Nippin Anand 0:01
Welcome to Embracing Differences with me, Nippin Anand. Picture the scene of two young men working at height without safety shoes, without a helmet, as if if they trip they’re going to die. I actually wrote a post on this, and I thought I would turn this into a, into a podcast. So, the title of this podcast is Lord Save Those Men, and the question is, Why do we struggle to understand safety culture, and if that kind of an image of two people working at height wearing no PPE, personal protective equipment, evokes in you a passion for saving lives, you might find this podcast a little bit difficult to ingest, but if you can think beyond the protection and prevention syndrome, let’s get going. Just to be clear, I have not written anything new here, but after years of observing, reflecting, and questioning, I do find that the world of risk and safety struggles with understanding culture, and by extension, safety culture. Much of this confusion comes from academics, researchers, thought leaders, and the books and research papers published in this space. I think there is an entire and concerted syndicate that has brought us to this distorted view about culture, and it has a particular appeal to one, people who cannot think critically and independently, two people who look up to safety science as their source of absolute truth, three people who take shelter in safety sciences for moral certainty, four people who have never really read much outside of safety books, five people who have never lived within and felt another culture, and we are not talking business travels or exotic holidays to foreign land. Six self-proclaimed change agents, transformation leaders, thought leaders, experts, specialists, gurus, swamis, evangelists, guardians, angels, jesters, and crusaders, and seven people who are passionate about saving lives. Now, these are just seven personas that come to mind, but there are many more, and my basic premise in this podcast is to illustrate how the rational cognitive mind that is driven by control, certainty, and moral superiority struggles with understanding safety culture. I will leave some links to selective readings to broaden your view on safety culture, including a view, a video on how to diagnose culture as part of this podcast, so finally I would like to say that I’m also a fallible human, like all of you are, and my views are subjective and biased. So, if you ask an open-ended question, I would be very pleased to engage, but if you want to prove me wrong, I have no interest in arguing with people, so if you find this podcast interesting, of course, please subscribe to Embracing Differences on YouTube, Spotify, or any of your favorite podcast channels, and I look forward to hearing from you once you have listened to this podcast. So, the question is, why do we struggle to understand safety culture? I think researchers and academics struggle with the whole idea of safety culture. Most begin with defining culture, and they try really hard, and the harder they try, the more it tends to slip away. Frustrated by the word, they start mocking it. Some become bitter and defensive, and others replace it with systems. And then there are those who have learned to adjust their pitch to dance to the needs of the industry. They call it sociotechnical systems, but you know, in all this critique and criticism, there is a dominant theme, which is a deep desire for measuring and controlling the culture, but there is little attempt to understand culture. Now, let’s be very clear, culture cannot be defined propositionally, which means by declaring what culture is and what it is not, that’s a purely intellectual exercise, and it’s very common within the academic circles, but outside of academia, much of life is lived and learned through experience without getting into definitions. I actually once asked someone what justice meant to. Her and she responded with distress and trauma. Serra had lost her father 35 years ago in a car accident, and the verdict of the court had gone as far as dehumanizing her entire family in their quest for justice. That was how she understood justice, not what she was taught in textbooks at her school. I have repeated this exercise with almost all social constructs, and physical as well. You name it: leadership, risk, accident investigations, learning, racism, and even apples, whiteboards, and wine bottles. We are all products of our unique histories, personal and collective memories, trauma, phobias, motivations, orientations, aspirations, and dreams. What we learn in lecture theaters and classrooms only forms a tiny part of our lives. Another problem with defining culture is the implied exception. What is left out in one definition becomes the primary focus of another definition. You may have noticed the excitement in an academic’s eyes when someone suggests a tweak to their theories, but when you challenge the professor’s assumptions, it is as if you have turned their world upside down. Many will love will live and die defending their thesis and reject alternative explanations. The few who I know have arrived at a point in time where their theories dictate their lives, but that is expected of academics, right? Read the work of Nassim Taleb on Skin in the game, it’s a fascinating book. Now, let’s talk about academic mediocracy. The psychology of academics also needs to be situated within the wider context of the education industry. Universities are territorial by nature, and territories are reinforced through discipline and departments. Notice the word discipline. If you are a professor in evolutionary sciences, and if you have a credible biological theory on culture, your views will not be entertained in the School of Social Sciences. If you are a relativist, your work will not be taken seriously in STEM sciences, which