So, You Want Culture Change?
When one’s definition of tradition is both programs, behaviours or values (or all three) the methods (strategies) that end result mirror the definition. Altering values, programs and behaviours doesn’t change tradition, it solely impacts these small parts of tradition.
One’s methodology (worldview) drives one’s methodology and so we most frequently hear speak about tradition change in safety in these three strategies. That is often the case as a result of Security doesn’t do something that can’t be measured. Effectively, there’s an issue at the beginning. There shall be little change to tradition if the idea of measurement is taken to the duty. Only a few issues are extra damaging to tradition change than the idea/dependancy to measurement.
Step one in embracing tradition change is eliminating the foolish assumption: ‘what can’t be measured can’t be managed’.
The following step to grasp tradition change is to embrace a Transdisciplinary method to tradition with a greater aphorism: ‘not everything that counts can be counted’.
The most effective place to start out in understanding and defining tradition is in a broad method to organizing and being. Because of this the language of ‘ecologies’ is so essential (https://safetyrisk.net/understanding-systems-and-ecologies-in-risk/ ). The language of ‘ecologies’ helps take us into the unmeasurable ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu), the collective unconscious and the autopoetic (self-generating) nature of social relationships (Socialitie). After we work in these areas we transfer away from the empiricist notion of realizing that solely thinks of that means and function when it comes to engineering and objects. Culture is finest identified and felt intuitively (Polanyi). In relation to tradition, science and engineering should not going to be a lot assist. One must step outdoors of those disciplines and their assumptions if one ever hopes to grasp and have an effect on tradition.
So, let’s check out simply one among these ecologies (there are a lot of extra) and the half it performs in defining tradition: Fantasy-symbolic ecology.
The development of myth-symbol is foundational to human being and identification. When one research Anthropology, Sociology, Social Psychology, Historical past, Semiotics, Non secular Research or Ethnography one learns in a short time how symbol-myth is foundational to human ‘being’. Certainly, Jung’s research of the collective unconscious demonstrates how all cultures and civilizations in historical past share a commonality in mythic-symbolic being. One can mess around with programs, behaviours and values as a lot as one needs but when there isn’t a consideration paid to myth-symbols in organizing nothing will change within the collective unconscious.
Yesterday was Remembrance Day in Australia. A day when the tip of World Warfare One is remembered. On such a day, we see and listen to principally myth-symbol and none of it’s measurable. When one engages in understanding myth-symbol, one has to step fully outdoors measurement sensibility. One additionally has to step outdoors of the brain-centric sense of ‘being’ projected onto human realizing by empiricist disciplines.
Science nonetheless has little thought of human reminiscence (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02211-5 ) and subsequent to no thought of what makes for collective reminiscence (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-power-of-collective-memory/ ). The second we transfer from empiricist definitions of realizing to making an attempt to grasp collective feeling, brain-centrism doesn’t assist a lot (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00257/full ). Collective reminiscence doesn’t occur IN individuals however BETWEEN individuals and holds extra thriller than it does any sense of measured ‘knowing’. Generally reminiscence is triggered by a tune or poem and isn’t ‘known’ till it’s heard. Even then such realizing just isn’t cognitive however felt. The concept of a collective Thoughts just isn’t about shared mind pondering however reasonably mutually skilled realizing between individuals (https://pure.bond.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/28738360/Collective_Memory_and_Forgetting.pdf ). None of this will make sense to engineering. Collective realizing between individuals just isn’t mechanical.
After we communicate of tradition and exclude the mysteries of myth-symbolic realizing we shift the dialog again to the insignificance of measurables. That is so clear within the populism of the ‘safetyculture’ (https://safetyculture.com/) phenomenon that’s neither about safety or tradition however reasonably the systematic regurgitation of checklisting.
If you’d like tradition change one must step outdoors of the favored constructs of Security to a variety of ecologies unknown to the widespread discourse within the trade, a tricky ask for an trade anchored to compliance, measurables and engineering.