In 2012 the passenger ship Costa Concordia sank off the coast of Italy, resulting in the death of 32 people. Amongst other things, the captain was criticised for his casual attitude towards formulating the ship’s voyage plan, sailing 0.5 miles too close to the coast, and ‘disregarding to properly consider the distance from the coast’. The captain was sentenced to 16 years in the prison. While the rest of the world (including leading experts in the industry) criticised the captain for navigating the safe too close to the islands. even five years after the accident when I met the captain in his hometown he maintained that this was a normal practice in the cruise industry. It was a powerful insight into the culture of the cruise industry. In this episode, we will discuss why culture is so often misunderstood within the risk and safety industry using this story. 1) what are normal practices and why do we need to understand them? 2) where are we today with our understanding of ‘normal practices’? 3) how a high-risk manoeuvre became a normal practice in the cruise industry? 4) what safety sciences won’t tell us about normal practices? 5) how can we uncover ‘normal practices’ within our organisations? Each of these questions will be addressed through stories and experiences that we can all relate with. This is the second in a series of episodes based on my recent book, ‘Are We Learning from Accidents?’. A previous video in this episode was focused on why people don’t speak up. The next few episodes will focus on: 1) collective sensemaking in a crisis, 2) the power of scapegoating (blame), 3) 3) how do human beings learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions. You can read a sample of my book here: https://nippinanand.com/ Read more about our work here: https://novellus.solutions/ and check out our future workshops here: https://novellus.solutions/events/
Hello. My name is Nippin. This is the second in a series of episodes based on my recent book Are We Learning from Accidents.
In this episode, we will discuss why culture is so often misunderstood within the risk and safety industry. To do that, we will take the story of the Costa Concordia.
In 2012 the passenger ship Costa Concordia sank off the coast of Italy, resulting in the death of 32 people, the captain was accused of sailing too close to the islands and sentenced into prison.
Using this story, we will discuss why our existing understanding of culture often rooted in psychology and focused on measurement, needs to be challenged, and how we can come to a more holistic and balanced view on culture.
The Costa Concordia was a ship of 114,000 gross tons, 13 deck high, 290 meters in length and eight meters in draft, owned by Costa crochet, a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, built in 2006 the ship could carry up to 3007 and 80 passengers and 1110 crew. At the time of the accident, the ship was in a regular route around the Mediterranean, from Civitavecchia to Savona, Marshalls, Barcelona, Palma, Cagliari, Palermo and back to Civitavecchia that seven ports in seven days.
On 13 january 2012 the Costa Concordia sailed out from Civitavecchia bound for Savona. About two hours after departure, the ship collided with La scol rocks of the Giglio islands of Tuscany, the contact with the rocks resulted in a 53 meters gash in the ship’s side, leading to progressive flooding and capsizing of the ship.
Within 48 hours of the accident, the company’s CEO issued a press statement. We cannot, unfortunately, deny human error. The company cannot be associated with this behavior. The captain took a decision on his own, which is contrary to our written and certified rules. This route was set correctly upon departure from Civitavecchia. The fact that the ship deviated from this route is solely due to a non approved and unauthorized maneuver, and which Costa crociere was not made aware of. The procedures implemented after the ship hit the rocks did not respect, in any way the strict rules, procedures and training we have given to our officers.
Coincidentally on the same day, a former ship captain and a safety expert appeared on television making the following statement. To hear talks of being 300 meters from dangerous rocks is very worrying. In my long career, I have never heard people talk about such situations in terms of meters. It’s always in terms of miles. So I do not understand how this can suffice as an argument. The weather was favorable, there was good visibility, and this was a familiar route. So it is very perplexing how an accident of this kind occurred. As with most maritime accidents, culpability and criminality were determined in the public view long before the formal accident investigation was concluded.
Amongst other things, the captain was criticised for his casual attitude towards formulating the ship’s voyage plan, sailing 0.5 miles too close to the coast, and ‘disregarding to properly consider the distance from the coast’.
In 2017 the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest criminal tribunal, sentenced Francesco schettino to 16 years in the prison. if there is One image of the accident that people can recall instantly, it would be the Kamikaze captain on navigating the ship too close to the islands. In the cruise industry, this maneuver is famously referred to as a sail past but to an outsider, it appears as a case of violation of safety rules in keeping the ship at a safe distance from the shore. What explains this mismatch? How can we understand it?
We asked Francisco tell us, what was your motivation to navigate close to Giglio islands? To this, he responded.
In general, we are performing a salute with a cruise line in reducing the speed, calling the manoeuvre operation, taking the bow thruster on the bridge, we slow down the engine, perform the salute at 5, 6, 7 knots maximum. This was not any kind of restricting navigation. This was simply a passage at 0.5 nautical miles from shore. It was not any special practice. We didn’t have time to lose, to slow down the engine to go very close to the land. This is the same passage that you can perform when you go from Savona to Barcelona and you pass at 0.4 nautical miles from shore, or even when you navigate at full speed in Copenhagen where you are at 0.2 [nautical miles] on each side from the land and you are in restricted water. This was not the practice that you perform.
Let’s say you pay tribute to the island or make the passengers happy, to offer an additional value to the cruise. Obviously even if you are passing by at 0.5 nautical miles still it’s interesting for the passengers to see that they are on the island; this was normal practice to pass close, but ‘close’ is relatively close, because we are talking here about 1000 metres away. Obviously, if we talk to a captain of a tanker of a very large crude carrier when they never see the land, even when I was an officer on a very large crude carrier, you have different parameters to establish the distance. When you are a cruise ship captain and on a daily basis you navigate through the Venice channel, the fjords in the South port, Ushuaia, Bega Channel. it was nothing so special just to make a course deviation on the waypoint at 0.5 nautical miles, from the a bathymetric of 10 metres from the land. So it was not difficult.
I reflected upon Francesco’s response over many months. when I had first listened to the captain his words almost felt like a grounded message. This is my identity, my world, and this is what I do, day in, day out. Why would you punish me for doing my work? How can you accuse me for existing? But there is a powerful expression here that I was emotionally and anthropologically drawn to. This was a normal practice.
While the world, including the leading industry and safety experts, are pointing their fingers at the captain for being negligent, five years later, the man is still convinced that he did nothing wrong by taking the ship close to the islands.
In this episode, we will examine the following questions,
Each of these questions will be addressed through stories and experiences that we can all relate with.