is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There education industry has historically underplayed the role of cross-disciplinary thinking under the pretext of contribution to knowledge. Most traditional universities lack the infrastructure to think with and across disciplines. Seeking truth is not always the goal of academia, it is always about protecting careers and prestiges of seasoned academics, but not always. And this is not a textbook hypothesis. It is my lived experience of working in the education industry for over five years. Sometimes the safest academic output is the one that says nothing at all. Let’s move from research to practice. Is it the historical development in academia rooted in mediocracy and mono-disciplinary thinking that has brought us to where we are today? I wonder. I see so many practitioners, regulators, consultants, and managers have fallen for simplistic ideas and constructs of culture. Many conflate systems with culture in their language, and culture change with rewriting processes or pushing for leadership programs. Now, the problem is not that experts and consultants are not read on culture. What I notice is that they have read only one book or submitted to one author as their gods. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A little knowledge about the moral and political truth of people who don’t share our values can be even more dangerous. People become insidiously self-righteous when they hear about distant cultures who do not conform to their textbook thinking. If you have never seen a person eating with hands, your first instinct will not foster compassion and curiosity. If you have never met people who chew tobacco all day to avoid drinking water, your first reaction will not be to engage with their history and geographical characteristics. Your first reaction will be to defend your beliefs and preserve your life processes, i.e. fight, flight, or freeze in your moral world. Many safety practitioners and consultants lack the ability to make the familiar strange and a strange familiar. According to one theory, the term barbarians was coined by the Victorian anthropologists who encountered an uncivilized population muttering baa baa baa. Safety as an industry has not moved beyond Victorian anthropology. I will return to this theme in a minute, but first, let’s talk about safety culture and religion. Our most fundamental differences about good and bad, sacred and profane, heavenly and earthly, moral and immoral, pure and impure, and compliant and non-compliant are not based on textbook definitions. Our differences are deeply and unconsciously religious. Read, for example, The Righteous Mind by Professor Jonathan Haidt. I will never forget the day when I interviewed a forklift driver who suffered critical injuries after he fell off the vehicle. What have you learned from this accident? I asked Khalid. His immediate reflex was, it’s God’s will. Hindus carry pictures of their deities to work and view all misfortune as the outcome of their own actions, which is karma. The Buddhists view time as impermanent, and they do not view mortality as the end of life in certain cultures and religions, the alphabet is written from right to left. People do not perceive right as correct. These differences are not trivial, given that many models of safety talk about bow ties, Swiss cheese, fish bone, eye cam, depict a linear representation of reality. I am not convinced that risk travels in such structural orders, and threats goes unidirectional from left to right. Are you, Professor Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Righteous Mind, shows that harm prevention, psychological safety, and the courage to speak up are embedded in Western values of autonomy and individualism, the Eastern world outrightly rejects these values and views community and divinity as the basis of all morality and social and political order. We keep pushing for more psychological safety in workplaces as if it is a universal truth, despite clear evidence that the tenets of psychological safety interfere with the core beliefs of certain societies, and I have written about this in a previous article titled Why People Don’t Speak Up. People don’t feel empowered to speak up when threat is imminent because their moral compass points at respecting their elders. Khalid’s learning, according to Professor John Jonathan Haidt, is the result of his faith in divinity. If all this sounds nonsensical, chances are that you may have hit the limits of your imagination and cultural worldview. The sucks, the secular world is not as scientific as it pretends to be read, for example, Rupert Sheldrake on The Science Delusion, or the British philosopher Mary Majlisley on the myth of science. Religion, including the dogma of scientism, segregates people, and religion still remains the foundation of our perception about how we see the world and what we consider right and wrong culture. Culture eats strategy, leadership, and processes for breakfast books on safety culture categorically avoid even the slight mention of faith, religion, superstition, spirituality, and rituals in understanding human behavior. This is why those who don’t read outside of safety books, cannot make the connection between religious structures, including their own, and how people’s faiths interfere with their beliefs about safety. Far from engaging, we become threatened when we are faced with alternative beliefs and religions. We fight, we argue, and we demean the other to prove our own beliefs, definitions, and principles right. Read the work of Ernest Becker. The book is called The Denial of Death. Now we can laugh at the faith of Khalid or Shivaram, and then turn to risk matrix or root cause analysis to determine what went wrong, but in the end it’s not what we find out there what we