Calling people ‘spud heads’ and saying they need to be Bi-polar?

The next thing safety people will need to be educated in is acting!

 

This article/concept from Dr Long HERE is referring to all safety people as potato heads. As per this article and the concept behind what is a virtue of a potato head; a potato head is able to switch body parts and take on a different persona. Kids used to make their own potato heads into anyone they wanted.

 

My philosophical question would be to this whole concept; who creates the spud-head? If a potato head is made/shaped so must be a spud head, then there must be a creator!

So I suppose what Mr Long is saying or how I read this nonsense, is that safety people can be shaped to suit everyone else. Long did say “because you could make a potato head anything we wanted, he was a chameleon, a fake”. A fake you say...I wonder what a CEO would say if I told them to fit into what others wanted them to be, to be moulded and crafted into anything but their true-self. Then to add his little bit of sarcasm, he makes the point in a typical indirect way that spud heads are a cynic, something Long says makes for a toxic safety culture. If a toxic safety culture is created out of questioning peoples motives and practices to seek out safety, then I have no problems being called a cynic. I do however do not respect the notion that people who question cause toxic workplaces.

What causes toxic workplaces are psychopaths, pathological lies and people with self serving interests. These are the people who get jealous of others who are doing their job and not spending all day working on ways to ruin someone.

Now in relation to the cynic side of the story, I have often debated that there have been many great cynics in history that have improved society, but Long cannot fathom this truth. I think Long might actually be a bit positively cynical about many things himself, but sometimes we cannot see what we truly are.

I have a real problem with this concept of ‘genuine people’ being told to take on a different persona (meaning personality). Whatever happened to just being yourself? Your personality (character) should never change, you are who you are. If you start to role play and are constantly shaped by others, you fragment your own being. Your work/task may change, but your character (nature) should remain the same. Do you come home from work and change into a parent character? I would not think so; ‘you’ come home without the obligations of work filling your mind. Without the thought of work taking up all your energy, you can focus more on the role of parenting, hobbies or whatever, but your character should never change. If you have to take on a different persona, then sadly, I feel you are being false to yourself and to others. How is it possible for others to understand you, if they catch you out somewhere between your shift of persona.

People that act out roles are those trying to be someone their not. This could be driven by fear or by greed. Fear would be being left out of a group/society and greed would be being to persuade others into buying something you are selling. If you look into the Art of Persuasion (or six steps of persuasion), it’s all about learning how to manipulate others and trick others into getting them to give more than they normally would. Politics are a great example of this when election time is due, as is when a salesman is using humble enquiry to make you buy that thing. These people spend a lot of time learning how to manipulate the mind of someone else, how to phrase questions and unconsciously feed information that will lead you into making a favourable choice. Then after you get home and start to think about why you have something you didn’t really want, you then realise you have been cognitively manipulated...you are a sucker.

Telling students or anyone for that matter, that being a safety person requires one to be bi-polar is absurd and unprofessional in my view. Is Long expecting or even wanting safety people to become Schizophrenic as well (failure to recognize what is real or who they are). Why should safety people have to change their persona to make anyone happy? If people don’t respect what safety is (or should be) and also that of the role of a safety person (what they do), then sorry, this is a cultural issue and needs to be rectified by the leaders or manages of the organisation.

In my opinion, Long just loves to denounce others in any way he can (as often self announced in his time on LinkedIn forums etc where he ends up leaving the site due to others lack of  so-called skills an academic knowledge etc). Then if you do not follow his systems or support his ideas he will denounce you and ignore you (ostracising). If you follow Longs literature, you can see how it develops and is shaped to fit feedback. He often has to clarify and make alterations to steer his view point to suit the feedback, then if you challenge him to much he sooks and gets the site owner to delete comments not in his favour.

One minute Long is saying a safety person has to be bi-polar, to then saying we all need to play many different roles. Life is not cosplay!. I would also not think this trait is being bi-polar; it’s being multi-skilled. Dr Long has criticised topics that say people and environment have nothing to do with making conscience decisions, so I wonder what he means by this; “social arrangements shape decision making and judgments”...are not these things the topics that shape conscience judgments?

I am not sure how one can shape anyone into being ‘empathetic’ (entering into a feeling of another), a term Dr Long has prescribed that safety people need to be, but a concept he has referred to that does not exist. An example would be such as when I wrote a topic called Satellite Insightfulness (basically meaning empathetic); having the ability to step away from your-self and put your-self into an external orientation, be it around person or environment. This is another clear example of Longs constant advertising to be the only one who knows anything at all. I suppose he does think he is talking to a bunch a spud heads he is shaping.

For someone that I doubt has ever been a front line safety person (not a manager or consultant), Long sure thinks he knows what it is to be a safety person and what safety people go through on a daily basis. Maybe the saying “it takes one to know one would fit here perfect”. Psychologists and many experts are like this. They read a book, go to uni, watch some Ted talks or review some study done, then think they understand the day to day problems people face. Funny thing is that many academic who are in the one sector can disagree. The world today is too dynamic for this sort of thinking. In a general sense this may be true, but on an individual level this is not true. We can gauge better what a group may do, but not so easy with an individual as we are all chaotic.

