O QUE É CULTURA DE SEGURANÇA?

Culture devours strategy for breakfast Peter Drcker said this, an Austrian thinker considered one of the fathers of modern management Defending what culture supports or hinders strategy in the company But when you talk about "culture", are we saying the same thing? And is this thing similar to the one over there with Drker? The safety culture, for example, for many people only exists when the worker obeys 100% of the rules.

For many others, the culture exists, and only exists, when the worker, on the contrary, can break the rule and is free to talk about it with his manager without suffering any kind of retaliation For many others, a safety culture simply does not exist Oh cruel doubt, what am I going to do with this safety culture? So grab your breakfast, noon, or evening because we're going to devour this subject together We're going to talk today about "Culture" "Safety" The notion of "culture of safety" first appears in 1987 In the report of Chernobyl accident analysis published by the International Atomic Energy agency This analysis concluded that human and organizational dimensions should be taken into account as well as technical dimensions in prevention projects From Chernobyl, reports and other major accidents that occurred in history Like Challenger, Piper Alpha, AZF, the BP refinery in Texas City, the Air France accident They have also pointed to the safety culture as a determinant in the main causes of these accidents. Okay, but what is safety culture?

I'll bring some definitions here for you ACNSI, which is an advisory board of nuclear industries in the United States, Defines "Culture of Safety" as a product of values, attitudes and perceptions and patterns of individual and collective behavior EUROCONTROL, an international organization linked to Civil Aviation in Europe, defines "Culture of Safety" as an amalgamation of perceptions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors The Chemical Safety Board, an independent agency in the United States, in charge of accident investigation in the chemical industry worldwide defines "Culture of Safety" as a combination of values ​​and behaviors And finally, the European society for quality in healthcare shows that the safety culture is an integrated pattern of individual and organizational behavior based on shared beliefs and values. So here we have four institutions, two in the United States, two in Europe, each in its own area, in time the different ones, which created very similar safety culture definitions, basically focused on the sharing of beliefs, values, perceptions and behaviors among different individuals with the same organization. And if we are the origin of these definitions, we will understand why they are so similar Some of the classical definitions of "culture" has brought this idea of shared ways of thinking or behaving Taylor, for example, back in 1871 have related "culture" with knowledge, beliefs and habits acquired by man here, more 100 years later, in 1988, Cooke and Rousseau also relate "culture" with ways of thinking, behaving and with the beliefs of members of a social unit.

And finally, Schein in 2004 will also say that culture they are ways of perceiving, thinking and feeling Back in the 70s, the idea of ​​"organizational culture" or "corporate culture" was also developed. And if we go back to the origin of the concept, you already imagine what we will find For Pettigrew, "corporate culture" is related to values beliefs and assumptions . .

. and Mintzberg and colleagues, again, are shared beliefs and values So it's not surprising that these definitions of "security culture" bring these same elements of the definitions of "culture" or "organizational culture", just adapting to the field of security. On the one hand, all these definitions are interesting because they advance in the behaviorist and archaic approaches that defend that culture of safety is exclusively based on the behavior of obedience of workers at the end of the production chain.

So they also incorporate the responsibility of managers in this process. As ICSI defends, the levels of Safety Culture have been reducing accidents throughout history but have reached levels throughout of the last decades, moving from a purely technical security to another of management systems AND that, for us to proceed to the development of an integrated safety culture, it is necessary that we reach the level of human and organizational factors of safety that is precisely the sharing of practices and values in an organization but on the other hand, it is necessary to people understand well what is behind these definitions, otherwise "culture" becomes the perfect alibi for those who can't explain exactly what it means Who has never seen a manager justify the company's problems in the culture of some group "Ah, here it has always been so, it's a matter of culture" Or, "we need to create a culture of safety" But if we want to know from this manager what he means by a culture of safety, we usually have no answer. It's that strategy of Mestre dos Mages of the Drgon's Cave, that when I say the most important thing.

. . it disappears.

. . So for us not to become the Master of Mages of prevention, it is necessary to understand 3 points here.

The first is that there is no single culture of safety throughout the organization but several "cultures" Because every organization is always made up of groups and subgroups that develop rules, values, symbols, language and behavior themselves to them and usually are different This makes that the organization's culture is heterogeneous among these different groups And that there are subcultures within them, so that only a few values, beliefs and behaviors are actually shared between people. So, from now on, we can no longer talk about "Culture of Security", in the singular, within a company We have to talk about "cultures", in the plural, of security, within that organization Be strong, Cavaleiro, and listen to your heart. .

. Mestre dos Magos! ?

Wait! The second point is that what prevails in the definitions of "safety culture" is a normally harmonious vision, which emphasizes integration, "amalgamation" of the beliefs, values and behavior and condemns dissent, confrontation and How to ambiguity a company was the olympus of Consensus, the eden of affinity, the paradise of conciliation But we know that this is not how it works because every organization is characterized by differentiation and conflicts, as Ron Westrum, an American sociologist from University of Michigan And isn't it precisely the conflict and contradiction that generates learning for people? The fact that people don't talk about work problems doesn't mean they don't exist.

In fact, what exists is organizational silence in these cases And where there is organizational silence, there is no culture of safety Finally, the third and last point of these definitions is that they do not discuss a fundamental notion that is the power relations established between individuals of groups within an organization Abraham Zaleznik, organizational psychologist, Professor emeritus at Harvard University, and with several books on this topic I was already talking to us , back in 1975, that every organization is marked by these power relations, whether vertical or horizontal. But remember, those who experience power once, will never be the same again. .

. Did you hear that? !

