It’s the holiday season. One terrific way to celebrate as a family is to see a movie together. Our pick? Star Wars: the Force Awakens.Well, that was an easy decision. The next one is harder though…what sort of experience do we want? Will it be UltraAVX, D-Box, IMAX, 3D, VIP, Dolby ATMOS or Surround sound, or standard digital? While sorting through the movie options, for some reason I began thinking about safety culture and had an epiphany. Safety culture is a movie, not a photo.
A photo would be a Star Wars poster, a single image that a designer has artistically constructed. It’s not the full story, just a teaser aimed to influence people to buy a ticket. We understand this and don’t expect to comprehend the entire picture from one poster. A safety culture survey or audit should be treated in the same fashion. All we see is a photo, a snapshot capturing a moment in time. Similar to the poster artist, a survey designer also has a preconceived idea; influence is in the form of questions. The range of questions extends from researched “best practices” to personal whim.
I believe this is a major limitation of the survey/audit/poster. It could totally miss what people actually experience as a movie. A movie introduces visual motion and audible sound to excite our human senses and release emotions and feelings. We can watch behaviours as well as their positive and negative consequences being delivered. With flow we are able to sense operating point movement and drift into the zone of complacency and eventual failure. A safety culture has sound that a photo cannot reveal. In a movie you can hear loud communication, quiet conversations, or lack of (e.g., cone of silence).
If we were to create “Safety Culture, the Movie”, what would we need to consider? I’ve compiled a short list. What would you add?
- Human actor engagement
- Actors on screen – lead characters, supporting players, cameo appearances, cast in crowds; front-line workers, supervisors, safety professionals, public at large
- Actors behind the screen – investors, producer, director, music arranger, theatre owners, craft guilds; Board, execs, project managers, suppliers, unions
- Actors in front of the screen – paying audience, theatre staff, movie critics; customers, safety associations, regulatory inspectors
- Story line
- Safety culture is one big story
- Safety culture movie is neverending
- Within the one big story are several side stories, episodes, subplots
- Relationships between characters and roles played
- Heroes, villains, maidens in distress, comic relief, clones
- Contact is continuous and relationships can shift over time (compare to a snapshot audit focusing on one scene at a particular time slot)
- What seems in the beginning to be independent interactions are often interconnected (“Luke…I am your father”) and may lead to a dilemma or paradox later
- Theme
- Overt message of the safety culture movie – Good triumphs Evil? Might makes Right? Focus on what goes wrong? Honesty? Respect?
- Hidden messages – Resistance is futile? Pay attention to outliers? Do what I say, not what I do? It’s all about the optics?
- Significance of myths, legends, rituals in the safety culture – the Dark side, Jedi order, zero harm workplace, behaviour-based safety
- Critique
- What can we learn if our movie is scored on a Flixter (Rotten tomatoes) scale out of 100?
- What does a score of 30, 65, 95 tell us about performance? Success?
- We can learn from each critic and fan comment standing on its own rather than dealing with a mathematical average
- Feedback will influence and shape the ongoing movie
- Too dark, not enough SFX, too many safety rules, not enough communication
- What can we learn if our movie is scored on a Flixter (Rotten tomatoes) scale out of 100?
- Artifacts
- A poster provides a few while a movie contains numerous for the discerning eye
- Besides the artifacts displayed on screen, many are revealed in the narratives actors share with each other off screen during lunch hours, breaks, commutes
- What might we further learn by closely examining artifacts? For instance, what’s the meaning behind…
- Leia’s new hairdo (a new safety compliance policy)?
- The short, funny looking alien standing next to R2D2 and C3PO (a safety watcher?)
- Why Han Solo can’t be separated from his blaster (just following a PPE rule)?
- Rey using some kind of staff weapon, perhaps similar to the staffs used by General Grievous’ body guards in Episode III (is it SOP certified)?
- The star destroyers eliminating the control towers which caused them so many problems in the Battle of Endor (implementation of an accident investigation recommendation)?
- Improvement in the X-Wing fighters (a safety by design change after an action review with surviving pilots?)
Season’s greetings, everyone! And may the Force be with you.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it!