So what are normal practices and why do we need to understand them? I will start with a story from my time with Francisco Schettino. One evening, as France
sco and I were walking towards a restaurant, I asked him, What is the one thing you would wish for if you were spared imprisonment? I asked because he had indicated several times during the day that he might soon be sentenced to prison. To this, Francesco responded, I would like to go back on ship, even for one week or one month. It feels as if some lamp post fell on my head. It was totally unexpected. I can understand and fully accept if it happened in dense fog, when gusting, but this was just a normal day at sea.
Francesco’s words, which sound familiar to the risk and safety industry, as Charles Perrow wrote in his book four decades ago, accidents are normal. In fact, when you read an accident report which states, clear sky, moderate winds, good visibility, it is a metaphorical expression of a normal day at sea. In the risk and safety world, normal practices are often referred to as adaptations, improvisations, trade-offs, adjustments, deviation from rules and standards, and more generally the gap between documented processes and the realities of front-line work. Understanding and addressing those gaps is one step forward towards managing the risk.
Let’s begin with the foundation of safety. What are the most basic assumptions about human decision making and learning in safety that we take for granted and therefore never question?
Safety as a discipline is primarily a western idea. Regardless of all the advances we have seen, safety as a discipline has not moved beyond the Newtonian thinking and the symbolism of Christianity. More on this later, the basic philosophy of safety still remains embedded in one, a search for certainty and order through measurement. Two, avoidance of harm. Three, fear of sin and death. And four, brain as the location of human mind and the source of error. It is in the latter that we will begin to unpack and understand normal practices. Traditionally, safety points at the brain as a source of all decision making, brain as in the control tower of the body, brain as in a disembodied computer issuing commands to the body. But when we turn to leading thinkers in education and learning, we see a different view of the brain. In this TED Talk, Ken Robinson, one of the greatest educationalists of our times, says:
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.
And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
What Robinson referred to as people who live up in their heads is a typical image of disembodiment, the idea of a disembodied mind was originally based on the work of Rene Descartes, sometimes referred to as the father of modern philosophy, Descartes’ thesis, otherwise referred to as Cartesian Dualism, viewed the human brain as separate from the body, hence disembodied, even superior to the body and the brain equipped with the power to control the body. For Descartes, the body is a servant to the brain. The body follows the command issued by the brain. All life is lived in the brain, or rather, life becomes brain centric.
Some years ago, I ran a social experiment at my daughter’s school. I was invited to share my views on learning with a class of about two dozen nine year old. I started by asking them to give me five words of phrases that came to their mind when they thought of learning. In the image, Are the main themes that emerge from this exercise. You can see education, logic, expanding knowledge, big brain, common sense, knowledge, putting information in mind, expanding knowledge, education to prepare for the future, comprehending what is taught, using the things that are taught, reflecting on mistakes, my social experiments at the school revealed a powerful story nearly five centuries on, Descartes is still alive in our world. What came as a surprise to me was that such a brain centric view on learning begins so early in life, and for most of us, it continues through our lifetime.
Safety as an industry is no exception to this brain centric view of how human beings learn, unlearn and make decisions. that people use, reasoning, logic, information and they reflect on their choices before they make decision is the basis of safety management systems.
One only needs a quick glance at the questions and slogans of risk and safety to observe the power of brain centrism. For example, why did you not follow the procedures? Meaning a decision is made in awareness of a safety breach. Why did you take a turn so quickly? Meaning you must have a good reason. Be careful, meaning people are consciously being careless stay safe, meaning people decide that they will destroy themselves or the others. Lack of situational awareness, meaning lazy and complacent people turn off their awareness switch. An aware, careful, diligent, conscious, logical and reasonable person is the byproduct of Descartes. life is lived above the shoulders, turn your brain on and direct your body to obey the commands of the brain.
Is the brain really disembodied below the neck? this is a very misleading assumption, and it needs to be questioned. Human mind is NOT disembodied, the mind is embodied, and it has huge implications for us if we want to understand how people learn, unlearn, make decisions and what normal means to them.
The embodied Mind
The term embodied mind means that our whole body has its own mind, hence the term embodied mind, in other words, decision making is not restricted to the brain, our entire body participates in the process. Think of the butterflies in our stomach when we get upset, the increased pace and shallowness of our breath when we are overwhelmed, the sweat in our palms when we get nervous, the goosebumps on our arms when we are excited, the dilation of our pupils when we get angry, our facial and muscle contractions when we feel stressed, the tears in our eyes when we are full of sadness, raised grows in shocks and a surprise. Each part of our organism has its own mind, independent of our overall consciousness, thinking about how the mind functions based on topical studies in cognition and neurosciences brings a fundamental shift in our perception of how the human mind functions and how we as humans, learn, unlearn and make decisions. As Guy Claxton states so eloquently, the brain is not the control tower of our body. Instead, the brain works like a coordination warehouse. The mind is embodied. in social psychology of risk, we don’t speak of having a mind. We are our own minds.
In social psychology of risk, we use a model called one brain and three minds as a foundation to illustrate the embodied nature of the human mind. together the three modes of being or thinking, head, heart and gut represent the whole person, instead of the prevailing brain centric view of humans. as with all models and semiotics, these diagrams are subjective and will be interpreted in different ways. They also have limitations and need to be understood with regard to their purpose. The use of a speedometer is only helpful to communicate the speed of human decision making. Mind one in mind one we are in rational, logical and analytical mode.
Think of mind one as a state when we learn to follow the rules of the trade and slowly start to earn confidence and respect within our profession. when we follow a checklist, instruction or a procedure in order to carry out a particular task, we usually do it slowly and methodically. Decisions made in this mode are neither fast nor efficient. even simple, hand eye coordination when using a tool can take months or years of repetitive practice. mind two.
Mind two is about thinking heuristically, thinking that relies on learned shortcuts and practiced habits. This mind state is in the process of developing into automaticity. This kind of decision making is essential for humans in order for us to be fast and efficient. This is decision making based on patterns, trial and error and habits that have become infused, or rather embodied into our thinking through experience, and it is triggered by perception, experience or memory. Much of this type of decision making does not involve any rational choices or analytical thinking. It is quick and efficient.
Mind three. Mind three is about total automaticity, what Damasio states as non conscious decision making. In this state, one is unaware of the process of deciding, thinking or rational processing. This is often referred to as gut thinking or intuition, and it is commonly understood as being on autopilot, embodied learning. Learning is not a brain centric exercise. The entire body participates in the process of learning.
