Page 90 - OHS, June 2023

SAFETY CULTURE Safety Culture’s Ink Blot Test How to identify the soft spots in your safety culture. BY RAY PREST Safety professionals typically define safety culture as “the way things are done around here.” Ask a group of researchers for a more specific definition and they’ll come up with a few bullet points—sometime after lunch tomorrow—that end up saying pretty much the same thing. And if you ask either group to be more specific, to describe what safety culture looks like in action or how to improve it, their answer will likely be so abstract that it may as well be a verbal inkblot test. We’ve all seen inkblot prints, in which people put ink on paper in a vaguely recognizable shape. Inkblot art has been used for parlor games since the Italian Renaissance, and then in 1921 a psychiatrist by the name of Herman Rorschach formalized inkblot interpretation as a psychological test. When you look at a print, what does it make you think of? Thousands of people have Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock.com 88 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2023 www.ohsonline.com been asked to decide whether one inkblot looks like a bat or a butterfly or a moth, whether another looks like a crab or a spider and whether a third reminds them of a human face. Crucially, the Rorschach exam is not a test of what you see— because there’s no right answer—but of how you interpret an abstract image. In a standard Rorschach test, examiners will take a close look at why you see a bat (is it because of the black ink?) or a butterfly (is it due to the shape or the pattern of splotches on the “wings?”). It’s a test of whether you can pull concrete meaning from ambiguous signals, of whether you can find underlying patterns in a collection of seemingly disparate points. And in that way, it has a lot to do with how we view safety culture. It can be hard to pin down the essential qualities of an effective safety culture because no two workplace safety cultures are exactly