Digital Engineering Library

The Visionary Imagination – Louisa Lawson Following a week of lies, criminal cover ups and misogynistic performance by the Australian Prime Minister we see yet again the demonization of women by the face of  masculinist orthodoxy  . If ever we needed visionaries like Louisa Lawson, it is today. Strange how orthodoxy always hides behind traditionalism to do its bidding of keeping women in their place. Louisa demonstrates that visionaries reject stasis and zero, and all semiotics of masculinist power. The following is a selection from Chapter 3 of the book Envisioning Risk ( https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/ ). Louisa Lawson (1848-1920) Louisa Lawson was one of the first feminist radicals in Australian History. Her husband Peter died leaving Louisa with £1103 so she bought a paper called  The Republican . Soon Louisa, established the first journal for Women in Australia called ‘Dawn’.  Louisa was a suffr...

  How Effective Are Your Conversations About Risk? One of the reasons why Safety is so obsessed with: paperwork, systems and audits, is that it is so poor at conversation. In the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) we have conducted thousands of workshops on conversation skills and not one risk and safety person has demonstrated even the slightest competence in the basics of conversation. When it comes to the fundamentals of helping, listening, caring and conversation it seems Safety is not interested.   When we run our workshops most of what we cover is deemed ‘new’ to risk and safety people. Yet, in the helping professions most of what we do is considered a 101 introduction.   Learning to conduct a conversation about risk is not easy. Talking and telling are not conversation.   Most of the organisations we work with, take more than a couple of years to become proficient and effective in the art of conversation. Especially, when it comes to skills in list...

  Traditional Safety The purpose of traditions is to ensure nothing changes. What often happens in starting any new experience, is that rituals and gestures quickly become traditions as people endeavour to ‘lock in’ an experience they don’t want to change. Initially, the tradition itself represents a change or transition from something previously experienced. This involves a degree of cognitive dissonance and painful separation, for which the new tradition compensates. Tradition stands in opposition to: discovery, learning, movement and innovation. Tradition establishes a stasis and orthodoxy so that a club/group/organization. Upon formation, traditions, gestures and rituals set a new orthodoxy, and are politicized so that nothing will change. Once a group has been politicized into a tradition then follows mantras and semi-religious rituals that further set-in concrete accepted cultural norms. This is how traditional risk and safety evolved. Traditional risk and safety emer...

The Measurement Mindset in Safety??? Most human living is NOT measurable. Most of the things that are important to fallible persons, are not only NOT measurable, they shouldn’t be. Any effort to measure qualitative values demonstrates a psychosis with measurement itself, and this demonstrates one attribute of ‘the safety mindset’. The idea of a mindset denotes a broad disposition or orientation, which is why the word ‘mind’ is used, not ‘brain’. A mindset is a set of philosophical assumptions associated with the way someone is oriented towards the world (worldview/ideology). So, I was not surprised to see that Safety is proposing to measure ‘a safety mindset’, whatever that means? Of course, if you want to know what Safety is oriented towards just look at the safety curriculum, global zero discourse or AIHS Body of Knowledge and you have your answer. From the evidence one can conclude that the safety mindset is characterized by: the adoration of objects, counting, dehumanizing...

  What You Profess in Safety There is no separation between claiming the word ‘professional’ and what you profess. What one professes determines if one is professional regardless of whether one likes to claim the word as a brand or not. Professions that understand an ethic of risk know that certain language, beliefs and behaviours exclude people from their profes sion.  Sometimes required beliefs, values and language are captured in a professional standard or a code of ethics, but even then, adherence to a code doesn’t make one professional. Being professional extends well beyond compliance to a code, but incorporates a disposition that is difficult to quantify. Being professional is more about an implicit way of knowing than compliance to a code. There is a certain ‘spirit’ associated with being professional. You certainly know when people are NOT professional. When we do a language audit in organisations, we analyze the language used in risk and safety in an organizati...

  Sexual Harassment and Safety Cosmetics Understanding an Ethic of Risk is not about ‘duty’, we see this in the failed deontological ethic of the AIHS BoK Chapter 38.3. You cannot come to such a critical ethical issue as sexual harassment in the workplace, as if psychological safety is just about meeting duties under the Act and Regulation. Yet this is how the Safety presents the problem ·          Work-related psychological health and safety: A systematic approach to meeting your duties ·          Preventing Workplace sexual harassment guide Sexual harassment is not about some objective rule or behaviour but rather deeply philosophical and ideological values hidden in plain sight. Of course, in Safety, there is no Feminist group or Ethic of Risk. Indeed, this masculinist industry does a great job on lining up all the sexist agenda behind the masculinst ethic of duty. The last thing this indu...