confusing but is the content of the book any good? Reading transcripts can be difficult, even edited and cleaned transcripts as are found in this book. Interview transcripts are usually easy because there are only two voices, including the interviewer, the thread of the conversation is clear and the format is familiar. This book’s transcripts are more difficult to follow even though there is a good amount of facilitation and the conversation diversions are minimised. The book hopes to get its own tone after a while but never seems to establish its own personality.
The information in the videos is a little easier to follow as the three voices are represented visually. The viewer hears the three personalities and accepts the three perspectives. The book tries to unify or harmonise the voices, or perhaps it is the mind of the readers that does this, but reading the book requires a great deal of attention.
The previous safety book referenced above, written by Carsten Busch, had an enormous amount of footnotes and references. The level of detail was appreciated but the book format did not seem to suit it. Long, Smith & Ashhurst prefer annotations to footnotes and this book reads better for it. The annotations sometimes explain a concept where an explanation in the conversations would have interrupted the flow. Sometimes they include hyperlinks for more information. These are not quite text boxes but they are reminiscent of the boxes used so successfully in the Dummies series, though without the bomb symbols and thumbs-up. Annotations allow for the reader to leave reading these until chapter ends or the whole book.
Another advantage is the format required for annotations also leaves plenty of space for the reader to include their own annotations.
Wickedity?
Sometimes the book sounds like a panel discussion of three academics who are very enthusiastic about the topic. And it is easy to have this wash over the reader. But annotations help pull this back to attention. For instance, Long encourages Ashhurst to talk about “Wicked Problems”, the apparent topic of Ashhurst’s PhD. The annotation provides a brief explanation:
“The idea of ‘wickedity’ and ’emergence’ are critical concepts for understanding dialectic and paradox in tackling risk.
The very act of seeking certainty and control by fallible people for things that are uncertain sets the scene for fascinating interacts between the known and the unknown.” (page 14)
Wickedity may be a new and useful concept but the outline is not helped by creating doubt in the reader’s capability by using a verb – interact – as a noun. This forces the reader to reread the sentence to interpret something that should have been pretty clear on the first read through.
One paper that mentions wickedity reports that
“Rittel and Webber (1973) introduced the notion of wicked problems in the context of urban planning where such issues as safety, aesthetics and ease of movement within a given space represent just a few of the more intractable and unique daily challenges facing urban planners.”
The application of concepts from one discipline to another is a major tool of the occupational health and safety consultant and can provide new understandings but wickedity, even as it is expanded upon later in the book, seems to be short hand for multifactorial considerations. The concept is not new but the shortcut is.
Is it any good?
This article has not discussed the content of the book as much as was intended. Partly this is because the book covers so many interesting topics. Partly it is because so many of the conversations seem to require a good knowledge of the books that have come before.
One of the options for purchasing this book is as part of a package of five books and this is an attractive option for those coming to Long’s work for the first time. In some ways this book is like a favourite trilogy. You read each book wanting the next and when the next one comes, you want the pleasure of reading the first book again. Risky Conversations took me back to the first book which still holds the revelations about risk that the current book discusses.
Sometimes articles based on books reveal a great deal of content and identify the dominant themes. I have struggled with this article because while reading the book I felt like I was intruding on a discussion of peers or a study group. The discussion is intriguing but I was from listening from outside the circle or even listening in at the window. Perhaps it has been too long since I studied and immersed myself in the academic rather than working in the real world of applying safety, selling safety and being as creative as I can within the organisational structures I work within.
Rob Long, especially, needs to keep communicating his ideas and this book is a great addition to anyone’s safety library. By including other voices in this book, he is showing that others have embraced his thoughts and are pushing them in new directions, sometimes bizarre ones. His books deserve careful consideration or, even better, to generate discussions. It seems his thoughts demand explanation, refinement, expansion and challenge. In a way this is reflected in Risky Conversations.