Consider learning to drive or an apprentice’s experience when entering into a trade. in the first few weeks and months, learning takes place in mind one the novice driver or an apprentice is slow, reading the rules, systematically, following the process and analyzing their movements in carrying out the demands of the role. Gradually, we move to a level of autonomy, automaticity and confidence, in which frequent consultation of rules and processes, both formal and informal, is not required anymore. The novice is now a beginner, slowly settling into their role, learning the tricks of the trade, finding their own balance, comfort level and risk tolerance through trial and error, watching others and learning from the social surroundings, and only occasionally, when encountering novel situations, returning to rules instructions and peer consultations. This is mind two. Finally, we come to mind three this is a super efficient, super fast mind, as Polanyi suggests. At this stage, the person feels and knows more than they can tell, because years of accumulated skills have become embodied within that person, both repetitive work and novel situations can be comfortably and efficiently managed with little effort in this mode of being. In fact, in most skilled professions, becoming efficient. In mind, three, is a requirement to be considered an expert in the trade. You can see why the captain sees sail pass as a normal practice while the rest of us are left shocked. The captain is operating in mind three, while we are making judgments by evaluating his decisions. In mind one. I will return to this soon.
A personal story of learning, unlearning and human fallibility, one of the challenges when I first took driving lessons in the UK was to unlearn the habits I had acquired in India. Those habits were neither good nor bad. They were simply not suited to the UK driving context. My first tutor, who I felt was a racist, kept reminding me to let go of my Indian habits. instead of the joy of learning, I experienced a sense of shame, guilt and fear during my lessons. I failed my driving test three times. When I discussed this issue with my wife, she was quick to suggest that I change instructor. My new instructor, Rob cooling was a joy. He was patient and non judgmental, and what I would now call open to fallibility.
I even left him a feedback note at the time of writing, nearly 12 years after I passed my test, it is still on his website. I did more than 30 hours with another driving school in Nottingham, and appeared for three tests only to realize that it was not working for me, went to the internet and read some reviews about Apple driving school Rob turned to be exactly the same as most people commented very friendly, patient and positive in. Rob’s unique style is that he gives you a lot of freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. He makes sure that you know your stuff well before you are ready for the big day. Just two lessons with Rob and I passed with four minors. I’d highly recommend Rob to anyone and everyone.
As I look back at my notes on Rob’s website, I’m overwhelmed by the emotions. this man had, the wisdom that I find lacking in many professional coaches, seasoned mentors, teachers and leaders. He worked with me, clearly felt my frustration and embraced my fallible being, which gave me back the confidence I had lost with my previous instructor. All this was helpful, not only in passing the test, but in thriving when driving a new environment. Despite spending so many hours with my previous instructor, I could come out of mind one slow, systematic, calculated combined with the fear of making mistakes and being reminded of my national habits. But in less than two hours, Rob encouraged me to experience the joy of driving as a whole person, connecting mind one, two and three. That is the essence of learning and flourishing when we find someone who embraces fallibility and our whole being.
Now this lived example illustrate what it takes to help people to learn and unlearn, especially when risk becomes part of their lived experiences, habits, heuristics and rituals. In other words, risk becomes a normal practice, all in a day’s work for a professional, this holistic, embodied approach to how human beings learn and make decisions is well documented in a range of studies in theology, mythology, analytical psychology, neurosciences, neurobiology, biology and evolutionary sciences. I have written about learning in my own book in much detail with lots of stories and examples.
The biologist Rupert Sheldrake sees learning and unlearning as a process of going from sensitization to habituation. That is mind one to mind three. when we are new to an environment or to the world as newborn babies, everything is exciting and arousing, as we perceive the world through our five senses. This is Mind one. gradually with time and through hit and trial, repetition and practice, failure and successes we become habituated to our environment. What was once novel and stimulating starts to penetrate into our bodies and becomes mundane and normal. Rituals, habits and heuristics are again examples of habituation. Sheldrakes work is a natural fit with embodied learning.
Embodied learning does not always follow a linear movement from mind one to two and then three. It works in other ways too, because we are essentially social beings. Much of our learning also occurs through mimicking. When we see our parents combing here, brushing their teeth or simply staring at us, we start to imitate their habits and gestures without involving our conscious minds. This kind of indirect learning is common in children. In fact, much of our learning happens through mimicking and mirroring. Importantly, this kind of learning is unconscious, meaning that we are not even aware that we are learning.
Finally, there is another level of learning, which Rupert Sheldrake refers to as morphic resonance. Carl Jung would call this the collective unconscious, and Thomas Fuchs would call it interaffectivity. In this mode, we don’t learn in a conscious mode, that is through education, instructions, supervision, or classroom training, or even through mimicking. Instead, we learn by inheriting the instincts and beliefs of our ancestors. Jung calls it collective unconscious beliefs, myths and symbols that we share without knowing across time and geographies in a contemporary sense, Sheldrake explains how we acquire habits from other members of our species, even beyond geographical or temporal boundaries. This would mean that if teenagers in New York have learned to type letters quickly on their cell phones, teens in Japan and elsewhere will also get better at those skills without even coming in contact with those teens in New York, my daughter does not need to travel from the UK to Japan to see how to get faster with using the tiny keyboard on her iPhone. If the habit is formed in Japan, eventually, kids of her age will also acquire the same habits. Habits once formed will find a way to spread and make their way in my body, because at an evolutionary level, I have a will to survive and flourish. Interestingly, even dogs, cats, birds and for that matter, all self organizing creatures can acquire habits from within their species, just like us, humans. That’s morphic resonance and the power of shared unconscious, and there is ample scientific evidence to make the point. beyond the materialist view of the world that conflates mind with brain, as in the mind lives in the brain and acts as the control tower of the body, Many scientists, including Thomas Fuchs, Mark Johnson, guy, Claxton, Ken Robinson, Peter Senge and others, have arrived at a similar conclusion, that the mind is not in the brain. The mind extends into the body and much beyond just like a magnetic field. Thomas Fuchs refers to it as inter affectivity, meaning that because mind is like a field, everything and everyone has an affect on us.
The idea of learning being embodied, should start to make intuitive sense. Cognition, thinking, paying attention and being constantly vigilant only works to an extent. There is a good reason that TED talks don’t last for any more than 20 minutes, and after a while, people stop paying attention to safety signs, thanks to embodied learning like what was once new, dangerous, stimulating, interesting or risky, both as individuals and at a group level, starts to become usual, mundane, boring and normal. What once aroused me, surprised me, excited me, irritated me, seemed difficult to learn with prolonged exposure and through familiarity and practice becomes manageable, internalized and normal in my body.
