James Pomeroy 0:00
I think back to my career and some of the most tragic and serious incidents I’ve had to investigate. Almost all of them in hindsight now, are less about the hard elements of things that we were measuring or the things that we were seeking to do. They’re almost exclusively around the interdependencies and the communications and the misunderstandings that happen between individuals. So what we end up with is quite a paradox, really, that the things that we are seeking to proceduralize, to measure, to audit, to verify, are important, but they are not the things that actually are quite significant in terms of incidents, it is the meaning that we make from each other, the reliance, the interdependency that we have between each other. It is the connections between the spaces, and that is language meaning that actually has more.

Nippin Anand 0:52
Hello James and welcome to embracing differences. This is the first time we are together on on my podcast at Liza, I feel very privileged to have you. Thank you for taking the time. It’s It’s so nice to to have you with me. Yes, thank

James Pomeroy 1:08
you, Nippin, I think it’s lovely to be to be able to talk to you. We have such shared interest in language and culture metaphor and actually a different perspective to safety. So it’s a privilege to be able to talk to you today, and hopefully it’ll be an interesting conversation for everyone to listen to.

Nippin Anand 1:27
I think so too. Yes, yes, great. Where shall we start?

James Pomeroy 1:30
James, well, I think it’s probably the shared interest in language. I think we’ve talked a lot in our time about the role of language, and I think it’s particularly important in safety, because if we look at culture from a different perspective, language is key. You know, if you speak to an anthropologist about culture, they will tell you that that language is culture. And yet, when we turn to safety, we often take language for granted. And I would be interested in your perspective on that.

Nippin Anand 2:06
Absolutely, language is the key to culture. I think, I think maybe we are not exaggerating it by saying that if you shift the language of the organization, there’s a here’s an opportunity to change the culture of the organization. I think they’re profoundly connected with each other, and I think we both have an interest in metaphor. And I think the next level is to think about speak how, how to the power of the metaphors. I think the power of the metaphors is where language becomes interesting. You know, you you talk to a seven years old or a 10 years old person, or my little one, and say, you know, here’s an app, here’s the apple. And he just look at me and then say, he might, you know, expecting a gadget been thrown to him, but it’s actually, I’m talking about the Apple fruit. And I think so we are so far apart, even within the same family, even within the same house, because the language creates those kind of worldviews. He sees it as a technology. I see it as a fruit, and for good reasons, because my history, my background, my motivations, are all connected with one way of looking at the world, my symbols, my artifacts, whereas he sees it in a completely different way from his background, his history, his motivation. So I think that is what makes it so interesting when we talk about language.

James Pomeroy 3:33
Yeah, and it strikes me within safety that we we use metaphor a lot. We’re often completely unaware that we’re talking metaphorically. But if we were to go into a world of say, Clean Language or therapy, for example, they teach you to play really close attention to metaphor, indeed, pause, excuse the pun, but our windows into someone’s thinking, and I remember some of our previous discussions in workshops about how we have discussions with individuals, where perhaps there’s been an incident, or there’s been a discussion about getting people’s contributions. People talk in metaphor, but actually we skip over the metaphor, and if we go back to the metaphor, they can be a way of actually people to for people to elaborate and to describe more, and it’s only when we attentively listen to that that actually we have the opportunity to get a better sense of people’s perspectives and meanings.