Safety people are not discerners of risk, but this types of concept (shaping safety people) again unrightfully entrusts this role onto safety people as the only ones who can discern risk. A safety person is there to advise on what the limits/constraints are to taking a risk with a task (set mostly by legislation), that's it in a nutshell. It is then up to those doing the risk (leaders/workers) to discern it for themselves using this advice. The whole idea that safety people are owners/discerners of risk (although this may change as understanding grows) is unjustified. It is this type of thinking that is making the safety sector more dissented and more divided. Lots of factors and expertise need to be holistically included in the process of discerning risk and the people doing the task will discern it for themselves within the constraints set by such constraining rules.

It is for this reason I believe the term ‘potato/spud head’ is a terribly demeaning, and childish concept. It gives a unwarranted nickname to safety people that is negative. If safety people where the owners and discerners of risk, they still should not be called such a term. The safety person has a role to fill; this role is to advise on constraints. To anyone who says different, I feel they really need to understand corporate governance and enterprise risk management etc. If safety people are not constantly hosted as the “owners of safety” and “change managers” or “culture developers” as so often referred to on safety sites, safety people would not need to shaped into anything or be bipolar, they can just do their job as advisor just like a mechanic is a mechanic and a CEO is a CEO.

Dr Long explains that a potato head knows that projecting into the future or attributing things to the past is spud head thinking. This to me is saying that planning for risk and retrospection is wrong. What is the purpose of a Risk Assessment? And what concept does an incident investigation have to learn from? There you go; anyone who has done a risk assessment and or incident investigations is a “spudhead”. Long has criticised the term hindsight bias, but hindsight (retrospection) can be a very helpful and positive way to help improve for the future even if they say they knew it all along. But saying this has now labelled me a spud head.

Maybe Long is acting like a spud head himself as per his own descriptive list...he maybe a professional pumpkin head...he tells everyone there is a problem with safety, he puts on the angry face when people don't listen to him and his ideals, he thinks everyone is a spud head who is not educated in all things such as comments like this “Spud heads think anyone who takes a risk or makes a mistake is an idiot or stupid. This is all orthodox spud heads have left, they don’t understand human decision making, they don’t understand social psychology, they don’t understand human fallibility”, he dehumanizes others (calling safety people such things as spud heads), he territory protects behind the mask of expertise (known as the curse of knowledge), he makes safety more complex by putting more ownership of skills onto safety people, he continually repeats the nonsense language of safety owning safety, and thinks that responsibility (blame) is nonsense. I wonder if Long has ever done a serious incident report (alone) and I wonder how any report cannot give blame. He does not respect the benefits of hindsight (a key learning tool), and does not think being sceptical/cynical has any good purpose in safety (although many great things have been improved from this very trait) just to name a few topics.

It is for these collective reasons amongst many, that I feel Dr Long does not respectfully represent safety people of what I feel safety is all about.

I think that maybe Long is barking up the wrong tree. If he wants to change the culture of safety into a culture of psychology and learning, he needs to target (shape them) the legal industry, corporate levels and focus on managers and officers; those who do own the ability to change culture and manage risk. I feel Dr Long is too fixated on one area (his expertise in psychology and learning most likely in childhood development) and this is fine, but he cannot constantly tell people to unlearn key safety requirements and rules that are required by law to be followed to ensure best practice.

He tells people that his systems and training discern real risk, yet he does not believe in systems and mechanistic approaches, yet seems to have many. A prime example is his parroted safety maturity chart that represents a typical linear step up to succuss (the goal), yet when questioned about this concept, tries to justify it as a holist approach. As I said in the reply, a step up to a end goal illustration does not represent a holistic approach.  

Based on his maturity chart, how is it possible to create a generative workplace when the first steps required to take are creating systems (something he despises), legislative and engineering controls that have not at this point taken into account the 5th, 6th and 7th + steps; or referred as the social, psychological and humanizing approaches to risk and safety? Surely the first steps would be to understand the social, psychological and humanizing approaches to risk and safety.

The Potato head term does not make for good anyone’s and is nonsense talk. If you have to be shaped by someone else, then you are not you. People should not have to role play like an actor in the work environment as you will lose true reality. Maybe this is a real issue within the workplace, all those scared actors trying to portray themselves as more than they are to be better than everyone else to climb that hierarchical ladder.

If you need to be told how to be ethical, empathetic etc, then you should not work with others as these should be innate dispositions (you cannot make a serial killer feel empathetic). If you are a leader or manager of safety and you don’t have these basic skills already and you need to go and be told how to be these things, then it’s little wonder why safety is in such a bad state. How a manger like this even made it to where they are now must be an injustice, but that’s a different story.

So, if you are unethical, uncaring, generally don’t understand people on the bases they are human just like you, then purchase your educational telling books about these things for a fee, and make sure you get your certificate at the end. Then you can show that to everyone and prove that you are now fully trained on being a caring and just person. 

Please safety people; stay true to yourself...don’t go role playing and don’t allow others to put a dick on your spud forehead, you just might find that you will be called a “dickhead spud-head” also!.