Biologically speaking, the risk or surprise becomes normal when it does not affect our homeostasis that is our breathing, blood pressure, heart rate, physiology, immune and the endocrine, none of our life processes are affected by the risk. If you drive on the busy roads of Chennai or Beijing, after a while, your homeostasis will adjust to the environment. Your body would have learned to cope with the traffic and chaos. the anxiety of the unknown and the unfamiliar gradually goes away once the risk is embodied. It is a biological need. Embodied learning explains why the captain felt so comfortable with sailing close to the island and called it a normal practice whilst you and I struggled to come to terms with his normality, learning and risk became embodied. The risk was neither in the brain nor in the conscious awareness. It was in the body of the captain. To say that the captain should have been more careful wouldn’t mean much. But this is not an excuse. It’s an explanation.
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Before we end this discussion, the embodied mind and one brain three mind model should not be confused with kahneman’s theory of system one and two, the Fast and Slow modes of thinking. What Kahneman proposes is a simple and dualist metaphor to illustrate how human beings make decisions based on the principles of behavioral economics and hedonic psychology. A metaphor is not a replacement for a conceptual model of how the human mind functions. It does not attempt to understand the mind body connection or the fact that the human body is itself a mind.
Moreover, kahnemans model excludes the idea of an intermediate, developing aspect of learning mind two, that connects the novice mind one and the expert mind three. The triarchic model avoids us falling into the trap of simplistic, linear and dualist metaphors of the human mind.
As a final word the three modes of decision making and learning should be seen as a model for discussion and not taken literally. The reality of decision making and learning is far more complicated and messier. The one brain three mind model, however, is a departure from the dominant brain centric view on learning and decision making. It serves to illustrate an important point that both learning and decision making are embodied, largely unconscious, habituated and not in control of the brain, and a considerable aspect of learning is our willingness to unlearn, relearn and learn.
Why is such a daring maneuver, sail-past considered a normal practice. When something is considered normal, usual or even okay by a group of people, it means that it is their worldview, their unconscious belief, or their culture. Culture means what people share unconsciously between them, without being aware that they actually do. to understand the shared unconscious beliefs of the cruise industry and how it arrived at this normal practice, We will use the culture cloud. Culture cloud is a framework used in social psychology of risk to understand and explain culture. The metaphor of cloud is used to illustrate that culture can be observed from the outside, but once you are inside the culture, we can only feel it and experience it, but we cannot measure it or touch it, just like the cloud, culture is always in turbulence, alive, always changing. It is a wicked problem, and there are no solutions or fixes, only understanding and tackling. using the culture cloud framework, we will examine the habits, the rituals, the behaviours, the history, the ethics, the metaphors, the artifacts and the slogans and symbols of the cruise industry, to find out how sail past became a normal practice, in other words, a shared unconscious belief of an entire industry. When we begin to understand normal practices more holistically and within an ecosystem, we have a much better chance to tackle them.
Let us once again go back to the Costa Concordia at the start of the voyage. A week before the accident, the ship’s Maitre had approached the captain, saying, given that I am due to sign off, I would be grateful if you could pass by Giglio for a sail past. This was the second time the maitre had made the request. The first time the weather had not been favorable, so the captain had refused. But on this occasion, the captain felt obliged to fulfill the expectations of the maitre. During our interview, the captain told me the Maitre was asking me to perform the maneuver. So I said, Okay, I will come to the bridge. It was kind of a reward, as this man was good. And also there was a former captain at giglio, so I thought, I will make happy, both of them, based on a second request from the same maitre, the captain had asked his second officer, have a look to see what speed we need to get out of here and approach Giglio. Let’s chart the route then. is half a mile, okay, Captain, there’s enough depth of water there. This exchange of words between Captain Francisco schettino and a second officer on board the Costa Concordia on 13th of January was recorded in the interrogation report. Following this exchange, the passage plan was amended by the second officer and approved by the captain for the ship to perform a sail past.
The ritual of sail past. Seafarers have always been thrilled by sighting the coast after a long sea passage before the presence of our technologies, and with the desire to connect with their families and the outside world, seafarers would look forward to phone calls, televisions and radio signals from the shore. After living at the mercy of nature for months, the sighting of land would be bliss for any sailor.
A new meaning of sail past
During follow up correspondence, two weeks after our meeting in Italy, I called Francisco to ask why he felt the need to deviate the ship’s course on request from the maitre to which he replied, fleet wide was induced a sort of mentality to reward the hotel managers on board by paying attention to them. His request was not an exceptional one, since the island was on the route and passing close to any Island is normal practice for a cruise ship. Why would an organization want to reward the maitre in particular or pay any more attention to that person than to other crew members on board? Thinking about this question generated another question in my mind, where is the power located in the ritual?
Sifting through some of the cruise line websites, it’s not difficult to understand this dynamic. Some of the world’s most famous chefs are appointed on cruise ships to showcase their culinary skills. A job advert seeking to fill in the role of a maitrey on a cruise ship reads something like this, I’m a department head, and so responsible for reporting to onboard management and the main office scheduling for all my personnel disciplinary action within my department, public relations with the guests and taking care of any special needs such as specific dietary requirements. Public Relations with guests explains the vital nature of this role. After all, dining is a core business of cruise lines, it is understandable, then that any request from the maitre, given the power of that position, could not be taken lightly by the captain a business need.
The chief executive of Costa Cruises condemned the captain for his non approved plan to sail close to the closed but on the other hand, he told the Italian Senate Committee during questioning that carefully planned touristic navigation was accepted by law and it enriches the cruise packages. It helps drive business. He says, We do it because it is desired by the passengers and we are competing on the world market. In other words, sail past are a business requirement in cruise companies in order for them to remain competitive.
Professor Maurizio Catino, in his book scapegoating, wrote an aphoria emerges from captaino’s testimony. On the one hand, he was criticized for not having notified the company and the authorities of the ship’s deviation from its course. On the other hand, he was publicly praised by the company for making a similar sail past salute on August 30, 20 Oh 10 in front of the island of prochida.
Can normal practices be controlled? It would be simplistic to say that such normal practices can be abolished through regulation and procedure controls when they have been embedded in the rituals and myths of the industry. New regulations, often in the form of penalties, prosecutions, criminalization of offenders, will create new problems, and when an entire industry seduced by the myth of sail past, there is not much that any individual company can do to resist the commercial pressure. The fact that both the captain and the CEO had normalized the sale past in their world shows that was never considered a danger or a threat. Rather, it was a business necessity. What sits as a business opportunity in the unconscious of an industry cannot be controlled through regulation, to manage or to regulate a risk. First, it needs to be acknowledged and realized as a risk.