Nippin Anand 4:33
So true, James, and you’re so right when you talk about the culture of risk and safety, I think it wouldn’t be it wouldn’t be wrong to say that our industry is, is, is, is, the foundations of all the disciplines that people go through when they come into risk and safety. Profession is primarily associated tied into the STEM discipline, which is science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And these disciplines actually take the world in a very literal way. Everything is literal. There is very little scope for to understand the symbolic nature, the metaphorical nature of reality. And I just share a little story with you. I was doing an incident investigation, and there was a big insurance claim about on board a on board a bulk carrier where the cargo was contaminated. And they did some some they were struggling to understand. How did the crew not get it right? Why wouldn’t they dry up the tanks and the holes before they they start loading and and the crew actually had one meaning of what is dry and empty, and the office had a completely different meaning of what is empty. So in the cruise world, and we are talking literal language now, so to speak, you know what is an empty tank and what is a full tank or a loaded tank? Let’s say so the crew in the cruise world, the world of the crew, 10 to 20 centimeter of water in the tank is where it stops stripping. You know, you just the pumps don’t work at all. So they’ve always seen it that way. So when they talk about an empty tank, they don’t talk about a dry tank, they just talk about a tank which has about 10 centimeter of water. And they’ve accepted that as their reality, as their world view. The office was completely shocked, because they sent an alert out to very clearly say that we need an empty tank, and by that they meant a dry tank. And here are two sides fighting over it, over something very literal, which we can all agree upon, what is an empty and what is a dry or what is a what is a loaded tank space and such a powerful window of opportunity to say that even literal language can be very metaphorical. And this is where, in a sense that we talk numbers and we think that we can strip everything down to as objective as possible, but the moment you place it within the history and the motivations of another person or their culture, there seems to be a completely different way of looking at the world. And I think back to the example of the apple. This is what we are struggling with, that we are not very good at stepping into another person’s world and their worldview to understand their perception or their symbolic meaning of the same word.

James Pomeroy 7:26
Yeah, you remind me of discussions of we have at work and have had for years about flammable, inflammable, non flammable. Now here’s a word that you know. It has real, real problems in its transferability. And everyone can kind of understand the different permeations of flammable but there is a very real example of attending to meaning within words that has real consequences. And some of the earliest examples where anthropologists have actually started to look at safety have actually involved them looking at the language and how people have different meanings of these words. And so it’s interesting for me, in the latter stages of my career to kind of get more interested in language and meaning, the things that I took for granted before. I mean, some things in safety are a conscious use of language. So in the last 20 years, just as you did a moment ago, you described an incident, whereas early on in my career, I’d have described an accident. That’s a conscious use of language where we’ve said accident has certain meanings and it implies that things aren’t preventable. So we want to then move on to a word of incident and the language. From the language, the choice of language in using incidents suggests that things are preventable, that there must be causation, that we must then find rational and reasoning to things. So underlying our choice of a conscious, conscious use of change of words, is actually a set of beliefs, and we can find another example of that. So just yesterday, I was having a discussion about an incident, and someone was telling me that they wanted to find the root cause. Now, firstly, there’s the concept of singular root cause, and then when we said that there may be multiple causes, but then we also get into the idea of, when we use a metaphor like root cause, that something is buried, we need to uncover it. It needs to be revealed. But maybe it’s not causal. Maybe there is more factors at play. Maybe it’s more to do with system and that we need to understand the wider system. Some of this may seem a bit abstract, but it’s an example of how the language that we use shapes how we think about safety. Immediately we say root cause, we are then driven in cognitively to start to think about something we need to reveal, uncover, dig, down, treat, remove, and. And it has a significant kind of impact.

Nippin Anand 10:04
Isn’t that so interesting? What you just said? You talk about roots, root cause, and you dig deep down, and when you dig deep down, you’re almost convinced that the problem is somewhere down. It’s not up, it’s not in the middle, it’s somewhere down. And so you end up invariably looking into places that, of course, for power and authority reasons, will never be challenged. It will, if you point the finger at the at the bottom end of the organization, which is frontline people, for example, there is very little resistance, because, you know, power always goes from top to the bottom. And the point is this that you don’t even realize that by the use of that language, you’re actually making situation worse, and you’re already trapped into that metaphor, and it’s so hard for you to look up or to look sideways, because everything points towards the idea that the problem is somewhere down, and you have to dig deep down. And hence the idea of five whys and digging deep and finding out the problem at the sharp end of the deep end, makes so much sense to people. But the interesting thing James is that all of this happens at an unconscious level, if people are not aware of their metaphors. And yeah. And I think just Yeah,

James Pomeroy 11:22
so you you refer to power. So let’s pick another very practical example for people. Most organizations have a speak up policy. They talk about raising concerns. Now there is a hierarchical metaphor the moment we stop and think the idea that we are telling people to speak up, to raise concerns, we are telling them that actually, that it’s challenging. The power is above them. It’s hard to raise things. It’s physically hard, and it also is literally, metaphorically, quite hard and challenging. So sometimes the power that we’re using is reinforcing some of the challenges that we have root cause we have to go down for to raise a concern. We have to fight above us and push above the barriers and the issues. And if we pause for a moment to just think, how is the language that we’re using either making it easier, or potentially more difficult, for people to think and equally, how is it framing actually how we’re understanding a problem? Because fundamentally, language is how we make sense of the world, but rarely within safety and risk. Do we actually think about the words that we’re using, and particularly metaphor, and how they may be reinforcing a certain perception or view.

