Reading Emma Darwin’s blog today about the real sixth sense made me recall a conversation I had in St Pancras station in London the other day. In my day job I work with safety and reliability engineers who deal with high hazard occurrences. I run a learned society that holds events and publishes work that furthers the understanding of high level safety.
In 2006 a Nimrod plane crashed in Afghanistan killing 14 service personnel and my deepest condolences go to their families. There was an investigation into the crash then an enquiry by Charles Haddon-Cave QC which was published in October. This impacted on my colleagues because the safety case regime was critiqued. I met with them last week to craft a response which is here.
Prior to this I had organised and attended a Human Factors conference in Aberdeen, where the main theme of the day was ‘go and talk to the people who do the job, don’t rely on reports’. Human Factors is the psychological aspect of safety engineering, where instead of solely considering the mechanical components, elements of psychology and sociology as well as environmental concerns are considered.
The common concerns here are language and terminology. Of course, each area of expertise holds it’s own exclusive terminology; if we all knew these special words how would consultants charge exorbitant fees? But in areas such as medicine, psychology and safety this is an important issue as people’s lives are at stake. The main culprit here is science and validity for the expert vs lay opinion rests in an ability to quantitatively measure, or not.
However, as I sat in the station drinking my tea out of a cardboard cup, I had a rare opportunity to explain my theory on more qualitative science to someone who is most definitely steeped in the quantitative. I explained that storytelling, even at the level of the shop floor or canteen, is a valuable tool in finding out what is wrong with the safety and reliability of, say, an aircraft. Because of hierarchical barriers, many manual workers feel unable to communicate their worries to their managers and they do not have the appropriate expert language. This barrier and translate into a culture of non-disclosure as confidence dips. A better way would be to communicate on a level where each party is free from hierarchical pressure and can recognise a common language outside the range of expertise. My colleague was excited by this but expressed his reservations: this could never be defended in the engineering workplace as there was just no valid explanation for this.
I explained to him that the valid explanation lay in, of all unlikely places, feminist thought. The diffusion of hierarchy is a much studied area in equality and discrimination in the work of Ann Oakley (1981). Further, the validity of storytelling as an exchange of information through understanding (and not just a tool for social interaction) lies in the study of narrative psychology and identity construction(Crossley, 2000a; Frank, 2000; McAdams, 1993, Mishler, 1999). Each person has a ‘personal script’ running through their consciousness that tells them ‘who I am’ and ‘who I am in the world’. This internal script is so familiar that we rarely realise we have it. It is the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. Many narrative psychologists have studied the nature of this script and it is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, rather than a list of scientific conditions or a mathematical equation.
This, according to narrative psychologists, is why stories resonate with us as ‘truth’ more easily than science. For example, the stories in the Bible and the Sutras and other religious texts resonate with us on such a basic level that many people do not ask for ‘truth’ or ‘validity’, they have faith with this resonance. It applies to their internal life and makes perfect sense. Similarly with fiction. There is not need to validate fiction as the stories within resonate with our internal scripts, making even the most bizarre concepts accessible because our mind knows no bounds.
Translated to the workplace, recognising this resonance and valuing storytelling more would capture much more rich information than tasking someone to write a report, or worse, report verbally in a specialist language that is exclusive and not fully understood. For example, although the specialist language of the safety case renders this expert knowledgeable and employable, and raises their status, it does not communicate clearly the basic problems to the rest of us or elicit a clear explanation for those who are employed to operate/construct outside this language. There is no global resonance in exclusive use of language and terminology. That is not to say that the safety case is not useful, in fact it is essential. But, like statistical information and trend analysis, it is valuable to an audience who understand the language. Otherwise, it is practically useless whereas the resonance of storytelling in inherent and global.
It is this resonance with our internal selves and the circadian rhythms that Emma refers to as our sixth sense that, recognised as valid and reliable, could be put to work to increase communication and save lives. Whilst the acceptance of recognised storytelling in books, scripts and music resonates on a visceral level there would be no immediate danger to our lives if we did not read or listen. For various reasons, both personal and social, many people do not develop this sixth sense externally in their awareness and come to no harm. But if this awareness and enhanced communication could be developed in the high hazard workplace someone who was formerly afraid of reporting a fault in a modification for fear of not using the language, terminology, science and maths of the safety case could be eased. With a focus more on understanding than validation and status valuable tools such as the safety case, trend analysis and profit and loss accounts could be used in conjunction with information rich stories of what’s going wrong on a day to day basis.
Fascinating discussion, and thanks for the link! I had a demonstration of this point recently in my own work: I plan in charts and maps and diagrams, but the WIP had got stuck: I read what should happen next but couldn’t work out how to write it. It was only when my agent asked for a detailed synopsis, so I had to, as it were, make a 3-page story out of my charts, that I realised the problem: the events I’d planned for the second half didn’t actually link together in a chain of cause and effect. But that wasn’t visible in all my plans: it took trying to turn it into a story to show it.
Amazing! So, maybe more women need to get involved in quality-control discussions, relying on their innate abilities to verbalize and their communal understanding of the story of their lives, as a group? And, does this mean women have skills way beyond what can be taught in a university, that would make them extremely valuable at the helm of almost any corporate endeavor, including a governmental entity? I’ve often thought that was the case, but could not articulate why. (Maybe I still haven’t!)