Another myth is to control normal practices by bringing in a new CEO, a structural reorganization, or introducing rewards and punishment. Again, this is a superhero myth. Many organizations believe leaders and their top down strategies can change the culture of the organization. How much of an influence do you think the President of United States can possibly exercise over gun control. in the cruise industry What could a new CEO or a thought leader possibly do to discourage the practice of sail past, incentivizing people to keep at safe distance from the land? punish them or sack them when they breach the rule? Just imagine in the long run. What kind of people we would be recruiting in the organization if the only thing that attracts people is money and the only way they can be controlled is through punishment and fear. The Boeing 737 groundings are a classic example in question, where the company is now focusing on increasing the incentives and bonuses to improve the culture.
It is true that leaders and incentives can have some influence on the culture, but human beings are motivated by intrinsic meaning and purpose, far more than carrots, sticks, rewards, awards and structures. Leaders, managers, site visitors and supervisors need to step out of their normal and imaginary view of risk and engage with people to find out what they consider as normal and usual with the view to understand them and not control them.
The power of habits. Earlier this year, my friend Matt Thorne and Dr Rob long traveled with me to Chennai for a workshop on culture and leadership. One afternoon, we visited a temple, and Matt had to sit down on the floor, cross legged with us, to offer prayers. As you can see from this picture, Matt was deeply uncomfortable to sit in this posture. Think about it, Matt could not find the courage to go against the habits of the group and walk out despite the pain he was experiencing sitting cross legged. If his habits did not confirm to the rest of the group, Matt would have been at the risk of being out grouped. And interestingly, no one told Matt to cross his legs. The power was in the unspoken and the unconscious.
Do you notice a paradox? The habits of a group have attracted a new member to join their group. How can this new member not conform to the shared habits that give solidarity to the group?
The same principle applies to the ritual of sail past. At some stage, sail past may have been initiated out of necessity or a pragmatic solution to seafarers being away for too long from their families. But over time, the ritual of sail pass took an entirely different meaning for the culture of cruise shipping. It became an unspoken fantasy of cruise passengers and an implied expectation by the powerful people in the organizational structure. Once that happens in any culture, anyone who becomes part of the group will be unconsciously primed to confirm to the norms and practices of that group, and they will automatically accept this as their new normal, as did mat whilst in the temple in India, it requires much effort from any individual in the group, whether it’s a CEO or the captain, to realize the power of the unconscious, Let alone raise the courage and persistence to challenge it.
Ethics
what is it that we consider right or wrong at a very fundamental level, sometimes without even knowing what we think. Why did the captain choose to go so close to the island? Why did he deviate from the approved plan? Why did he not consider maintaining a safe distance? Why was he making the ship go so fast? What was the rush? The framing of these questions is replete with value judgments. It is as if decision making is about an individual’s binary choices between safety and efficiency goals, in this case, maximizing pleasure for the passengers whilst keeping the ship at a safe distance from the coast. But when I asked Francisco about his motivation to maneuver the ship close to the Giglio Island. His response reflected a strong sense of giving back to his community. He said, I thought I will make happy both of them, that is the Maitree and his friend, a former captain who lived on the island. To me, it was a captivating insight into the ethical and moral values that underpinned Francesco’s normal.
From one viewpoint, the idea of making a crew member or a close friend happy by putting the ship in danger sounds ridiculous. It goes against the professional conduct of a ship captain who, in the modern Western world, at least, is expected to confirm to a set of rules and standards, code of ethics and exercise judgment in their vocation. But this may not be true of other societies in which skills, finesse, charisma, artistry, heroism and courtesy may be valued more than meticulous conformity to a code of practice when we think of ethics within the risk and safety in the. History, we are largely but unconsciously drawn into the imagery of rule following and duty of care. Ethics. Where does this idea originate from, and what are the alternative ways to think about ethics. expressions such as rule following ethical conduct and duty of care are the byproduct of monotheistic religions. In monotheism, a good life lived is about following the words of Jesus, Muhammad or Jehovah. The details can vary, but the idea is that God created a perfect world, and human beings born in sin, attempted to fall prey to error and fallibility. And so the purpose of human life is to seek perfection by following the word of their God. The 10 Commandments, for example, offer guidance about how to live and behave in the world. And then on Judgment Day, it will be decided whether you have lived near enough to the expectations of God. based on your thoughts, words and deeds in this life, you will or won’t be granted a place in heaven, in your afterlife. Followers of polytheistic religion, on the other hand, and Hinduism is a prime example, believe in multiple gods and goddesses. God as in with a small g, there is no single preferred way to live life. Different deities symbolize different characters, and everyone is free to choose how to live their life. Human behavior is not governed by a set of rules. In contrast, the underlying basis of human life is dharma that is seeking harmony with existence and the laws of nature. Human subjectivity is celebrated in polytheistic religions, what is correct for a woman may not be correct for a man. And the idea of right and wrong shifts at different stages in one’s lifetime. Reading the epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, one gets the sense that ethical basis of life is found in acting virtuously. For instance, how those in position of power should live their lives and why the mighty should care for the meek. Society is held together by morality, not the rule of law.
It is natural to become frustrated when, despite our best efforts, the root cause of an accident almost invariably, ends in procedures not followed. But in those instances, we should learn to recognize that it is much more than just the reluctance of an institution or an organization to search for answers beyond rule compliance. It is the ethics of risk and safety.
What is fundamentally right and wrong at a basic level of the culture of safety industry? the industry is anchored to the same monotheistic myth of one God, one truth and one set of rules as the guiding principle of life, otherwise referred to as the safety management system. As an industry, we have not evolved to appreciate what other cultures would consider right or wrong.
For example, the decision of the captain of the bulk carrier ship wakashio that went aground off Mauritius shook many seasoned investigators in the Risk and Safety world. the captain was condemned for deviating the ship from its course by navigating close to the land. Why did he do that? Because he was trying to find a phone signal to help his crew members communicate with their families. Maritime investigators stopped questioning beyond the point where rule violation is determined without seeing the need to explore the moral values and beliefs of those involved in accident in those moments, there is no need to get frustrated. We must accept and realize that this is the ethic of risk and safety.
There are many instances from around the world where the ethics of rule following simply don’t make sense. In 2008 a senior pilot in Cathay Pacific was sacked for flying a passenger jet barely 28 feet above the ground at the Boeing headquarters in Seattle, in a stunt to entertain a group of VIPs on the plane for its maiden flight. Later, it was found that on maiden flight, such stunts were common practice intended as a bit of a jolly for executives. More recently, Pakistan, international airline came under attack on at least two occasions when unauthorized guests were allowed into the cockpit by the pilot while the aircraft was airborne and during landing, a New York air traffic controller who attended my workshop told me once, on a less busy day, airline pilots often request a fly around the New York City before leaving the airspace to provide an additional value to the passengers. These examples illustrate a direct conflict between duty of care that is deontology, ethics, based on rule following in the culture of safety, and the alternative form of conduct in professionals such as nepotism, favoritism, virtue, finesse, courtesy and care based on ethics embedded in other cultures. We struggle to understand the diversity of human culture when all behavior is judged to the lenses of rule following ethics. when Francesco talks about obliging his shipmates as the reason for performing a sail pass on the night of the accident, And at that moment, we are offered a rare glimpse into his worldview. We have a choice. We can dismiss Francisco as an irrational creature, or we can choose to learn something new from another culture and enrich our worldview. I’m not suggesting for a minute that this behavior should be accepted, but the first principle of influencing behavior is to learn to appreciate it, not dismiss it. Here is an important lesson in leadership. Understand before you want to be understood how history influences normal practices.