believe to be true safety sciences, even direct us that we can alter the beliefs of others, including Khalid and Shivaram, to match with our documented processes. Andrew Hopkins’ book, Structure Creates Culture, proposes that processes and systems can override people’s belief in about safety from Hopkins’ point of view. Those two men on the that we talked about at the start of this podcast, hanging on the pole without any PPE, should submit their faith to Kantian deontology, which is follow the rules. Now, the managers and supervisors, primed by the dogma of measurement and control will embrace these simplistic ideas quite literally and without thinking. Such belief systems can be extremely helpful for achieving deadlines and creating a temporary delusion of certainty, thus escaping thinking and all the hard work that it takes to create a meaningful culture change. The old saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast, proves the impotency of cultural theories beyond safety to include mergers, acquisitions, culture chain, new technology, and all acts of organizing. After years of telling and selling hegemonic top-down culture chain models, we simply realize that it does not work. For example, read Dead Aid by Dumbisa Mayo. If only processes, rules, tools, and technologies could come to our rescue whenever moral worlds collide. Read, for example, Peter Senge on the art and practice of learning organizations. If you want to think about how to create culture change successfully. Step away from defining safety culture now. If you see apples as a source of nutrition, and I see it as a device for entertainment, definitions and arguments produce bitterness and distances apart. Definitions become a source of cultural imperialism, i.e. my culture knows better than yours. Anthropologists, that is, people who formally study culture, understand this conundrum too well. They make no attempt to define culture through propositions. Instead, they travel far from their native lands to escape their imaginary ideal and textbook definitions. They they travel so far away from the comfort and familiarity of their own culture that their language falls apart in making sense of the world. In this new world, they learn to meet with people without the temptation to judge them or fit their beliefs to match with their preconceived definitions. In this meeting, commonly referred to as field work, they are confronted with people whose habits, rituals, and moral truths make no sense. People who eat stuff that they cannot even smell, people who nod their head sideways to affirm in agreement, people who climb poles without head production, protection, or safety booths. Anthropologists understand the influence of religion, faith, and rituals on people’s tastes, preferences, and choices. What a society considers good and bad without questioning is not a matter of what people do around here. It is the deeply held structure that religion leaves behind, even centuries after what nature referred to as God is dead. Read, for example, Robert Yell on the semiotics of religion, and I see this a lot in accident investigations and near misses. The office staff, unaware of their own dogma of measurement, rationality, efficiency, time saving, and causal explanation, are often left bewildered by the seafarers’ behavior in a crisis situation, but anthropologists do not get into lecturing people, judging them, correcting their gestures, or saving them from dying. Doing so implies many things, including that the anthropologist one knows what is right from wrong, two is morally superior to the natives, and three exists to save the others. Instead, they choose to experience the culture. They learn to listen and observe in patients, while constantly questioning their own beliefs and perceptions. This ongoing self-doubt, fundamentally missing in STEM sciences, is the bedrock for all humility in understanding culture. I see what you did just now, but I’m not sure if I’ve understood that. Can you please tell me what you did and why you did that? In this way, the natives learn to trust and share with these strange anthropologists from the foreign land, and the anthropologist learns a new way of living and being. In this doubtful exchange, there is humility and change, both the natives and the so-called educated person learns from each other. In this mutuality, there is also dignity and respect. No one feels belittled, offended, or proven wrong. Culture change is not imposed, it simply and effortlessly happens, and it grows. That is how change is achieved. It is not my way or highway. Change, like all successful marriages, is a compromise and our ability to take a step forward in the unknown. Now, here’s a little exercise for you. If you think I’m cooking up all this stuff while sitting in the comfort of my couch with a glass of wine, try this exercise randomly. Select a sample of 100 authors, research papers, blogs, conference speakers, and podcasts on safety, and observe the demographics. You will rarely find a First Nations author, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or a Hindu person. It is also rare to find women in safety and those who truly advocate for feminist ethics, for example, Nell Noddings or Francis Ellen Harper’s work on care ethics. The most dominant voices in safety are often those of middle-aged men, anchored to a material worldview, masculine ethics, and cognitive. Of rationalist constructs of safety culture. Many have no formal education in humanities, ethics, theology, mythology, anthropology, biology, or depth psychology. Many have never lived outside of their own country. Many are not qualified beyond engineering or cognitive psychology, which is brain-centered theories. Many dismiss the idea of the unconscious mind. Why? Because the unconscious cannot be controlled. Now, listen