Welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, in this podcast, I would like to make people aware of the power of slogans, how important it is for us to pay attention to these binary and absolute slogans that we are being exposed to each day, every day, and what is the unconscious power of these slope slogans? And let’s take a look at that, and I will share a story with you. So these binary and absolute slogans, you have to listen to them very, very carefully. They are meant to make us numb and dumb. Say it a few times and it becomes your belief, and watch it how, over the years, how these absolutes and binaries actually undermine the culture of an entire organization. Why I say that? Because anything that is binary or absolute is meant to be a path towards perfection, and humans are fallible, and fallibility and perfection are do not align with each other. Do not go very well with each other. So when you hear something binary or absolute, like, believe in chicken, believe in zero harm, let’s engineer a safer world. Customer is always right. Customer is God. We have to think about these things. What is the underlying message here? The underlying message is that E all of these slogans are very binary and absolute. So let’s, let’s look at the power of these slogans first, and what you realize is that they are intuitively very appealing. They are intuitively appealing because they resonate with our heart. They do not engage our rational mind in the way they are they are written in the way they are designed. And there is a very good reason for that. They are meant to take away all the critical thinking from us. So let’s just take one example which is so prevalent in the Risk and Safety world, which is context is everything. It’s an absolute slogan. It leaves no room for ambiguity whatsoever. It’s either Everything or Nothing. It’s a zero or a one context is everything. Here’s another one context drives behavior. It’s very one directional. It’s cohesive, and it turns us into puppets of a situation. And this is behaviorism in many ways that we have no mind, or we are born with a blank mind, and all that we have is an environment that can turn us in any direction. So context is everything, because through stimulus and response of the context, we become who we are. We are born with an absolute blank mind. There cannot be a more telling example of behaviorism. Then context is everything. It’s everything. Human agency has no role whatsoever. So you have to look at these slogans, and the power of these slogans really lies not so much in scientific explanations, but by going through some stories. So let me share one with you. I had a very interesting case some days ago when somebody was attending one of my workshops on human judgment and decision making. I was presenting some practical methods and tools and how to challenge the way we conduct audits, investigations, site visits as leaders, and how we can change some of that for the better. But it seems that my ideas did not go well for this person. He wrote to me later on with a sense of dismay and disapproval, saying that, well, my ideas were would not go very far, because I wasn’t really addressing the structural problems of the industry. And I’ll just quote what this person said. He said that people cannot do what they want to do. They do want their situations. Well, they they do what their situation drives them to do. So context drives behaviors. If our industry, our safety, wants change, it must begin by reshaping the structure that define these contexts, rather than expecting individuals to develop empathy or insight, the industry tends to reward those who confirm who save time and money. That’s how an owner justifies their existence. Few, if any, ship owners run ships. To make the world better, learning is tolerated only when it’s convenient for most survival and success depends on aligning with the structures in place. What does the system expect of me? What will I be rewarded for? What are my managers preoccupied with? There are few who can afford to reject these constraints and pursue a different path. Most of us adapt to the incentives before us, just enough to keep life going, unquote, so I’m just giving you the feedback that I received at the end of this series that I conducted on human decision making and risk and safety, in order to influence the way we conduct audits, investigations and ourselves. So I am trained in a discourse analysis, and I look at the discourse or the language very carefully, and the question that I tend to ask, or we tend to ask in all discourse analysis, is this, that in this discourse, in this language, in this narrative who has the power and who is made powerless. So as you listen to this feedback, one thing that becomes very, very clear is that situation, structure, context and system, they have the power and individuals and safety in particular is powerless, and we have accepted this for our lives, and we have become slaves to this slogan. Right, context is everything, structure is everything, situation is everything, and context drives behaviors. In fact, it’s very, very visible in this in this feedback, in this text. Now this person’s response helps us to understand the power of these binary and absolute slogans, yeah, so he has unconsciously attributed a lot of power towards he doesn’t know how much what he has done to himself, and reads the state of what