Speaking Fact to Power|Security Differently

“They tell us to do these things, but they do not need to know how we get them done.”Others in the focus group nodded in arrangement. Myself, I was taken a bit aback by the declaration. I was assisting in the focus group with the intent of discovering about the organization and how it handles security. We had actually been speaking with many of the line staff members who revealed differing degrees of disappointment with various elements of the workplace, management, the union, etc. These aggravations were usually specific to a provided job, tool or area. Concerns about absence of training, not getting suitable gear for a job, or locations that were particularly hazardous or bothersome. But this statement struck me as an especially extensive summation of the image that was developing– a space in between the decision-makers and those enacting the choices.

The supervisors in the organization above do not wish to put employees in harms method. Instead, a combination of aspects, such as problematic psychological models about how work is carried out and what Diane Vaughan calls”structural secrecy” (i.e., the structures and bureaucracies in companies that prevent flows of info), develop blindspots at the top of the company. Managers make in your area reasonable decisions and employees, with all their amazing creative potential, discover ways to enact those choices in a manner that pleases the managers. This does not indicate that the employees do exactly the work precisely how the supervisors wanted it done. The work simply gets done. The managers’ beliefs seem shown proper and the cycle continues.

In this way, the concern is not so much about managers being unethical or dumb, however about supervisors being separate from the realities of the workplace and the impacts their decisions make on the complex balancing act of getting work done. Essentially, it has to do with an absence of good information getting to the decision-makers. The space between the decision-makers and those enacting choices develops an environment where it is simple to make errors.

Recently, I have actually been reflecting a lot on what the function of the security specialist is within the Security In a different way area. In an environment where we see local adjustments as a potential source of security, where people are a service, what is the function of safety professionals such as myself? There has been much discussion about this topic on this website (I’ve offer some links listed below to some posts to offer you a concept of the various viewpoints) in addition to in other places but even within the Safety Differently space there is a great deal of controversy on this subject (simply take a look at the remarks section on some of the previous posts on this topic as proof of this).

The conventional model of the security expert, the model in which most of my education, training and experience was situated, is as the technical professional. This includes understanding of risks, dangers, engineering principles, regulations, requirements, etc. The focus of this model is to create a security expert that is equipped to have the responses to all of the organization’s security questions.

Although I see the requirement for such knowledge in an organization, my worry about this model has significantly been that market is too diverse to make such a model reliable. After all, the technical understanding required for safety in one environment might be dramatically different (however not constantly obviously so) than another environment. This design seems to need that we have a level of specialization in the safety occupation that would match or go beyond the medical profession, otherwise would produce a safety generalist with such a basic level of technical knowledge regarding be close to useless. The technical expert security expert is often in the unpleasant position to be advising workers on how to do jobs that the safety professional has never ever carried out. We still do require technical expertise for safety in our companies, however I’m not convinced that the security specialist need to be the ultimate source of that competence.

On assessing the experience in the focus group and the declaration of the staff member, it appears to me that a person role the security professional is uniquely situated to play is as a port in between management and the front-line employee. Security specialists often are placed in methods that allow them access to a lot of or all levels within the organization. They connect within front line workers and management (although the particular levels of management do vary a fair bit). They have the capability to establish relationships with people at each of these levels.

This puts the security specialist in the unique position to be able to tell the story of work to upper management. In this way I see security experts like organizational journalists. The traditional conception of the objective of the journalist is to speak reality to power. In the exact same method, the security professional speaks the reality of the truths of normal work to those with the most power, i.e., management. The goal is that by presenting these realities to management, by offering supervisors with much better info, that management will be able to make much better decisions. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of what the employees in the focus group believe, the supervisors in that organization do would like to know about the realities employees deal with. The issue is that they (a) believe that they currently understand, and (b) do not have sufficient processes in location within the company that would present information that opposes that belief. Maybe we require to orient the safety profession more toward altering this truth.

This model of the security expert as the port, communicator and facilitator of info circulation has crucial ramifications for what safety experts should be concentrating on in organizations. The orientation of the security professional is no longer simply toward technical issues, however towards assisting in the successful completion of work. The security expert recognizes that she/he is not the specialist on that work and therefore focuses on being the lorry for information flows from the sharp end towards the blunt end. This requires a new set of practices designed to determine the realities and intricacies of normal work and to communicate those truths to the blunt end in a method that facilitates partnership, curiosity and, eventually, action.

The second ramification of this design is in relation to the proficiency needs for safety specialists. Rather than developing safety professionals that have all the responses (an impossible job), perhaps we ought to be concentrating on producing security professionals that know which concerns to ask. This new model needs an expert who can determine and facilitate partnership and dialogue. It requires the ability to feel sorry for people at numerous levels of the company, so that data exists in manner ins which produce understanding and understanding.

These are abilities that presently are not taught in any major security degree programs that I understand and are not noted as needed qualities for the many of the security expert job openings I’ve seen. If we desire safety professionals that can fill the space in between decision-makers and front line employees, that can speak fact to power, possibly we need to be valuing and teaching these abilities more often. Possibly we need to look more for individuals who are adept at combining varied opinions, rather than simply looking for those who understand the policies. Maybe we need professionals with the capability to ask terrific concerns, rather than those who are truly proficient at providing responses.