carefully to their language, and you will uncover a worldview oriented towards behaviorism, positivism, empiricism, deontology, and rationalism. In simpler words, a belief that all that cannot be measured against a universal standard simply does not exist. The material concept of harm avoidance and the finite nature of life are at the core of what we mean when we talk about risk reduction and harm prevention, that is, zero harm within the culture of safety. It is also rare to come across a safety book or a safety journal written in first person. The myth of objectivity is central in safety research, but also in safety audits and investigations. Safety is not that scientific. Science is a humble and ongoing inquiry into the unknown, and a dance between the observer and the observed. As I see it, safety, on the other hand, is a religion of absolute certainty and unquestioned submission to objectivity, measurement, and control. Follow the process, and thou shalt be saved. Now, consider this: nearly half of the world’s population is not male, and nearly three and a half billion people do not view death as the end of their lives. Their view of life and death is not linear, but cyclical, and they do not look up to the 10 rules laid out by the Abrahamic God in the search for salvation. So, what is safety culture? Now, it’s somewhat an irony that we have to talk about safety culture by writing an article on safety culture, so I think the best way to end this podcast is to go back to the cover story. What are those two men up to on those pillars? Why are they not wearing a harness? Is it not our moral responsibility to save them from dying? I invite you to listen to this story from Jenny Krasny, who I interviewed a few weeks ago,

Jenny Krasny 22:27
so I was working out of a country in Africa, and and I was blown away with an initiative that one of my customers had introduced, and he was very proud of the initiative, and the initiative was as simple as working from heights. He had sent a bunch of people on a course to learn how to work from heights only the week prior, and I get to the operation, and I’m working out of an office that was overlooking the area where trucks get loaded and unloaded, and as we were looking down, it was just in a break. We weren’t observing their work, per se, and all of a sudden he says, “Oh my gosh, Jenny, there are people here working at Heights, and they’re not following process, because what we had was a bunch of very proud workers with a glossy harness, you know, a beautiful harness, brand new, shiny. It wasn’t dirty yet, it wasn’t tattered, but they weren’t tethered to anything. And he said, “Oh, I need to go and tell them off, and I said, hang on, let’s have another look, and then we saw another worker doing exactly the same thing, and then another worker doing exactly the same thing, and he looked at me and turned white, and he said, Jenny, this is very embarrassing, and the issue was that the workers were wearing their harnesses, but there was nowhere, nowhere that they could actually tether this thing off, so if they did fall, it was nowhere, you know, there was nowhere to go, and I remember retelling that story to my manager at the time, and he said, See, this is good, Jenny. This is why they need you here. These people are taking, taking risks where they really shouldn’t be taking risks. And I remember saying to my manager, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that, because on the way to the facility we passed by, I’ll call it accommodation that people were living in, and the accommodation was probably the size of my desk times two, so not very big, and that accommodation was being guarded by someone’s child while mum and dad. Had gone to work to earn for the family, and this child was guarding the accommodation either with a fairly large knife, a machete that was about as tall as them, or what was even more confronting for someone like me, a string of bullets hanging across their body, and them holding a gun, and I said to my manager, you know, the average age for someone, the average lifespan for someone in that particular country is 45 if they’re lucky, if they’re lucky. So I said to my manager, who was, who had just turned 45 at the time, and I said to him, “Do you think you would live your life differently, knowing that this might be your last year of life compared to our environment, where people might live to 8590 if they’re blessed that way? And he said, “Well, yes, and I said, so would that change the way you see risk? Because right now someone falling off the back of the truck that might only be a meter and a half off the ground is not the worst case scenario for them at all, not being able to feed their family and having to protect their family by using one of their youngest children. Yeah, life’s a bit different, risks, risk awareness, risk tolerance, call it what you like, is different across the globe.

Nippin Anand 26:29
Now, why do we struggle to understand safety culture? The scientific man with a sense of moral superiority on a mission to save the world cannot engage with the lived realities, priorities, moral truth, and sufferings of another culture. Perhaps our problem is not with culture or safety culture, but the methods and ethics by which we claim our understanding. Maybe our struggle starts and ends with understanding our own hidden beliefs and assumptions, our own religion. Maybe we need to look at the mirror, we need to face the mirror before we look outside the window. Thank you. I hope you found this podcast interesting. I will leave some readings and some videos in the, in the podcast links. If you enjoyed listening to it, please subscribe to our channel, Embracing differences on YouTube or on your famous podcast channel. Thank you once again, and we’ll speak to you another time.