Description
Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep209
We are in the business of change. But we aren't always great at it. This is a podcast about babies and blindness, carrots and elephants, and the necessary tension between where we want to go, and where we are right now.
I don't think we will ever be able to rest on our laurels, even if we become the most influential and effective safety professionals in history. Even if all the hazards are identified, all the controls are known and in place, I think two things will always be true. The first truth is that the only thing that stays the same is change - change in operations, change in people, change in resourcing, change in the work environment or industry context. The second truth, or maybe I should say what I believe to be true, comes from the High Reliability Organising research. Even when everything seems great, our ongoing job is to create and maintain a sense of unease about things, which keeps us tuned into and anticipating change and what needs to change.
I gave up the clever but trite phrase 'my job is to make myself redundant' many years ago for this reason. I will make the argument that not only is the job never finished, that we need to earn our place in our organisation using this very logic.
And until that time, it can feel really, really frustrating.
Are we doing enough? Is the fundamental question of H&S governance. And the answer, it seems at least in New Zealand, is largely not one given with confidence. And beyond NZ, the answer sometimes seems vague, unclear, or uncertain. Governance arguably is the lynchpin around which all health...
Published 07/31/24
This is a conversation about a really important mission to improve health and safety. It's also about extreme difficulty, persistence, and how being professional might actually mean straying far outside your one specific professional domain.
Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap.
...
Published 05/30/24