History is never a collection of neutral and objective facts. It is a social, cultural and power laden narrative from a particular point of view, how an organization creates and shares stories of successes and failures plays an important role in shaping and influencing what is considered normal within its culture. In 2005 Costa Cruises had another accident of a similar nature, the cost of Fortuna, with 3500 people on board on her passage along Capri off the western coast of Italy, was performing a sail pass to entertain the passengers. The only thing reported by Costa was that there has been an abnormal rise in the temperature of an engine. After making this false report, Costa buried the incident. Shipping companies are known for under reporting accident and passing the blame onto the Seafarer to avoid liability and preserve their public image. But here is an important lesson, manipulating an underreporting accident comes with its own set of problems. When stories about critical failures are shared as if they are normal occurrences, tolerance for failure increases until it becomes the new normal.
On our last day in Italy, Francesco shared with us a large collection of photographs taken on cruise ships. As I looked through those pictures, his view about what is considered normal made a lot more sense to me, the normal is not a threat to be controlled or managed. When the normal has become a prerequisite for the survival of your business, it is to be observed and understood as one participant observed during a workshop. No one pays a fortune to travel on a cruise ship to look at the boring sea. People want beautiful sightseeing the moment they open their cave in curtain, when photographs such as those are put up on the walls of our offices, alleyways and boardrooms, their power is immense. Little do we understand how such artifacts influence the unconscious mind, thereby all human motivation and decisions.
I often imagine this picture to describe the sail past. I see it as a delicate balance between the customer expectations and the safety of navigation, a reckless and irresponsible action, but when observed through the lived experience of the captain, it is a normal practice and the culture of an entire industry. And the most disturbing aspect of this normal practice is that it is embodied, or rather concentrated in one professional who also happens to be the person overall, in charge of a complex system, at least on the paper.
What safety science does not tell us about risk and safety?
Things we never hear in research papers and books written on risk and safety. It is now time to start bringing together this discussion to an end with a personal story. Some years ago, our little boy was being bullied by another child at his school, this other boy simply could not understand why my son was so spontaneous, why he would laugh out so loud, why he was so outspoken, and why he ate his lunch with his hands whilst leaving aside the fork, the knife and the cutlery on the table. How our boy behaved, his gestures and his eating habits were not normal for this other boy. I will not go into the details of this painful story, but it is my attempt to help you understand the meaning of normal by drawing parallels between two very deeply personal stories about what is normal. My son’s normal and Captain Francesco Schettino’s Normal.
There are three aspects to all normal practices. Understanding these three aspects can make us culturally intelligent leaders. I believe normal is subjective, normal is in the unconscious, and normal is embodied. That is normal lives in the body and not in the brain. Few academics and researchers in Risk and Safety bring these three aspects to the surface, in fact, most consistently underplay and some even deny them in safety sciences Take, for instance, subjectivity.
Most books and almost all research papers in risk and safety are written in third person, meaning a complete rejection of subjective views. Subjectivity is considered impure in STEM. self means little, but as we will find out, your own self, your own subjectivity and how you see the world, are powerful and revealing pathways to wisdom in culture in learning. Who else needs to learn, if it’s not you and me?
So why is normal subjective? The boy who saw our son eating with hands could not withstand my son’s normal. In other words, he could not come to terms with another person’s subjectivity, just like when we hear the captain saying that this was a normal practice for him, we could not digest his normal. In fact, even another expert who appeared in the news two days after the accident, even being from the same profession, could not understand Francesco’s normal. Because although Captain himself, he was not from the cruise industry, he was a captain on ships that carry oil cargoes and never really come close to the shore. Even within the same profession, the same industry, the same family and the seemingly same life experiences, we can have very different views about what is normal, what is usual, what is okay and what is not okay. We are all subjective beings, but it is so hard to understand another person’s truth.
why is normal unconscious? The boy who had bullied my son had perhaps never seen anyone eating with hands before, and so he was not aware of another person’s eating habits. My son did not see that he was doing anything wrong. Likewise, we learned that sail past was a ritual of the cruise industry, a tradition that has been around for decades, if not centuries. The captain of the Costa Concordia was unaware that he was doing anything unsafe. Interestingly, as much as we are surprised why the captain took such a risk to navigate so close to the island without an approved plan, t
he captain is surprised why others are so surprised by his normal here I am reminded of a beautiful quote from the American anthropologist Edward Hall, culture hides much more than it reveals, and strange enough, what it hides, it hides, most effectively, from its own inhabitants. It’s questionable, if not shallow, to study culture in a classroom or from someone who has never stepped out of their country to live and feel another worldview. I don’t mean a touristic holiday or a business tour to a distant land. If you want to learn culture, you have to go and live with people in their native land, share a meal, spend time, feel their stories, listen to their language, pay attention to their slogans, observe their symbols, their rituals and habits and what artifacts they display, what they dream and what they imagine to be morally right or wrong. You will be surprised when someone asks, Do you like cricket? And if you say yes, there comes a plate with a fried insect on it. What you do next is your cultural intelligence.
So don’t assume what others believe in, what songs they sing, what myths they live and how they navigate the ship. Go and have a conversation. Ask them why they believe what they believe, and don’t be surprised when they smile at you or they look lost. That is also how we design all our workshops, feeling, experiencing and breathing culture and not making it a brain centric classroom exercise.
The third aspect of normal practice is that the normal is embodied, it lives in the body and the brain has little control over the body. My son is habituated to eating food with hands and his spontaneous laugh are not in his control. It is normal for him. 19 years in the UK, I have not learned to sneeze like the British people, and my body cannot take in cheese. In that respect, I must be uncivilized, right? Culture is not a social construct, as some people will tell you, culture goes much deeper than that. Our bodies are enculturated and habituated to what we eat, what we believe and how we live. Culture is in the living and it is precisely why we turn to culture for baking our bread. The captain is habituated to navigating close to the islands. He does not need to think how to maneuver the ship, just like you don’t have to think when you drive a car from office to home, our bodies will do all the work automatically, without involving the conscious mind. The normal is subjective, unconscious and embodied.