Now maybe you'll treat me with a little more respect! Geert Hofstede, another well-known researcher on the subject of "culture", professor emeritus at the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, has also written several books on this topic, one of the main ones being this one here "Cultures Consequences", written back in the 80s . book, the Hofstede shows a research developed back in the 60s with IBM that is intrigued because the same message it sent was developed in very different ways in the more than 50 units it had in the world at that time.

The Hofstede, then, and his team conducts a 6-year survey of the company initially reaching four dimensions, and after they have seen six, which make some societies more efficient than others. The first two main dimensions of this Hofstede study are power distance and uncertainty aversion The countries with the greatest distance from power and the greatest uncertainty aversion were those less efficient because they have less possibility to collaborate. tion and cooperation and greater possibility of risk in the process It is worth taking a look at the Hofstede website because it shows all the research and the differences between the countries Brazil, for example, is one of the, as is to be expected, with greater distance from power and greater aversion to uncertainty and, consequently, with less efficiency in the processes More recently, Stian Antonsen Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology O Antonsen has been working a lot with the relationship between power and security culture shows, in this book here, that without including the issue of power in the analysis of safety culture research, we run the risk of creating superficial and simplified representations of organizational life.

And so we run the risk of reifying the safety culture, or transforming it into something in a kind of mythical entity where workers, managers and the organization want to get close to solve their problems but in the background of pure fake news because it has nothing to do with people's real work In fact, this story of fake myth that sells itself as the solution to all ills is not new for us, right? ! But we cannot work power in organizations without working on the relationship of trust between people.

As defined by researchers Carmen Migueles and Marco Túlio Zanini, from Fundação Getúlio Vargas They have a very interesting research, over many years, on the development of culture of security and the development of trust within the Special Operations Battalion, the BOPE, in Rio de Janeiro, showing that the reduction of power distance through shared leadership and team participation in the strategic decision processes of the BOPE increases the relationships of trust, increases the group's safety, and, as a consequence, increases organizational performance. And Migueles and Zanini were here at the Ergonomia da Atividade channel last year explaining all this work, check it out because it's worth it. So how do they show all this research and all these researchers, for us to develop a culture of safety, we have to, necessary to work with uncertainty, or the variability of Ergonomics, as well as the power relations between individuals in that organization.

And how in practice do we do this? Ah, now it's time for the jabá! My PhD research is an example of this.

Together with professors François Daniellou and Vanina Mollo, we developed important elements of the safety culture of ENEDIS, the first electricity distribution company in France through a deep understanding of the work of electricians And then breaking the organizational silence and placing the contradiction so that it could be shared and confronted between them within the space of debates about work And, finally, working on power relations involving the different hierarchical levels in the development of autonomy and power of acting from those groups participating in the debate I'll leave some references here in the description for those who want to know better the research And soon we'll make several videos of each of these concepts that were worked. Therefore, the development of "cultures", with "s ", security in the company should not be the search for agreement and harmony throughout the organization ization but, on the contrary, it must be based on the value of uncertainty and conflict and the incorporation of power relations in this process and it is precisely the absence of these elements in the research that there is a strong movement of many scientists, for many years, for the term "security culture" to be abandoned Look, for example, what Charles Perrow, American sociologist, wrote in the book "Normal Accidents" back in 1984 "I didn't write anything explicitly about culture because I doubt its usefulness. It wasn't values ​​and shared beliefs that prevailed over safety engineers at Ford and Firestone It was senior management's concern with profits that made them hide US government data.

Of course there are 'cultures' (note the plural) in companies But in relation to risk and safety I think the issue is really power" Then, in the same tune, came Andrew Hale, in 2000, in a very suggestive editorial in the journal Safety Science cha called "Culture's Confusions", clearly inspired by Hofstede's "Culture's Consequences" And Andrew Hopkings, in a 2005 book called "Safety, Culture and Risk " Deconstructing Work" here from the Ergonomia da Atividade channel And, more recently, Antonsen himself appeared strongly criticizing the term, as we have already shown here. And also Adelaide Nascimento, a researcher at CNAM in Paris, who recently published a long research that she did about culture, showing that this story of shared culture is a myth, because what prevails is not sharing. Therefore, Adelaide defends that we should not talk about "shared culture" but rather about "sharing in culture", which happens through the negotiation of what she calls "culture struggles" or this balanced distribution of power in organizations.

We are here talking about researchers, doing research in a range of 40 years of time and all the complexity behind the development of a safety culture and even the use of this term. But there are many Mestre dos Magos of prevention out there defending that safety culture is the unrestricted obedience to the procedures but the whip cracks This is definitely not a safety culture, this is the culture of control And the culture of control generates fear, it generates distrust, it generates organizational silence And this is, unfortunately, the picture of several organizations that we see out there If we don't manages to abandon the term "security culture" because it has been ingrained in organizations for many years . We have to abandon the common sense of the idea, for the three main reasons we presented here.

Because there are several subcultures in the same organization. Because it is the contradiction and the conflict that generate learning, not consensus And because power relations are determinant in the culture of safety The search for a culture of safety What, then, is the search for the confrontation of multiple opinions, for the development of the operator's capacity to deal with uncertainty and for the questioning of power and autonomy by the different hierarchical levels of the company There is an old proverb in this region: "the one who has the answer and don't understand it, it's actually like one who never knew the answer", and you have the answer young man. .

. it's as close to you as the wind. .

. Master of Mages! So to paraphrase Peter Drcker, devour the safety culture because otherwise it's going to devour you!

It cost! There are several links here in the description of the video related to the studies I talked about and others too, check it out! And if you watch the video this far, it's because you liked it, right!

? So give that strength, give your like and subscribe to the channel, so that we can continue making other videos like this one.