Nippin Anand 12:43
So true, James, and you use the word framing, and I would say that is probably one of the most important words when it comes to understanding the power of language, because all the framing happens without your conscious awareness. You have framed the world in a certain way. It’s like taking a picture and seeing it in a particular way. What do you include in that picture, and what is it that you don’t even feel like including what is in the foreground and what is in the background? We often see pictures people post on LinkedIn and where not, and there is always an unconscious bias in that picture, in the way it is framed. So once you have framed a picture, once you have presented a reality in a particular way, that already tells me where your focus is. But the funny thing is, when we are framing a problem, when we are framing a picture, when we are framing the idea of speaking up, we take it very lightly. I mean, you talked about speaking up and this relationship with power, it can, there cannot be a better example, because speak up. My goodness, what a word it is. Because, you know, speak up. And it implies so many things. It implies autonomy, courage, bravery, you know, it implies the whole Hollywood culture, that somebody will rise up, you know, some hero will rise up in the face of this adverse situation. So not only we are using a word, we are framing it as a story. It is a story behind it which we are not even aware of. And I find that very fascinating, because you cannot speak up to a wall. You have to have another person for them to listen to. But the whole discourse of risk and safety is more or less silent on the idea of relational relationships, for example, in this whole life, that as much as I need to speak up, somebody needs to listen to me. But we are not talking about conversation. We’re talking about speaking up. It goes back to this. My point is that even that little word, which reveals so much, as you very rightly said, about the culture of the industry, and if you pick up and connect between these words, and you start to see, stop the job, authority, stop work. Speed. Cup, they all point towards a narrative, a grand narrative that plays underneath, which is that you need to be courageous and brave in order to break the ice and talk to somebody up upwards. So you have root cause, and you have speak up. What beautiful metaphors in risk and safety to make life difficult for people and reinforce power in the status quo. And so the industry is trapped within its own metaphors. I think that’s a wonderful thing to say, is, yeah.

James Pomeroy 15:33
And then there’s a potentially another group of metaphors, which is about vision, and Vision’s got, you know, deep biblical, metaphorical kind of meaning where sight is seen as positive and blindness is seen as something which is very bad. And we use this language within safety and risk, but often we don’t realize we’re using it. So we talk about risk blindness or willful blindness, and then we then talk about safety as a positive thing. When we say we need to forecast, we need to have prediction, we need to be able to see ahead. But often we can’t see ahead in that kind of way, because the world that we’re in these days is highly complex, and the ability to have vision and to foresee is quite problematic. And then when we when things go wrong, we then say that they had blindness, or they were blind to a particular incident. So the kind of language that we’re using, actually, if we pause for a moment and think about it, actually, it has deep meanings that often are kind of religious in some ways, but certainly start to shape how we understand that our ability to foresee is a positive thing. Those that have vision have power. Those that are blind and don’t have it do not and that language then permeates through how we think about safety, and it really has an impact.

Nippin Anand 16:57
I just you know, the moment you talked about vision, the first thing that came to mind was the Qantas airways logo, which is the kangaroo. There are two big animals in Australia, the National animals of Australia. One is the EMU and the other one is the kangaroo. And the uniqueness of both the animals is that they cannot look behind and they cannot move back, neither of them. So here we have a country that is trapped in the metaphor that is it’s that development is all about moving forward or looking ahead, and we pay so little attention to history as a result of the kind of logos, the kind of messages, the kind of metaphors, the kind of symbols that we have created and and so we are trapped in that language. But yeah, it’s, it’s, there’s so much to it, James, we can talk all day about this. It’s so, so powerful that to help people realize that metaphors actually shape your worldview. But also metaphors are mostly unconscious to all of us. Yeah.