But these three aspects of normal are rarely, if ever, brought up in safety science books and research papers. Instead, what we have is a language that consistently supports a brain-centric view, denial of fallibility and human error. In traditional safety, when we hear something as a normal practice, it means that we have found something that does not coincide with the rule book. Our first response is normalization of deviation, or even drift into failure. Drift into failure. Failure from what? Observe the language and the hidden assumptions. It tends to assume that once upon a time, we were on the right path, but then we deviated and it became normal. Once you deviate, drift or disobey, you have sinned, you have committed an error, you have become impure. Now you have to be purified through the ritual of accident investigation. You have to be brought back to the path towards perfection and salvation. The God that we call safety management system, this God will then decide whether you will be redeemed or sacrificed as a scapegoat. This is not a play of word or semantic gymnastics. It is the same myth of perfection in the Garden of Eden, denial of fallibility and sin and the deeply religious nature of risk and safety. we are preoccupied finding engineering solutions to a problem that is deeply rooted in our unconscious beliefs. We don’t think about it. This is why in safety there is no listening, no understanding, no questioning, no empathizing, only telling, ensuring, reminding, disciplining, punishing, confirming and rejecting the fallible human, even when this person is dead.
Moving on to the next stage, or as we call it, the new view of safety, safety two, or human and organizational performance. Here, we actively engage with workers to understand what is normal, and we try to address the gap between work as imagined and work as done. We never really articulate what is imagination, where this imagination comes from, or that work as done is also someone’s imagination. But that is another topic for discussion. The emphasis is on design, engineering, decluttering of processes, fail safe systems, enabling work and improving work performance. We believe we can make it easier for people to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong stuff. We want to understand the normal, but in a very mechanistic sense. People are important, but only to the point that they can tell us about the secrets of how they do the work. In fact, we categorically use the word workers and not people. People are workers and workers are components in the system, but if by chance, we step into the personal boundaries of this worker and we discover that he or she is being bullied, harassed, underpaid, sexually abused or molested, we show them the complaints booth or the well being department. Learning is all about the mechanics. We even call it operational learning. So we think of normal still within the Newtonian, Cartesian and materialist framework, what cannot be measured cannot be managed, and what cannot be managed is not my problem. Ethics and politics are out of the window. We just focus on improving the design of the work.
But there is a much bigger problem even here. If you want to focus on work alone. people are not components, and organizations are not mechanical systems. If it were, we would use the word mechanizations, not organizations. People are self organizing, biological, social and relational beings, not mindless atoms and lifeless engines. When we make things simpler, easier, foolproof, failsafe, we also reduce the threshold of risk, or what people start to consider as their new normal. Initially, when we put a new alarm a barrier or an alert switch to prevent the ship going too close to the shore, people are sensitized to the novelty of those barriers and controls, but after a while, sensitization. TURNS INTO habituation. People switch off the alarms, find workarounds, learn shortcuts through experience, and the whole idea of failing safely goes against its original intent. A new normal is born, and new risks will emerge, which are not even in our faintest imagination. This is very frustrating for risk and safety managers. It’s almost like losing a battle. There begins a vicious war. Put more barriers and more control, give more dosages of audits and inspections, measure injury rates even more closely and supply more protective gear. But in my 17 years of experience, both as a ship officer and a safety inspector, I have observed that more controls are only met with more shortcuts and more fixes. This can get even more frustrating than traditional safety, because now my company has invested a lot of money, and normal practices still don’t seem to go away. And how would they? we have never really understood the human being, because our focus was never on human beings. It was always on human factors, human performance, human element and what humans do. Even when we say we want to understand the culture or a normal practice, what we really mean is a mechanical exercise, a static system, a search for certainty and a template for control.
My question is this, can we really control a life? Do we really think we can control another person’s beliefs, their habits, their ways of eating, or their faith in their own God, be it religion, sex, money, a new car, or, for that matter, the new god of safety, chat GPT and artificial intelligence.
Another story comes to mind. A few weeks ago, I interviewed a forklift driver who had fallen off from his truck and injured his knee. The company was keen for me to find out what had gone wrong and how could such an accident be avoided in the future. I interviewed this person and asked Khalid, what have you learned from this accident? Khalid smiled at me and said, What is there to learn, sir? Is God’s will. What control do I have in a situation. even today, in modern India, when someone dies, people would say, when your time has come, no one can save you, not even God. There is no belief in prevention or avoidance. It’s an accident, and an accident happens, as it says on the label, we can laugh at these people, call them superstitious, dismiss their culture and their norms, and then come back to our own myth and our own normal ways of doing the five whys?
Do we really think we can put barriers and structures on someone’s beliefs, their faith, their habits, their sense of hygiene and their threshold of what they consider as normal, safe or pure, and make our systems fail safe. How can we be so naive to accuse someone for doing something wrong, even when they tell us that they see nothing wrong with it? Apparently, safety science tells us that we are entitled to do that for the sake of safety. In fact, organizations have it within their power to ensure that organizational cultures override national cultures.
Can we really control another culture? Every culture has its own myth and beliefs about what is normal and abnormal, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is sacred and profane, what is impure and pure and what goes up and what stays down. There are no universal laws that govern human culture. The ancient Greeks were so right in calling the Earth Gaia, Mother Earth, as did many civilizations, including the Mayans and the Indians. This is not a poetic metaphor for an otherwise mechanical universe. The universe is a living organism. There is nothing static and mechanical in the universe. Even constants such as gravity and the speed of light are changing. All that we have done is designed a unit that we call a meter to absorb those changes over a period of time, just like we write KPIs and fudge the data to prove that we are all safe. all truth is unstable, paradoxical, temporary and living. Even what we see as constants and universal laws are subject to change.
Leading physicists and scientists are now coming to realize that what we claim to know today through science is only 4% of the universe. 96% of the universe is still dark energy, dark matter, and therefore a mystery. These are very shaky grounds for rationalism, deontology, positivism, pragmatism, utilitarianism and all the philosophies of materialism, which together make the basis for safety sciences and gave us a misleading view on culture.
It should not surprise us that reductionist, materialist thinking leads us to believe that there is no such thing like culture or the first rule of safety culture is not to talk about it at all. Such mono disciplinary approaches rooted in measurement and matter reduce people to atoms and machines. It appeals to us as an industry that seeks simple solutions to problems that are inherently messy, complicated and wicked. Anyone who has raised a teenage girl or studied suicides would understand what happens when we try to control another person’s normal without making any attempt to engage with it.
