What you hear, will depend how you're asked
What would you say if I asked you to tell me about the Mona Lisa?
You might mention that it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci and hangs in the Louvre. You could say that it is a portrait of a woman. You might wonder what all the fuss is about. The word enigmatic will spring to mind while you wonder if it is ever used in any other context.
You might tell me about Lisa del Giocondo, the subject of the painting. In her teens, she was married to a cloth merchant who later became a local official. She was a mother to six children and led a comfortable and ordinary life.
You might start telling me how the artist cut off his ear before realising that your knowledge of artists is very limited, and that was the ‘other one’.
It’s possible you could tell me that it is an oil painting done on a wooden panel that warped when it was removed from its frame, how it was repaired, and that it is now temperature-controlled to prevent further cracking.
Your knowledge might include the fact that under French law, the painting cannot be sold, but it is classed as the most valuable painting in the world, and at one point, its sale was suggested to ease the national debt. It is possible that you will tell me how the eyes follow you around the room, how you wonder what she was thinking, and how this impacts your own feelings.
None of these responses would be incorrect, and which ones you find valuable will depend on what you are trying to get from the discussion. Do you want technical details or insights? Do you want confirmation or a challenge? Or are you just open to what you are going to hear based on the way the question is framed and your relationship to the person you are talking to?
How we approach answering a question on The Mona Lisa will depend on the type of knowledge we have. If you are like me, you might know some common details and have a view on whether you like it or not.
If you talk to an art critic, they may give you a long, detailed answer you likely don’t understand and weren’t expecting. The same question to an art historian may come from a different angle than a response from an art conservationist.
There is a drive within occupational safety to encourage senior leaders to see work for themselves. This, coupled with the current trend of critical control variation processes. There is nothing wrong with either of these concepts, but as you can see from the Mona Lisa, the response will depend on the questions you ask, who you ask and the context under which the response is attained.
Getting out there and talking to people without a predefined purpose is more likely to expand the answers you hear than going in with an outcome in mind.
Even the approach of asking about what is Dumb, Difficult, Different, and Dangerous, especially when done, as I have seen several times, simply asking someone what they have noticed today that is (insert D here) four times, causes the responses to be narrowly framed and suppresses the ability to have a natural conversation.
It’s not just in occupational safety that I see this happening. Behaviour-based questions in job interviews box people into pre-thought-out responses and restrict the ability to follow conversational threads. Audit standards often follow the same principle, and, except for the presence of a highly skilled auditor, try to apply a linear assessment process to a complex and intertwined system
If you need a specific output, you must be clear about when and how that information is collected.
If the output you want is a safety-critical technical one, then automating or designing the system to be able to monitor itself is the only realistic approach.
If you want to know how people do their work, you need to collect stories and create narratives.
We know that the Mona Lisa has an enigmatic smile because repeated stories have stated this, and this has formed the narrative that has become a well-known concept. It is a thing that is true, based not on individual experience, but on a constantly repeated story. You can state boldly that Mona is just experiencing trapped wind based on your own interpretation of her gaze, but the narrative won’t change, I suspect, ever, due to the number of times it has been stated.
This is the same thing that happens with any popular idea. The narrative around it is assumed to be the truth. Whether blame fixes nothing or not, the narrative drives the idea much more than any objective fact.
Narratives can be formed in different ways. They can be constantly repeated with confidence until they become normalised, a favourite trick of politicians and those with something to sell. They can also naturally emerge from communities with similar experiences. They can even be generated through targeted propaganda.
So, next time you go out to observe work being done or are sitting listening to an opinion or even commentary of a commissioned report, think about what you hear and why that narrative might have emerged.
As for the Mona Lisa, I wonder what happened to her eyebrows.