James Pomeroy 18:03
And if we extend the discussion beyond metaphor to talk about agent language, agentive language, so how we assign agency? How we assign in effect, causation through our language? Now this isn’t metaphorical, but it’s another example of how particular languages actually, indirectly, subconsciously, will then say that someone was causing or someone who was in control or had agency and power over a particular incident. An English language makes great use of agency in a way that others don’t so very often, the way that we describe events, incidents, even how we describe control of safety, is using agentive language. And so if, if those that are listening think that discussions on metaphor are abstract, theoretical and really this doesn’t have an impact, I would encourage them to go and think about how they’re describing incidents and some of the ways that actually we are priming and framing people’s understanding and where they want to attribute blame, because it, unfortunately, often does result in blame merely by how they are describing How incidents occur.

Nippin Anand 19:20
So true, James, and I think you bring such a wonderful aspect of it. There’s something that’s always troubled me that this agent of language also lends to another problem, and quite literally, when there’s a problem in the organization, who do we invite a change agent? It’s not a change facilitator, it’s a change agent. So here you have a person who walks into the organization, but it’s a consultant or a senior leader, or somebody who’s appointed by the organization to bring change, but that person becomes the agent of change, and I find it deeply worrying. That there is somebody who’s taking the moral responsibility to bring a change in the organization and yet has very little curiosity, and by the use of the word change agent, we have given him or her so much power to do whatever they think is right. So yeah, we attribute a lot of power to the word agent in individual societies. For example, one wouldn’t see those words or the lexicon, at least when you move to other parts of the world, people actually become very embarrassed when you use words like this. They don’t want to be associated with words like agent or hero and so on. They want to be seen as one of everyone else. So I think you’re right, James, there’s so much we can talk about that.

James Pomeroy 20:47
Yes, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting for me. I mean, this year, I think will be 34 years I’ve been involved in safety, and it’s only really by stepping outside of safety and studying other fields that you get a different perspective on things. So for the first, I don’t know, 30 years, I was involved in safety. It was very scientific. It was very objective. There was a belief in absolute measurement in my mind, and a very deterministic view of the world. By stepping away and actually reading more about other fields, whether that’s anthropology, sociology, philosophy, it encouraged, it has enabled, and both encouraged me to bring a different sense and my love of language has grown as a consequence, but equally, my awareness of how language is shaping my understanding of what safety is as a construction within an organization. And if that sounds a little abstract for listeners, it’s, it’s, it’s more than just actually some philosophical idea about how we construct safety. It is how we actually assign responsibility when things go wrong, how we describe safety, and even to what extent we actually understand and seek to kind of manage safety in organizations, if that where itself possible.

Nippin Anand 22:10
Yeah, you’re right, James, you talk about reading across disciplines and and becoming aware of literature that sits, you know, so far away from risk and safety, but it is so important to get to grips with it. Were there any jaw dropping moments for you, or any particular school of thought that has influenced you more than others?

James Pomeroy 22:33
I think a few. So the first thing I’d say is on metaphor. Reading books on metaphor and linguistics has been particularly helpful, particularly in my studies on kind of language and lack often. Johnson is an obvious area, but not not them, and not in and of itself. There’s some really interesting work on the sociology of numbers and how numbers have effect. So in my early studies about numbers, and then, latterly, through yourself and others. Encouraging me to look at anthropology, the work of Mary Douglas and her work on risk and blame, and understanding how we attribute blame, has also caused me to think differently. So I think across the wide area, and I should also throw in, for good effect, some of the some of the reading around Foucault and and understanding power, so very much an interdisciplinary kind of view. But that I, you know, I am, every day working in the field of safety and risk, so I have one foot in trying to apply some of this. And then the other element is in trying to actually bring a different sense of understanding to what safety is. And the most interesting thing, above all, 34 years have been doing this is having to unlearn and rethink things and challenge what I used to believe. Because I think it’s only when you unlearn and challenge what you thought you understood, or what you fundamentally the truth that you held strongly before that, I think you’re really only going through a sense of self development at that point.