I call learned helplessness, in a sense of hopelessness that pity me everyone. I’m the victim of the situation. There is nothing I can do in this situation, and because I have created a god in my mind that I call context and structure. And who am I to challenge an entity who I have created in my own mind as a god. Now we have to understand how we arrive at this stage by paying little attention to how human beings perceive the world and experience reality, right? So when we wake up, or when we are in a conscious mode, we are bombarded with millions of bits of information through our senses, through our five senses, right? But obviously, the conscious mind cannot cope with so much information. So this is the where the power of perception lies. We perceive that which actually already exists, the patterns that already exist or are congruent or aligned with our worldview. So we take in a lot of information from the outside, but we perceive it in the way that we want to. Some people call it confirmation bias, but it’s much more than that. But anyway, let’s stick to that for a sake of understanding. And so our perception of the world around us is basically drawing and forming what we already know through our past experiences. And that is sense making, in some ways, but it’s only one part of sense making once a worldview is formed, once we start to see the world in a particular way, it also continues to turn all our future experiences to what we already believe in. So so in a way, every action that we take, every word that we speak, every everything that we reject, we reject it because it does not confirm with our pre existing worldview or beliefs. And so this is a very interesting situation where we are trapped in this perception and action. Deadlock. Imagination becomes dead, learning becomes stagnant. All hope is lost. We accept our fate and we become something like lame ducks, right? So if someone challenges us and somebody exposes us to a different way of seeing the world, the first thing we do is we dismiss it or we mock it. But the interesting thing is that there is a living paradox here, because these people who actually advocate for context is everything, or context drives behavior, also advocate for something opposite, which is speaking up, stop the job, just culture, psychological safety, but they’re totally unconscious of the incongruence, or the mismatch between what they have started to believe in and what they are preaching. Speaking up, for example. So how do you speak up when you have created a God that you call context or industry or structure or system that cares so little for individuals in your own words, interesting.
So at one point I actually tried to introduce this person to an alternative view, I said. And but of course, it was taken as a romantic. Idea that I was making up things and I was being an idealist. So this is very interesting, because what is happening here? It’s a lifetime entrapment. No one can help us in this situation, apart from our own selves, because all change that we see is seen as a threat to our worldview. Anything that is different is seen as a threat to our existence, to our worldview. So it is a cognitive dissonance at its very, very best, and unfortunately, many of us have uncritically embraced these slogans, turned them into our realities and completely lost hope. And this is sad, because there is nothing more hopeless in life than losing hope. It is the single most dominant cause of suicides, neuros, psychosis, mental health, diseases that we face today. So my point is that please take note of the slogans that you are exposed to each day. Think Critically, because even in the darkest hours, life has meaning. We have to learn to love ourselves. We should never lose hope. We should keep asking questions. We should challenge our deepest assumptions, and we should remain very, very open to unlearning and learning, because we are not Pavlov’s dogs. We are human beings with unimagined depth of potential, and we should never forget that all change actually initiates from within us. So while it is true that context does influence behavior, does not drive behavior, there’s a big difference here. Context influences behavior, but we also influence the context in turn. So it’s a dialectical relationship. It’s a two way relationship, and understanding all this gives us the power to change the world, as much as the world holds the power to change us. And I think this is very, very important to understand. So the key message here is to be very careful of the words that we speak and the slogans that we come to believe, because these things have incredible amount of power, much more than we can imagine. So that was it. I hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast. I do many podcasts. Please do subscribe to our channel, embracing differences. We are on Spotify, as well as on YouTube. And if you find them helpful, sign up to one of our programs. Why not come along? I do so many events, so many courses, so many programs. I give away a lot of stuff for free if you are interested in learning. So I hope to see you someday in the future, either at one of our in person events or in on one of our online sessions. I There’s a lot you can see on LinkedIn. I’m quite active there, so throw in a question. Come along and we will learn with each other. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much for listening.