This is a Foreword to Are We Learning From Accidents, by Dr Nippin Anand, published April 2024.
In industry, there is often talk about ‘organisational learning’. After accidents, the refrain ‘lessons have been learned’ nearly always crops up from organisational representatives. But organisations do not learn. People do. Equally, organisations do not care. People do. This might seem pedantic in that, of course, organisations comprise people. But organisations also comprise technologies, rules and procedures, infrastructure and assets, within a legal entity serving particular purposes. Even the people in organisations come and go. Many of us have experienced how much things can change – and how many ‘lessons’ are unlearned – when senior leaders come and go, as they do every few years. And there are many people, each with their own values, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, practices, and histories. They all learn different things, in different ways, for different reasons, in different places, over different times.
The point is that we often like to anthropomorphise organisations as if each were a person. At the same time, we like to bureaucratise learning, caring and change. It is as if we can strip away that which cannot be controlled by process. This includes trust, faith, hope, and doubt. It includes compassion, empathy and humour. And it includes symbolic thinking, ethics, diversity of thought, complex and nuanced language, and cultural transmission. Most of these qualities or characteristics are uniquely human. We even talk about ‘changing culture’, and the need for this, as if this were an engineering project. We keep talking about this, over and over again, after and between every major unwanted event. I have sometimes performed a thought experiment about this as changing the values, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, practices, and histories of one person … then multiplying this by hundreds or thousands of people and their relationships.
For as long as I can remember, people have been my ‘special interest’. I remember studying human beings consciously as a small child, and from my early teenage years I bought and read books on people and relationships, and the curious things that we believe and do, from mundane rituals to adopting extreme beliefs and joining cults. As far as I could tell, few or none of my friends took such an interest. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, looking at something truly extraordinary: human behaviour.
I found a friend when I met Nippin Anand in 2018 at a workshop in Cardiff , Wales, on ‘Safety-II’. Safety-II was then an emerging theory about safety, organisations, work and people, proposed by the eminent safety scientist Erik Hollnagel. Five years or so after its birth as a concept, Safety-II was being put into practice by a relatively small bunch of confused but curious practitioners. At the workshop, Nippin talked about a tragic marine accident in a way that I had never heard before. He had talked in person to Captain Francesco Schettino, the main protagonist of the story, to try to understand his perspective. Nippin did this as a safety scientist, anthropologist and, importantly, as a former Master Mariner himself. He also did this as a person, displaying some of the characteristics that I mentioned earlier.
The method and style of this human encounter was very different from an accident investigation interview. The story and insights that emerged were very different from what one could fi nd in the accident report, or any accident report, where such testimony is neglected, approached very differently, or else distorted to such an extent that it can become meaningless or misleading. This typifies epistemic injustice.
Nippin started to question assumptions and explore uncomfortable truths about not only shipping but the safety profession itself, and its myths and rituals. Since then, I have heard Nippin present on Costa Concordia several times. Not everyone would agree with the perspectives, insights or conclusions. That is not the point. Or rather, it is exactly the point: there are always multiple perspectives. Some are more convenient than others. Some are hard to accept, perhaps because they challenge deeply held assumptions and cherished beliefs.
In the years that followed, Nippin and I discussed psychology, anthropology, mythology, philosophy, and religion, in the context of safety, work and life. We often approached each of these from different schools of thought, and with different lived experience. But we seemed to think in a complementary way, valuing similar things, such as interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity), multiple perspectives, thick descriptions, synthesis, and ethics.
I have been especially curious about how Nippin has taken a wider angle on religion, and how this affects our thinking about organisations and safety. The religious origination that I have most identified with throughout my adult life has been Quakerism. It has affected how I’ve thought about many aspects of organisational life, such as hierarchy, leadership, followership, fellowship, group processes, and conflict management. It has influenced how I think about language, semiotics, learning, symbolism, simplicity, rituals. It has also affected my attitudes toward equality, diversity and inclusion.
Nippin’s religious heritage in Hinduism could – on the surface – hardly be more different, in terms of history, liturgies, rituals and sacraments. But beneath this, there are similarities that may affect how we view people. Quakerism emphasises the concept of the ‘Inner Light’, the belief that every person has access to the presence of the divine within them. Hinduism teaches the concept of the ‘Atman’, the individual soul or inner self, which is considered a spark of the divine. Quakers have historically been involved in movements for peace and social justice. Hinduism’s teachings include principles of ahimsa (nonviolence) and the importance of treating all beings with respect and compassion. Quaker worship – especially in the UK – often involves silent contemplation, with individuals waiting quietly. Hinduism includes practices such as meditation (dhyana) and contemplation, where practitioners seek to connect with the divine through silence and stillness. Both traditions encourage individuals to seek truth and spiritual understanding through personal experience and direct revelation, rather than relying solely on external authority or scripture. Two religious traditions, one well over 3,000 years old, and one around 370 years old. One born into, and one chosen as an adult. How can this be separated from ourselves, or our work?
I don’t think it can. Our religious heritages and orientations infuse into our way of being. And then there is our broader cultural background and life experience. I grew up in a working-class family, in a small northern English former mining and textiles town, in a small family business, as a white-skinned, intellectually- and artistically-curious boy. I have carried this around with me throughout my life, moving around in the UK, then Australia and France. Nippin has his own very different story, but he too has moved around the world, carrying his culture and seeing those of others.
But what has any of this got to do with learning from accidents? Surely, religion and culture – with their values, beliefs, myths, symbols, rituals, means of transmission, and institutions – couldn’t be further apart from accident investigation! Beneath the specifics, we carry our religious heritages around with us into our work, whether in safety or other professions. These heritages affect how we view truth, ethics, purpose, wealth, success, and relationships. It’s a fascinating thing to think about. And yet, we largely ignore how our history and religious and cultural backgrounds, even those of our parents and grandparents, encoded as they are into our upbringing, affect how we approach life now. This is especially true for activities that we have deemed scientific, objective, methodical, and institutional, like safety management, including accident investigation and learning from accidents.
Whatever your story, it affects how you see the world, how you interact, and how you learn. No amount of bureaucratising can bleach this from your approach to work and life. The problem is that more often than not we cannot see our external (or internal) cultures. In his book, The Invisible Language, Edward Hall, an American anthropologist, wrote in 1973, ‘Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own inhabitants’. Sometimes, it takes a non-inhabitant to ‘make the strange familiar and make the familiar strange’, as Nippin likes to say. I moved from the UK to Australia and there were differences, but they were not profound. I then moved to France, a metaphorical stone’s throw from England, and the differences were profound. The shock of contrast and difference exposes to ‘us’ what is normal to ‘them’. But sometimes, it might just take a different approach to seeing, thinking, feeling, relating, communicating, and learning. This means going beyond non-thinking and nonfeeling, with their sentry slogans, myths and rituals.
That is what this book is about. It is unlike any other book that I am aware of about learning from accidents, and it shows why we – in our organisations – often don’t. It goes beyond analysis, beyond theory, beyond disciplines, and beyond profession. You are likely to be surprised, challenged, and perhaps irritated. And if so, it is worth your time.
Are We Learning from Accidents? is available at https://nippinanand.com
Humanistic Systems 