Nippin Anand 24:14
Yes, and I love the word unlearning James, I think that’s a key to a lot of it. And we were talking about framing, and we were talking about language and worldviews and how the metaphor actually influences you. I think unlearning is such a jaw dropping moment to see that whatever I have known so far is only one part of the puzzle. It’s only one, one little story of this, whole messy universe, and the moment you start to look at things from a 10 years old boy or somebody else who might have a very different view of the same same image or or narrative, I think that’s when unlearning happens, and it’s and it, there’s, there’s, there’s a couple of things. One is, obviously, you know, reading helps. And reading is so important to to achieve that. Unlearning, in my own example, I find traveling around the world and and and engaging with different belief systems is so important. I mean, I had a just about few months ago, I had a case in in Dubai of a forklift driver, and he fell off from the forklift. And I asked him. I said he had a broken, broken leg. And I asked him, so what have you learned from this accident? And he said, what’s there to learn? It’s God’s will. And the interesting thing was not, not what he responded. The interesting thing was when I looked around in the room and everyone was very convinced that, yeah, he’s right. And, you know, here you are, you are. It totally throws you off, and it tells you what, what do you know? What do you know about this, this whole situation, and how do you respond next to something that just and it was such a moment of unlearning for me to say I was expecting one thing, but this just came and hit my face in the way that I wouldn’t have thought about it. Now you can dismiss that and say that, no, it has to be rational. It has to be a scientific explanation. You cannot just say it’s God’s will, but then go back and do what root cause analysis I mean, how is my root cause analysis any better than this person’s faith in in Allah? And I think that’s where we need to find middle grounds, not to dismiss other people’s world, but to reconcile between what we think and what they think, and try and meet somewhere in between. And I think metaphors and understanding the power of metaphors actually allows us to come in that space where we start to appreciate that words create worldviews, and words actually divide worldviews. So here you have an opportunity to either dismiss that person or start to think that maybe there is some truth to it. And I need to think about things from his perspective also. So I think grounding is very important. Where you stand when it comes to unlearning, Where do I stand? Do I even know what my limitations are? That part, I think, is, is missing in the Risk and Safety world. We become too sure about ourselves sometimes, and we dismiss other people’s metaphors and their language, and because we look at things very literally, and I think that’s that’s where that’s a big barrier to learning and unlearning both,

James Pomeroy 27:30
yeah, we have, in safety, a view of kind of culture. And there’s very often a kind of a very positive view of culture, objective culture that I as someone who leads a safety program globally, is going to impart a culture on others. You know, we have a safety culture as an organization, and we’re going to to impart it. I think one of the problems I’ve had with that in my time is when there isn’t a sufficient cultural sensitivity. And that example of inshallah that you talk about, I can remember being in the Middle East and having what I would now view is quite a colonialist view, that my approach should trump that idea that certain things are fate, certain belief systems and a view that actually my corporate safety culture should sit supreme over someone’s cultural values. Some of the most interesting things I’m seeing at the moment in safety are in the culture space. Are actually organizations discovering their national cultures. So I’m seeing in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada, where the cultural grounding of an organization, whether that’s Maori culture, starting to feature into an organization, safety program in a very different way, and organizations becoming much more attuned and culturally sensitive, so that we don’t have a scientific view of culture and mechanicalistic view that we go in and we say, this is the culture you want to have. We’re much more actually interested in actually what’s happening, and particularly understanding norms, values, belief systems in culture. So hopefully we’re more respectful to colleagues who do who do have belief systems that may be different from ours, but equally, that permeates through how the organization culture is working.

