decision making that people are making that may be correct or may be incorrect? Dr Long: Yes, except I don’t think we can draw some of these things – because I think what safety tries to do is get social psychological stuff and then pull them back into a mechanistic framework. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed David Borys at all, but David was responsible for getting the concept of heuristics into the risk management standard framework. If you look at HB327, which is the handbook on how to communicate and consult about risk, heuristics is page 567. Dr Miller: So what I’m hearing you give us as a challenge of health and safety professionals, is that we need to look outside the traditional disciplines that we’ve looked at. But some practical tips on how can we – this stuff will be quite challenging for most people to understand. How can they translate some of these learnings that you’re talking about into every day workplace practices that would make us think about risk in a more balanced way? Dr Long: Most of what I do when I come into organisations is help them with skills, skill development. I think we have lots of the skills which we need to exercise, but they’re not exercised. Dr Miller: So are you saying to first start with an awareness? Dr Long: Yes. You start with an awareness, but then I would say to an organisation “You know what? You have a walk around checklist where you walk around your site. Great. But leave it in your pocket. You don’t need it. All you need is an open question. So if you just ask some open questions and just start to listen to people in a simple conversation where you truly engage, you might actually get somewhere”. If you go out with a checklist, it shapes the whole way you are, it pushes you in the linear way it tries to make you. Dr Miller: So what are some of the open questions you should challenge us to ask in a workplace? If I’m a leader and I want to walk around my workplace and truly understand what’s going on… Dr Long: Openness is a disposition and a mental attitude and a world view. That’s very scary for a lot of people, because it empowers the other person. The
Back to the initial point I made about a transdisciplinary approach, there are disciplines outside of the current safety space that have a great deal of value to add. They’re not being engaged. Dr Miller: And what are some of those Robert? Dr Long: Well mostly things in a social science area. Dr Miller: So I’m going to loop you back to something you said at the beginning of the conversation about safety, the challenge for safety professionals is to move outside their own disciplines during their training. So is that a final challenge that you’d be setting us all? Dr Long: Yes. I would have a careful look at the curriculum, and I would argue for some major reforms in the curriculum. Dr Miller: To make people look at other disciplines and the evidence that they can bring. Dr Long: Just go to any curriculum anywhere in risk and safety, University degree, diploma, whatever it is, and just do a little mathematical exercise and ask yourself how much of the time is committed to a mechanistic discipline rather than a social science or a humanistic discipline or a humanistic focus. And yet the moment a safety person leaves that training and gets out into the workforce, 99 percent of what they do is trying to engage with people. And they get frustrated because they don’t know how to do it well. Dr Miller: So it comes back to the communication. I’m going to open it to our visitors in the room. Ms Pryor: So Rob bringing your psychology approach how do we get these people, who you quite rightly say are in their silos, to actually get to be open minded and talk to each other? And then as you quite reasonably say, how do we draw out the strengths of all of those to something that’s integrated and not lose the good things but put the other things aside? I really like your comment about we’ve got to be evidence based and we’ve got to look to the research. I see part of the problem is these people do their research, but they only do their research in their area they’re interested in. Have you got any suggestions about – at this level of the people that are…