Dolphyn Newsletter # 4 – The Learning Adventure Continues Learning to Embrace Ambiguity “Organisations, despite their apparent preoccupation with facts, numbers, objectivity, concreteness and accountability, are in fact saturated with subjectivity, abstraction, guesses, making do, invention and arbitrariness, just like the rest of us” Karl E. Weick (1969, p.5) One of the things that stands […]
Culture of Care (and sackings…) I caught up with a good friend Martin over the weekend and he was telling me about his work situation. Martin works in heavy industry as a contractor, he has done most of his life and he’s now in his mid 40’s. Martin is currently contracting at a mine that […]
Have you ever been involved in an incident investigation that was really just a checklist of organisational processes? Have there been times when you might have missed something because you became too focused on one aspect and weren’t open to exploring? I’ve been in these situations. I’ve written reports that were focused on checking off […]
I live in the Hunter Valley in NSW, which is on the east coast of Australia. This week we have been hit by what our local media are describing as a ‘super storm’. In the particular area where I live, we received over 400 millimeters (0.12 gallons, US) of rain in two days. The scenes […]
During April 2015, good mates and study buddies (and authors on the Safetyrisk.net blog) Gab Carlton, Max Geyer, Rob Sams and James Ellis attended the Society of Australasian Social Psychologist (SASP) Conference held in Newcastle. While Rob Sams has provided his reflections on this conference, hearing from academics presenting their research, the guys also participated […]
I’ve had the privilege over the past few days to attend the Society of Australasian Social Psychologist (SASP) Annual Conference held in my hometown of Newcastle, NSW. The SASP Conference brought together more than 170 delegates who were keen to learn, share and explore together. You can learn more about SASP here, and if you’re […]
The Inaugural Psychology of Risk Conference was held in Sydney on 25, 26 March 2015 and was a great success. People from New Zealand, Hong Kong and Australia came together at ACU in North Sydney to hear how the social psychology of risk can be applied at work. The diverse field of presenters included practitioners […]
It can feel good to win and argument or be perceived as the most intelligent person in the room. It’s a great boost for our ego and I think typically as human beings that we like being the one who knows the most, or to excel where others don’t. However, when we know more than […]
In my last piece I wrote about the impact that our social arrangements can have on how we make decisions and judgments, even in ways that we may not be consciously aware of. I titled the piece ‘there is no way that I would do that’, and outlined the social psychological experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, where […]
The impact of social arrangements on our decisions and judgments I had the privilege last week of meeting a new group of people as they commenced their adventure into the world of better understanding people and how we make decisions and judgments about risk. I felt especially privileged to be able to present a short […]