Nippin Anand 29:34
Yeah, you’re right, James and I think sensitivity to national culture is so important, whether we like it or not, it will always show up. You have a Middle East company working in the UK, the moment you enter into the premises, you can actually feel it. You can feel their culture and so and vice versa. When you have a Western company operating in the Middle East or in India, when you walk into the premises, you actually feel the culture. It’s so fascinating. I was working in IT for an Indian company, and they went to their head in the in their office, in in in Hamburg, and you can see the pictures of gods and goddesses everywhere. And the notion of gods and goddesses is little bit different from what we have here. They don’t just sit in the churches, they also sit in cars and taxis, and it transcends the idea of time and space. So it’s everywhere. I find it fascinating that and people actually pray to God. They have an emergency master list, and they have the picture of Lord Shiva next to the emergency master list. And who am I to tell them that that emergency response is actually much more, or any better than and then what your God has to say, because they will first look at their God when things go wrong, and then they come to their process, and that’s the belief system. So I think we there’s some some interesting things that and we should never forget, the power of the national culture and how it permeates through the organization, irrespective of wherever they set up their branch offices, or when they go into mergers and acquisitions. It always follows. It always follows. But the beauty of all that we are discussing so far is that it happens at a very subliminal level, and we are not conscious about it. I think that’s the key to it. That’s where I wanted to share with you. You know that maybe, and there’s something we talk about in the London workshop, also, that the key to all this is to make it conscious, to make it visual, to make it to surface these biases to people, and I think the limitations of many of our methods and tools and risk and safety are is that they are structured around the notion that human beings are rational and literal. We don’t make space for non rational nature of decision making, the biases and assumptions that we all carry, the baggages that we carry with us as cultural, psychological, social beings. And I think so this is where we need to have models and methods that appreciate the need to surface all those things, not only in accident investigations and risk assessments, but also in our daily conversations with each other. How do we do that? I think that’s that’s where it becomes interesting to me, at least. Yeah.

James Pomeroy 32:31
I mean, most of the way that we are making sense of the world around us is through dialog. Indeed, many of us think as we’re speaking, there isn’t some sense of an auto play five seconds ahead of us. Our speech is how we are thinking, and so attending to words and listening is particularly important. And I think back to my career and some of the most tragic and serious incidents I’ve had to investigate almost all of them in hindsight now are less about the hard elements of things that we were measuring or the things that we were seeking to do. They’re almost exclusively around the interdependencies and the communications and the misunderstandings that happened between individuals, and yet, those are the things that can’t be measured. They can’t be audited. You can’t proceduralize them. So what we end up with is quite a paradox, really, that the things that we are seeking to proceduralize, to measure, to audit, to verify, are important, but they are not the things that actually are quite significant in terms of incidents. It is the meaning that we make from each other, the reliance, the interdependency that we have between each other. It is the connections between the spaces, and that is language meaning that actually has more. And this paradox of actually what we are attending to within safety. Whilst it is important, it is often not, in and of itself, the things that actually contribute to people being harmed or not going home.

Nippin Anand 34:11
So true. And then a typical thing that that, where we say in the industry, is, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. And I think that’s, that’s deeply problematic, because a lot of what we have been discussing so far, you know, how do you build trust with somebody? By saying that we have 20 minutes to build trust, it doesn’t make any sense at all. So you need to take the time to slow down and actually try and understand each other. I think that’s that’s and we don’t have rituals to do that. We come very close to what we call a meeting, but it’s hardly a meeting. It’s mostly one person speaks and everyone else listens. And we call it a meeting with such a wonderful metaphor, which is. Far away from its original meaning,

James Pomeroy 35:02
the kind of recognition of having been involved in safety for over three decades. I went back about during the Christmas period, and I looked back at some of the training materials that I’d done on incident investigation in the past, and what really struck me was I’d done in a space of 25 years, eight courses on investigation. None of them had given any attendance to language. And yet, if I were, if we were, if we were therapists, talking about how we were caring for people, we would be taught to really pay attention to language if we were in religious leaders or politicians. Rhetoric is how you give meaning to people. You inspire people. You get them to vote for you get them to come to your temples and churches, so that we may be missing something within safety by skipping over the importance of language, and I was just really, it really brought this to fore when I actually started to look back at what I’d been taught in the past and come to realize that actually it’s there is very Little there. In fact, there was nothing that taught me about the importance of language and the things that we’ve talked about before, a role of metaphor, agented language, to listen to what people are saying and genuinely listen to what people are saying, and to be comfortable with silence, and all of the things that we get to grips with when we start to look at linguistics and understand how it’s shaping our understanding true. James, missing, I think in safety is, yeah, the role of language.

