The Safety Leadership Process is firmly based in complexity science, where organizations are seen as behaving more like living systems than machines.
But, the machine view of organizations is the dominant paradigm right now. We direct the people to work in tight procedures. We manipulate them to do things right. We punish them when there is an injury or incidents. We look for root-cause. We think that if we can take things apart and understand the parts that we can understand the whole. Almost all the effort is engaged in doing things TO the people as if they were just interchangeable parts of a machine. Most people push back against authority in this paradigm. This is a win/lose environment.
When we see organizations as if they are living systems, we focus on the whole system where all the parts are interconnected and interacting all the time. Change is embraced. Information needs to be freely flowing so that all the parts are working in harmony. Trust needs to be built so that people can depend on each other and work more effectively together. Each person helps the others do their work more effectively. People from all levels PARTNER together for the good of the whole – rising above their own selfish needs and goals. This is a win for safety, a win for the business, a win for the people.
Dr. Sydney Dekker, an Australian safety expert and leader, spoke at the ASSE Safety 2014 Conference. He is a leading thinker in trying to bring the complexity science paradigm into the field of safety. In his talk, he emphasized that while great improvements in reducing injuries and incidents has been achieved over the last 50 years, the injury rate improvements are getting smaller. By shifting our thinking to the complexity paradigm, we can achieve excellence.
This is what I was advocating in my talk I described above. The Safety Leadership Process puts the complexity paradigm into the organization. This is what I used as a plant manager and now as a Safety Consultant with excellent results. The Safety Leadership Process is a robust, proven, easily understood, low investment process that leads to sustainable levels of safety excellence.
A core part of the Safety Leadership Process requires everyone to get clear on their assumptions, values and priorities. I have often found that various members of management are not clear and aligned, which results in mixed messages and inconsistent results.
A powerful complexity tool called The Process Enneagram© is used to bring the people together to struggle with the hard questions like “Is safety #1?” or “How do we get everyone engaged in helping to improve our safety performance and sustain it?” Here is a link to sign up and receive free access to a recent webinar I held to describe this tool and its use.
People are often reluctant to speak up in these negative environments. Ideas for improvement never surface. New employees are negatively influenced and led astray. Supervisors have a very rough time getting the people to do their work properly. Grievance rates are high and much time is wasted needlessly because these are not addressed at an early stage.
For most managers putting production first can be quite subtle with messages like:
As managers go into their workplaces, walking around watching, listening and sharing with true authenticity and interest, trust and interdependence build. People learn to open up, to share, to point out possible areas for improvement, and to realize that they are a critical part of the whole safety effort. A huge, positive shift in the safety culture occurs. The people close to the actual, physical work are often in the best position to see potential hazards that are not visible to the managers. The managers often need to push to meet production schedules so it is easy for them to miss these potential hazards. Therefore, having the active help of those closest to the work is an important piece of the total safety effort. This is one way we avoid disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire.
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!
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. 
