Conscious incompetence – a step towards a generative safety culture?

Safety culture often sits in the realm of ‘unconscious incompetence’. That is, a poorly used ‘label’ with no specificity and little translation into practical application. This is despite the fact that safety culture is identified as a major factor in practically all major accidents, incidents and systems failures.

The safety culture of an organisation reflects unconsciously adopted norms, beliefs, expectations and worldview. These manifest themselves as deeply ingrained and unique routines (ways of ‘doing’) and influence what information and knowledge the individual ultimately attends to and ultimately accepts (ways of ‘being’). People play out roles according to the ‘unwritten rules’.

A first step towards building a positive safety culture is to move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence by making the safety culture visible and understanding its impact. This is a difficult step to make because we stand in an emotional relationship to what we know or believe.

Making your safety culture visible may challenge some of the core assumptions and beliefs of the organisation. Moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence requires shared learning. If shared learning is to proceed successfully, a necessary shift in the group belief system is equally important as one in the individual belief system. Group members should be invited to test the validity of their beliefs about the organisation, about other people and about how they themselves ‘show up’.

Knowledge and belief are not ‘cold’ and feelings can act to enable or frustrate learning, especially in deconstructing old mental models to make room for new ones. Furthermore, information and knowledge, whether generated externally or internally, are subjected to the perceptual filters of the existing culture. At its heart, building a safety culture involves reorienting group values, assumptions, norms and behaviours through changing cognitive structures (e.g., multiple causation of accidents, human error, group practices vs. individual attitudes) and emotional structures (e.g., fairness, positive reinforcement, trust and accountability). This requires the opportunity to unlearn unconsciously adopted beliefs and behaviours which block new learning and action. It requires the fostering of genuine communication and to eventually create feelings of congruence and personal leadership – vital ingredients for a generative safety culture.