(16b) The TRAPS of Process Safety Culture

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Organizational culture does not exist.

To achieve a deeper approach and add a new dimension to our understanding of culture, we will pretend for a while that the notion of organizational culture, and within it the culture of process safety, does not exist.

We are going to suppose that this way, understood as a consistent, compact and coherent block; as “the sum of the values, beliefs and behaviors shared by the members of an organization”, it simply does not exist.

We are going to assume that it does not exist, too, to avoid all those other words that are added to the word culture, and that have the same semantic complexity. The words “values”, “beliefs”, “behavior”. We are going to assume that they are failed attempts to simplify organizational complexity, even though they have a noble and organizing intention, since they give us a -distant- hope that we will be able to order life in the world of work. But it is only a momentarily reassuring fiction, forcing us to feign understanding. It makes us believe for a moment that we understand something that we did not understand before, but that only descended one step from the Olympus of abstractions.

But if the organizational culture does not exist, what is that kind of family resemblance that is perceived in organizations, that kind of "know how to do in common", that kind of similar style that their leaders share, that kind of tone in the communications that shows us that something is right or wrong? There is something particular that can be perceived in each organization, that is different in each human group, a kind of unique atmosphere shared by all the members of an organization, and that for a while we are not going to call it culture.

We are going to call that intangible that runs through an organization and orders collective behavior, as a coherent, consistent and measurable whole, narrative. That family resemblance that organizations have is their narrative.

Many times we do not understand exactly how decisions are made based on risk in the environments we integrate, but we do know the story that is told. When a person changes jobs (changes culture), he is actually changing his narrative. And for that you don't necessarily have to go to another organization, you just have to change your hierarchy, geography or function. Any one of these three jumps does not introduce a new dominant narrative.

The culture of an organization should not be thought of as a great continent, but rather as an archipelago, as a group of islands that are linked with common interests and a shared language. We are going to think about each one of the islands of that archipelago from its own narrative. Cultural management is the management of narratives. That phenomenon that does not exist, culture, is actually the management of fragmented narratives that respond to a global idea. The organizational culture does not exist, there are human groups ordered by a common narrative.

The key to cultural risk management is the management of their narratives.

Culture does not exist, what exists are narratives. The cultural narrative is the stories we tell ourselves and each subculture of the organization creates. Some organizations believe that they are a big family, others believe that their founders endowed them with a particular spirit, others believe that security is a priority. Culture is always a narrative, which tries to order the behavior of groups, sometimes by understanding, others by imitation. The narrative basically orders the way in which decisions are made, since behind the decisions are the values that in turn order the collective behavior of an organization. Managing the culture of an organization is, without more, managing its multiple narratives.

The traditional concept of safety culture has low use value because it is full of pitfalls. In this paper, we are going to present the five traps of culture that hinder understanding, and therefore, cultural management:

1. THE SEMANTIC TRAP

We need to get around the first trap, which is perhaps the most difficult to perceive. And it is the semantic trap. The most widespread definitions of culture do not help to understand the phenomenon, but on the contrary, as they are lists of dense concepts, they obscure it, opaque it, contributing to the general confusion. The first drawback that organizational culture management presents us with is that we have to manage something that we do not know exactly how to define, which has loose semantic limits: at times, it seems that everything is culture. And although it seems like a tongue twister, it is not: if everything is culture, nothing is culture. As with the word “communication”, the word culture has imprecise semantic borders. The first challenge in the journey towards effective culture management is to define it.

2. THE TRAP OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

It is the trap of thinking of individuals to think of culture. The first step in managing culture is to stop thinking about people and start thinking about groups. Culture is not an individual phenomenon, but a group one. Group behavior is never the sum of individual behaviors. When we talk about culture we must forget individualities.

3. THE UBIQUITY TRAP

“Culture is that the way we do things when no one is looking at us.” This definition implies that if we were not being watched, we would do things differently. And that is a mistake. People act in the only possible way: the way that the context in which they are inserted allows them. Culture determines behaviors. Culture is not "the way we do things when no one is looking" because culture is beyond the will of isolated individuals.

4. THE COMMON GOOD TRAP

It is one of the most frequent traps. The trap of individual responsibility, in turn, is connected to the trap of the common good: culture is everyone's responsibility and we all want culture to evolve. It seems to take the place of the common good. The challenge of culture is the challenge of conflict. Managing culture is managing group tensions. The challenge is to guide the conflict and not eliminate it, simply because the conflict cannot be eliminated. Conflict is unavoidable. Conflict is inherent in human groups. Where there is a human group, there is diversity of interests, and therefore conflict. Managing culture is managing tensions.

5. THE SCOPE TRAP

If everything is culture, nothing is culture. If culture is everyone's problem, at the same time, it is not anyone's problem. If all problems are cultural, none are. A demagogic approach to cultural management is to say that “it is everyone's problem”. That we all have a responsibility in managing culture. This is partly true, we all have a role, but not all of us have a responsibility, much less, we can all do something. Culture is not “everyone's responsibility”, but rather a second-order concept, made up of multiple dimensions. Cultural management impacts us all, yes, it is true, but it must be in the hands of experts who assume responsibility, and leaders who develop skills.