How to Tackle Risk You Can’t See
So often in strategic planning and goal setting people can’t see the trade-offs and by-products they are putting in place. You can’t see what you don’t know. We saw this with the recent research into traffic safety messages (https://safetyrisk.net/study-reveals-an-unexpected-side-effect-of-traffic-safety-messages/ ).
The trouble is the industry of safety is so poorly mis-educated and indoctrinated that it thinks that the behaviourist/engineering worldview sees all. Of course, it doesn’t. Furthermore, such a worldview creates enormous blindness to trade-offs and by-products in strategy (https://safetyrisk.net/essential-elements-for-a-safety-strategy/ ), planning, goal setting (https://safetyrisk.net/goals-and-vision-in-safety/ ) and perception. Safety doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and is blind to what it should know, but it doesn’t want to know it.
You will never get ahead of by-products and trade-offs in risk from the safety mono-disciplinary worldview. The best way to tackle the psychology of goals, strategic thinking and trade-offs in risk is from a Transdisciplinary worldview (https://safetyrisk.net/transdisciplinary-thinking-in-risk-and-safety/ ). That is, from a worldview that gives value to many worldviews and disciplines that don’t see the world like safety. This is the foundation for Envisioning Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/ ).
When your only lens for looking at the world is safety, you won’t see much. In all my years in Education, Learning, Curriculum and Pedagogy I have never witnessed an industry more closed, fearful and afraid of learning. Even when it talks about learning tams and learning it isn’t about learning!
Having worked and studied across many disciplines I have never seen a curriculum so narrow as safety. No wonder safety is so surprised when by-products from strategy come back and bite them. I wonder how many more years it will take for Safety to wake up to the fact that zero doesn’t work and creates more dangerous by-products than it thinks it solves!
A Transdisciplinary view doesn’t fear what it doesn’t know because it trusts and validates the knowing of other disciplines equal to its own. Transdisciplinarity validates the idea that other worldviews and disciplines can see things that safety cannot see and visa versa. Such a view doesn’t privilege one view over another nor insist on a hierarchy of knowing (eg. science over metaphysics). Such a view knows how to converse and listen to disciplines and worldviews it knows little about.
Goodness me, just think about it, one might even design and strategize approaches to risk that might work (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/ ).