If we really want to learn about culture or safety culture, we should read beyond psychology human factors or sociology and across disciplines, and we should travel far and live with another tribe for a period of time to feel and experience another form of life. We come to appreciate the power of culture by studying across disciplines and living and breathing another person’s culture. We must learn to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. If something about another culture excites us, irritates us, annoys us, chances are that we have reached the limit of our imagination if we label those things as unsafe or at risk behavior without asking an open question, the problem is with us, not with the one who we are observing. This is a difficult message to digest in a video that lasts for just over an hour. It takes time, patience and an open mindset to learn about culture. reasoning, thinking and classroom lectures are not so helpful when it comes to understanding and learning about culture.
I was struck by the depth of the Aboriginal wisdom when I first saw these images. We live in relationship with nature, and all of us are connected with and affected by everyone and everything around us, that system thinking in an 85,000 years old culture, which we call primitive, even barbarian. But of course, what does not fit with our own normal cannot be true, or it needs to be fixed. True science and a learning mindset is a humble and ongoing inquiry into the unknown. When someone says they don’t know how to express their concerns and their words, they cannot give you a reason why they believe what they believe, or their normal seems like a crazy idea, park your agenda aside and have a conversation.
I have been eating with my hands ever since I was born, and it has served my culture for millennia. We all have different myths, rituals and symbols about hygiene, safety and purity. The problem is not that every culture is different. The real issue is when we start to believe that mine is better than yours, or that mine is the only way to salvation, there’s a good reason that the world’s leading band HSBC makes use of paradoxes as a marketing strategy. The food chain McDonald serves cerveza in Spain, Maharaja burgers in India and rice in Indonesia. And innovative companies make use of subtle subliminal words in lieu of luminous safety warnings to influence people. We don’t change culture by creating structures that are dismissive of what people believe in. We don’t override people’s senses, their tastes and their preferences, and we don’t stand tall to prove that I am right and you are wrong and that I hold the key to your salvation. Organizations that truly understand the power of culture find ways to influence people unconsciously without controlling them, leaders who can step into another person’s view of normal stay humble even more when their own normal is so far away from the others, and ask open questions, have a much better chance of fostering a culture of learning, innovation and safety.
So where does this leave us? I’m not really against any of the existing approaches in risk and safety. My point really is to give you a language to think about how to tackle risks in a more holistic and a balanced sense, especially in addressing issues that seem to keep coming back to us despite all the engineering solutions we have in place. Remember, normal is subjective. Normal is in the unconscious. Normal is embodied.
And here is a practical method that acknowledges all the three aspects of normal practices and what it means to be a human being. This is a visual method referred to as the iCue method in social psychology of risk, used for mapping conversations and understanding decision making using a whiteboard. Unlike forms and checklists, as you can see in this picture, it takes at least two people to engage, which means, as a minimum, this is a social and relational method. Second, there is a lion facilitating the session with the toucan, A giraffe, a zebra and a mouse. It symbolizes that when oral speech is turned into text on a whiteboard, people can start to visualize their own words and appreciate how each one sees the same thing differently. That’s the starting point to entertain differences and realize our subjectivities. We all have strong views about what we think is normal, but now we can actually see that in the open. third no one rehearses what they will say when they come to a conversation. As we visualize our spontaneous words on a whiteboard, our beliefs, our decisions and our misunderstandings start to become visible. How do I know what I think, until I see what I say, that is precisely the essence of this little explanation. Fourth, mapping a story using a whiteboard is a somatic experience. It is very different from ticking a checklist from top to bottom or from left to right. After a while, the checklist taken becomes a mindless exercise, but it takes a whole person to map a conversation. The active involvement of the whole body makes it a kinesthetic experience. We learn best by practice and doing, and unlike templates that constrain thinking, a whiteboard or a blank piece of paper, also unlocks people’s imagination about risk. a 10 minutes toolbox talk, or a strategy conversation, brings much more to the surface and creates more engagement than an hour long, telling and instructing. Finally, the lion is also the one holding the pen, keeping his ears to the group, and his visual focus is on the whiteboard. The picture symbolizes how the most powerful person in the room, who is often not used to listening only telling and instructing, has now been deliberately asked to do precisely that. In other words, this is an ethical method. It is relational, and it addresses the problem of overconfidence and hubris that continues to dominate the Risk and Safety world. I know it all. Well, no one knows it all. A higher status or a salary package is not the key to risk intelligence. Quite often the opposite is the case.
There are many practical examples of how the iCue method works in practice on our YouTube channel. We’ve worked with many organizations around the world to bring a positive culture change using this method. my friend Brian Darlington has written a whole book on how to change a large-scale organization by using this method, the difference being that Brian started with understanding and mapping what people believe on the ground. Brian focused on personable problems, not scalable solutions. The book is downloadable for free. This is just one of the many tools we use in social psychology of risk to show how we bring people together to have conversations about risk that have long become normalized, gone in the unconscious and become embodied. If you are interested to learn about how to understand culture, how to observe the world around how to make sense of habits and rituals of another culture, how to understand the hidden meaning and beliefs in another culture, how to discern slogans and symbols and how to decode the underlying message in your investigation and audit reports. Here’s another tool that can help. this is the culture cloud based on social psychology of risk.
If you are interested to read more about Culture and Learning, I have recently published a book – Are we learning from accidents? The book is available on Amazon, Kindle, KOBO and Apple books.
Every now and then, we organize workshops around the world where we introduce the participants to the power of subjectivity, experiential learning, unconscious decision making, embodied learning, relational thinking, conversation mapping, mandala drawing and a wide range of practical and intuitive methods and tools.
We have a workshop on Culture scheduled in Copenhagen where we will discuss the Culture Cloud in depth and detail. We also have a series of workshops on Learning from accidents in Calgary, Canada; London and Brazil. We also have an online workshop scheduled in December later this year. You can check out our workshops by visiting our events page Novellus.Solutions forward stroke events.
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In the next episode in this series, we will discuss sensemaking and how we human beings make decisions in a crisis situation using the Costa Concordia story.
Thank you for watching.
Hello. I hope you are enjoying watching these videos and they are making you think little bit, and if they are, please subscribe to our YouTube channel @teamnovellus.
My name is Nippin. I am a former master mariner (ship captain) and I work at the intersection between anthropology, social psychology and neurosciences of human beings learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions particularly in groups, which we call collective sensemaking. I work with organisations around the world particularly in high-risk areas to help them diagnose, understand and improve their culture.
If you want to know more about our work please visit our website novellus.solutions, thank you for watching.
