Welcome to Clarity
Clarity represents a change of direction for our business.
We have spent 25+ years helping organisations develop work health and safety (WHS) management systems, applying a traditional approach to safety on the way.
Why the change of direction?
We formed Clarity Enabled to to help organisations better understand psychological and cultural hazards affecting safety in their workplace.
Most organisations are good at identifying physical hazards (falls, trips etc).
Few identify psychological and cultural/ organisational hazards – hazards inherent in many serious safety incidents.
Why?
Largely due to a lack of knowledge, skills and tools.
All of Clarity’s training and support services are designed to help you bridge this gap.
What do you mean by psychological and cultural hazards?
Psychological hazards refers to pressures affecting our internal cognition and decision making:
- Rushing.
- Overconfidence.
- Desensitisation to risk.
- Heuristics (mental shortcuts).
- Flooding – and others.
Cultural hazards refers to aspects of the organisations culture and group micro-cultures:
- Culture.
- Group think.
- Values/ norms.
- The way work is organised.
- Production at all costs.
- She’ll be right – and others.
Do these hazards really affect our workplace safety?
These hazards affect the way we perform work, make decisions, choose a course of action and our commitment to participate, or resist safety requirements.
They are present at every worksite.
Sadly, these factors tend to get most consideration in coronial inquiries.
The Court Report into a Canberra crane roll-over clearly identifies physical, psychological and cultural hazards, which are summarised in the figure below:
https://www.courts.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1538287/Watts.pdf
Similarly, the Pike River Royal Commission made a clear distinction between“what” happened:
"this was a process safety accident, being an unintended escape of methane followed by an explosion in the mine"
And “why“:
"It occurred during a drive to achieve coal production in a mine with leadership, operational systems and cultural problems"
So How Do We Tackle This Challenge?
We regularly see WHS systems that focus exclusively on physical hazards and controls.
And to be clear, this is a fundamental step in any safety program.
The challenge is improving understanding of the human, social, cultural and organisational dimensions of risk – a challenge you can’t ignore if you want to improve safety performance.
Clarity is our response to this challenge.
Our programs are based on an evidence based body of knowledge in the social psychology of risk, human judgement and decision making.
We provide unique tools to enable your teams to regularly surface, discuss and manage these hazards.
We hope you enjoy our content.
