Almost any activity in our field is somehow connected with changes in regulations, perception, the regulatory framework, corporate approaches, and the evolution of management systems. There are plenty of reasons for this: the old ways no longer work, they have become tiresome, boring, or routine, they don't yield tangible results, or external conditions and facts have changed. The list of reasons for change is endless. In this article, let's not cover all the institutional concepts of change, but rather focus on one narrow area: why production-related managers are reluctant to change their approaches to safety as quickly as we would like. In this context, we are not talking about legislative requirements enshrined in federal laws, labor codes, or federal norms and rules, but rather about corporate requirements, which are much broader.
The "I said so, and you do it because it's written in the order" approach has long lost its relevance when it comes to anything more or less conceptual or intellectual, especially where there are deltas or, as we call them, "gray moral zones." For example, a BBS audit or a leadership walkaround can be conducted in very different ways, but in the report, everything will look roughly the same. We all want managers to truly believe us and to implement the proposed practices with initiative and interest.
But why does this often not happen, or happen only as a formality?
I would divide the implementation challenges into three categories:
1. Our shortcomings:
2. Quirks of perception (psychology):
3. Biology:
Let's take a closer look at what this phenomenon entails:
Biology.
There are entities over which we have no control. For example, humans are relatively weakly hierarchical creatures compared to many other social animals, especially from the perspective of biology and evolutionary psychology.
How it works in the animal kingdom:
Wolves, lions, and monkeys (especially baboons and chimpanzees) live in rigidly structured hierarchies where dominance, submission, and status are regulated through aggression, rituals, genetics, or physical strength. In many species, status determines access to food, mates, and safe places — and this is critical for survival. Their hierarchy is stable, instinctive, and almost indisputable without serious conflict.
How it works for humans:
We are capable of cooperation outside of a hierarchy. Human groups can collaborate effectively based on trust, reciprocity, norms, and agreements, rather than solely through submission to an "alpha."
Human hierarchies are cultural, not biological. Unlike wolves or bees, we do not have an innate "instinct to submit." Hierarchies are created socially: through laws, traditions, economics, religion, and technology. They change over time and vary greatly between cultures (e.g., egalitarian hunter-gatherers vs. imperial bureaucracies).
Humans are prone to resisting authority. Experiments (e.g., Milgram, Zimbardo) show that while people can submit, they often experience internal conflict. History is full of examples of rebellions, revolutions, and democratic movements — which are rare in the animal kingdom.
We create "horizontal" structures. Friendships, partnerships, cooperatives, and open-source communities are all forms of non-ranked interaction that are impossible for most animals.
Flexibility is an evolutionary advantage. The ability to quickly switch between hierarchy and equality, submission and leadership, made humans more adaptable to changing conditions.
This is interesting, but these are simply facts that we take into account, not things we can control.
What we can control are cognitive biases, although even that is not easy. There are currently 157 of them. How to work with them was discussed in the previous article.