Tag Archives: Sidney Dekker

279 – ‘Guerilla volunteering’ – a response to risk aversion and red tape?

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1200 words (12 minutes reading) by Colin Weatherby

A recent article in the Melbourne Age by Alan Attwood, entitled ‘Red tape’s strangling volunteering – creating more casualties than you’d think’, is timely in drawing attention to a growing problem in Victorian local government. Risk aversion and red tape are making it difficult for people to volunteer in their own community or even get a job at their council. This focus on playing safe seems to be counterproductive.

As Sidney Dekker and Georgina Poole point out succinctly in ‘Random Noise – Measuring Your Company’s Safety Performance‘, most organisations don’t exist simply to be safe; they exist to provide a product or service. It is unfortunate that many councils seem to be starting to think otherwise. Dekker uses the term ‘safety theatre’ to describe the superficial and often misleading efforts that organisations put into safety. I can’t help thinking that some of the risk management red tape making volunteering more difficult fits that description.

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277 – Mediocrity at work.

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1000 words (11 minutes reading time) by Gordon Brittas

I seldom put pen to paper, however, reading the viewpoints of former colleagues has stimulated my thinking. Tim Whistler and Carole Parkinson’s posts on model collapse have started me thinking they are onto something. Is model collapse just mediocrity at work? Perhaps mediocrity is a product of model collapse? Or could it be a cause? So many questions.

As an expert in mediocrity, I must say that I know it when I see it.

Mediocrity

A recent paper by Tobias Jones entitled ‘Italy’s strangely seductive culture of mediocrity’, struck a chord with me. Jones cites a paper by the Oxford criminologist Diego Gambetta and Paris-based philosopher Gloria Origgi, ‘The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms’, which discusses why so many academic conferences in Italy go seriously awry in a ‘cocktail of confusion, sloppiness, and broken promises’. It suggests that most Italians in academia prefer sloppiness to perfectionism.

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276 – Synchronicity, systems, facts and accidents…

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1300 words (14 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I have been doing some diverse reading recently, some of it inspired by world events. Serendipitously, it has led me to an insight that I thought I would share.

Why we’re Polarized

The first book is Ezra Klein’s international bestseller ‘Why we’re Polarized’. He says the book is an examination of the American political system and that it is unlike most books on American politics, which he says tend to focus on the individuals.

“Let me be clear from the beginning: This is not a book about people. This is a book about systems.”

Ezra Klein, ‘Why we’re Polarized’

Klein is an American and says two decades of reporting on American politics has shown that it has predictable cycles and patterns that repeat. He sets out to explain the failure of the political system, which he says occurs despite it being ‘full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face’. He describes it as a collection of functional parts that combine into a dysfunctional whole.

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