With our focus on improving the safety in workplaces, our intention is to make things less complicated and difficult. Many organizations that we work with are all tangled up and things keep getting twisted around.
People get protective of their turf, resist changes, form tight little groups and exclude others, bully, get into endless arguments with management and others, and waste a huge amount of time in unproductive activities. This drives the management into difficult positions trying to push to get things done safely and on time. Everyone is in the tangled web.
Things do not have to be this way! Most of the people know that this is counter-productive but that is the way it is. However, when we engage the people from across the organization in the Complexity Leadership Process, guiding them in a purposeful conversation of discovery that changes everything, they find it does not have to be that way!
In working with them, we begin with an important question like “How can we reduce the number of people getting hurt?” and talk together. In the course of this, stories are told, incidents remembered, injuries relived, and things open up. The people discover that they know a lot about all this, but the knowledge was hidden and scattered among everyone.
As we talk together, we see how, in working together, we can get a lot better in reducing injuries.
No one comes to work expecting to get hurt, so they begin to see ways for people to stay healthy. As their ideas develop, they are posted on the wall chart we use and a Strategic Safety Plan develops. The excitement builds as people engage in the conversation and debates. They co-create their safety future together, discover the connections that they have with others, and create ad-hoc teams to go after their big discoveries for improvement. When they have co-created their plan, priorities are clarified, and resistance to change virtually disappears so changes are made and improvement is seen very quickly. Their Strategic Safety Plan is posted for everyone to see and use going forward.
In working this way, management’s job gets a lot easier and becomes one of facilitating the people rather than having to drive them. Becoming a cheerleader is more fun than being a driver. Furthermore, the accident and injury rates go way down so everyone wins. I know this happens because this is what happened to me when I was the plant manager in the DuPont Belle, West Virginia Plant.
Most of us working in safety have been brought up to see organizations as if they are machine-like. This thinking goes all the way back to Descartes (1596-1650) and Newton (1642-1727). We use reductionist approaches to try to understand them. We seek cause/effect relationships. We use linear processes for training and the like, prescribing answers and doing things TO the people. We work on this part or that part trying to fix the whole thing. 
The first part of this work is sharing all information and talking together about it. Another part is building trust and interdependence with the people as we openly discuss what is happening, what we are doing and why. The third part of this work is helping people to see the big picture and how important their part is to the success of the whole business.
Lots of critical knowledge, experience and skills will be lost. Younger people, who have grown up in an electronic world of texting and games, will replace these people. Many are out of shape and bordering on being over weight; some are developing diabetes. This will pose significant challenges to employers and the need to work safely and well.
Most of the safety people I’ve come to know approach organizations as if they are mechanical things to manipulate. Organizations are structured in functions. Knowledge is structured in pieces. People are narrowly skilled. Motivation is based on external factors. Information is shared on a need to know basis. Change is a troubling problem. People work in prescribed roles seeing only their part of the work. If change is needed people are moved around like chairs. Training is provided in abundance. Safety programs are set up as step-by-step processes where things are arranged in a prescribed sequence. 
When I began to learn about chaos and complexity science, I saw that this was the way to handle the high level of change. As we shared more and more information, helped people to really understand the nature of the business and their important roles in its success, and as we built more trust and interdependence, people began to step forward to help us take on all the changes that poured into our organization. I did not have to do everything myself, which was a great relief.
It was fascinating to see the contrast between the usual, linear, mechanical approach to safety and The Complexity Leadership Process (CLP) that I discussed at my display table. A large number of people talked with me at my display table about The Complexity Leadership Process which was new to all of them. Many could not believe how quickly and dramatically the safety performance improved using the CLP. At one level the CLP looks like a simple employee involvement program, yet it is much more and also different at a deeper level than the usual employee involvement processes. One fellow, who recently wrote a book about changing the safety culture to excellence just brushed the CLP aside as something he’d already seen. The approach to safety excellence he’s written about involves 43 linear steps that take 3-5 times as long as the CLP and require a very high level of persistence and determination over many years.
I’ll be participating as a sponsor for the Conference Program Brochure. I’ll have an ad in the Brochure as well as a display table. My tag line is “When safety gets right, everything else gets right”. Since I am not an official speaker, I am going to use my display table as an opportunity to talk with people about the 
This Blog is focused on my new book, The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice. I am the editor for this book that was just published by Emergent Publications. It can be purchased directly from their 
