Safety Paradigm! Is it dangerous?

The current safety paradigm is definately leaning towards behavioural control but is it dangerous?

Paradigms in safety are interesting to say the least so what is a paradigm?

Paradigms are a way in which we view safety or for that matter life. It's like a pair of internal sunglasses, when they are on, we forget they are changing the colour of the way we view safety!

If you've ever stepped inside on a sunny day still wearing sunglasses or driven into a tunnel with the on, you'll find you are temporarily blinded untill you take them off!

The sunglasses (paradigm) have distorted the true colour (risks) and light (controls). They can be useful as long as we acknowledge that they have filtered out some of our world.

In the same way the safety paradigm filter our views on safety. They allow us to set boudaries and make sense of all the death in our industry.

They allow us to live comfortably so we don't have to reexamine something everytime we encouter it! A good example is generic Risk Assessments or JSA's.

Examaning or changing the safety paradigm is not always easy as people have witnessed through people feeling threatened banning me.

Many feel uncomfortable becuase something that seems secure is taken away or altered eg behavioural controls and my stance against them.

But the safety paradigm is robbing the profession from experiencing a richer more fullfilling profession. It's a great loss to those who lead our profession becuase they have to change their paradigm and are unwilling to do so.

However the current safety paradigm focussing more and more on blame of the individual and hence increasing laws based on modifying behaviour is seriously clouding/distorting the Safety Professions ability to actually reduce death, injury and disease in our workplaces, on our roads and in the general community.

It's time the leaders of safety took their sunglasses off (demolished safety paradigms) so they can see clearly we are not saving lives by focussing on behaviour but actually destroying lives, even if this sort of focuss removes a problem from the immediate vicinity, it will shift it to another area of our society and hasn't achieved anything for the good of the community or the workers.

For example if we heavily drug test our workforce and remove all those using illegal drugs, we haven't achieved anything just moved the problem somewhere else and in all likelihood made that problem even bigger. The drug user who had hope with employment will now feel hopeless and be thrown on the scrap heap only to turn to drugs more heavily and hence create an even bigger problem than there was before.

I ask the leaders of safety to stop running scared and banning people like me who have a totally different view but embrace the views and the people so we may open up the safety paradigm to actually help the whole community not just our own workplace.

Sincerely
Daniel Di-Giusto

I must thank Dr Norm Wakefield and Jody Brolsma for the wonderful reference in the book Men are from Israel Women are from Moab