Nippin Anand 36:53
I mean, yesterday, we had a very interesting workshop in Aberdeen, and we were talking about all the metaphors associated with risk assessment. And we collected about 50, 6070, words from people, and all of those words were associated with, as you very rightly said, measurement and control. So if you cannot measure, it doesn’t exist. The funny thing is that the moment you stop that exercise and go into something else, people start talking about perception and experience and subjectivity that I don’t see what you see. But then I ask the question, you’re saying all that now, but you never use those words in risk assessments. Do you No? We don’t no, but we talk about it all the time. But how much of that language actually enters into your risk assessment forms. And we did a little exercise to say, okay, there are 10 of you in the room, 12 of you in the room, and you all drive to work from home on a scale of one to 10. How dangerous is it to drive from office to work or from work to Office? And 12375, you know, subjectivity is already out, but what is this? 1235, and seven. What does that even mean? And then suddenly there is all quiet in the room. So we want to measure things, but we don’t really know what we are measuring. We have no idea, but we are so convinced that we must measure and we must put a rank to things. So I find it a very interesting that intuitively people understand there’s something not right with it, but they don’t know what to do with it, because we go back to the same thing that we don’t have the language to explain these things the or we have. I mean, of course there is language, this perception, this subjectivity, there’s all sort of words, but it hasn’t entered into the discourse of risk and safety. It just does not get into the organizational rituals to say it’s okay if you have, if you have one word for empty or Apple or whatever, and I have a different word, why not have a conversation about it and see how far we are? Because we’re going to start a very high risk activity, and nothing is more dangerous. And then misunderstanding each and it is, I think, that that’s there’s that recognition does not exist because they because of the nature of the industry and the sunk costs. You know that both psychological and economic, that comes with the kind of models and methods that we have put into the industry. It’s all about certainty and control. So there’s a whole lot of lexicon or language missing that is connected with the non measurable. It’s a fascinating thing to think about is,

James Pomeroy 39:32
yeah, I think getting better at understanding perception and listening to kind of people’s sense and collective kind of sense making within organizations is important. There is also a paradox with numbers in the fact that the number of times I’ve gone to senior leadership and asked for investment or changes and the decision has been Yes, but then they need confirmation. In numbers. Now, you know, there’s something in this, which is that a lot of the decisions that we’re making are emotional and perception we feel, we then need the numbers to provide confirmation. And there’s also a belief that leadership is, you know, is all numerical and scientific. I don’t think it is actually, I think a huge degree of judgment, even at the most senior level in organization, is about people’s perceptions and hunches. And so there’s some belief system going on that everything needs to be measured, and that numbers give a certainty when actually numbers are often used as a confirmation on what is already a perception.

Nippin Anand 40:42
What is already believed? Yes, yes, absolutely, yes, yes. Great. James, do you have any questions? Apart from what we have discussed so far, I don’t know.

James Pomeroy 40:56
I’m looking forward to our time in the workshop. I think it will be a really exciting time to explore some of these topics, particularly around how people use language, and the role of language in understanding, in people’s understanding of safety, and how they construct safety. I think it will be exciting to bring people together, and probably I’m most excited about learning from others, hearing others views, and seeing where they are on some of their understanding of some of this. It’s a fantastic topic. It’s a really interesting area to get into, and what it offers, probably most of all, is a different view of culture, not a mechanicalistic, deterministic view, but a model of culture that actually understands the role of language is more respectful to national culture and people’s belief systems, and see how that starts to shape and influences people’s understanding. Great.

Nippin Anand 41:54
I think so too. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and learning and unlearning during our time in London.

James Pomeroy 42:00
Yes, maybe that’s come along for some unlearning. That’s the truth,

Nippin Anand 42:05
I think. So that’s, that’s, that’s, that would be nice. Yeah, it’s rare and refreshing to hear that. You know, we are, we’re tired of the word learning.

James Pomeroy 42:14
How much has been unlearned by attendees. Yes, that’s right, how many different perspectives they’ve gained, and we’ve gained together collectively. It’s a joy to spend time with people and to hear their views. I’ve been doing some research over the past, well over the past four weeks, and the pleasure of listening to people you know and coming together collectively. You can’t understate that.

Nippin Anand 42:45
You can’t measure it. No,

James Pomeroy 42:47
we’re social animals, and we enjoy learning from each other. So I hope that we get an interesting group of individuals who want to come along, are curious, up for unlearning things, up for collectively, kind of sharing experiences and see where we go.

Nippin Anand 43:04
That’s right. Well, on that note, thank you so much, James. It’s such a joy to engage with you, to listen to you, to share ideas with you. And I hope we can, we can make a great event in London. So.