As 2023 began, I turned my attention to setting up meetings with members of the Society and representatives of our Affiliate Organisation Members. As I write it is almost three years since the beginning of the pandemic and while some aspects of life have returned, the way we work has changed in many ways.
The Society is primarily interested in knowledge transfer and sharing information about safety, risk and reliability and the challenge to do this has moved from organising events to the more personal one-to-one meetings. As we settle into new work patterns, we will inevitably need to look at how meeting less in person and groups impact the exchange of knowledge.
How has the workplace changed?
I speak to many SaRS members and to staff at the Engineering Council, Royal Academy of Engineering and various Professional Engineering Institutes on a regular basis. As well as reading reports about hybrid working and a full time return to work, I hear personal stories of how lives have changed.
Some people have returned to the workplace full time, while others have returned part time or are working fully remotely. The knock-on effect of this is that some organisations whose staff are back in the workplace full time have stopped streaming or providing remote access to meetings. Conversely, organisations who work remotely and hold all meetings online might struggle to get office or site-based clients and colleagues to join meetings due to no access to a device.
How does this affect knowledge transfer?
At first glance, it might seem that the knowledge transfer still happens even when we cannot attend meetings, conferences or seminars as the knowledge is placed in a folder addendum to the meeting online in the form of reports and minutes. Occasionally there will be a recording of the meeting accessible from the cloud.
There is a difference between listed written knowledge and told knowledge. This difference lies in the way our brains are trained for the shape stories. Almost everything we tell each other is storytelling – there are lots of studies which confirm this – and billions is spent each year by advertising and marketing to key into this.
I have attended hundreds of conferences in my working life and the speakers who stand out are those who have made that personal connection with the audience. Those who spoke about their own journey and experience and coined memorable phrases – Trevor Kletz and his ‘belt and braces’ story springs to mind.
The discussions at meetings mirror this. In these discussions, we are building a story of how we move something forward, with contributions from colleagues. Even meeting minutes are a storied structure of the meeting telling us what happened and tapping into key memories about the knowledge and information we need to retain.
Reports, lists, spreadsheets and accounts are an important part of knowledge exchange, but do not tell the whole story.
So why do online webinars work so well?
At first glance, webinars might not seem like storytelling. But they retain the shape of ‘telling’ to an audience. Typically, there is a semi-interview situation, a panel collaboration and mini stories told in the questions and answers.
But the key to successful online events is structure. In knowledge exchange, structure is everything. In order to collate context and meaning, our brains build concepts into schemas and structuring knowledge helps our reticular activating system to sort the information into what we want to keep as memories and what we discard. Many structures in the external world are set up to train us to do this – courses, journal papers, conference papers, committee meeting agendas and minutes – all these give common knowledge shapes for our brains to build our personal knowledge architecture for.
Webinars still foster enough discussion to provide both storytelling and a repeatable structure.
Group psychology and committee meetings
The obvious thing missing from online meetings is the group dynamic in terms of body language. I have seen many techniques that try to mirror this in both Teams and Zoom but have so far not managed to capture the ‘in a room’ situation.
There is a strong accent on leadership and learning here. In a face-to-face situation, we can take unspoken cues to prompt us when to speak and when to listen. Leadership includes understanding group dynamics in your own organisational meetings. On Zoom or Teams, it requires a much more focussed organisation and direction from the Chair to make sure everyone in the meeting is heard – and one of the de rigueur of online meeting phrases of only slightly less regularity than ‘you’re on mute’ is ‘you can write it in the chat’.
Online chat produces a fragmented list instead of a discussion and while the apps dutifully deliver this to our recording folders, it often lacks context and meaning outside the meeting. Similarly, reports in a dropbox or sharepoint are useful and interesting knowledge containers, but lack the context of the discussion at the meeting.
Positive change
So, what is the answer? The world is still settling from a pandemic that changed many things about the ways we live. Our well-rehearsed and stored structures are disrupted and we are still working out how to rearrange. While this happens, all we can do is try our best to communicate knowledge in the best ways that we can, with the understanding that talking to each other and meeting face to face will provide a different knowledge exchange to reading reports.
As SaRS, we are working to provide an all-round knowledge exchange experience. Some of our branch meetings have been held face to face, and we make sure that Zoom or Teams calls have a few minutes at the beginning for us to exchange knowledge in a storied form.
But the biggest change I have noticed is the compulsion to collaborate. Pre-pandemic, we provided formats for our affiliates to meet and chat, but the preference was to send a representative to meetings and take knowledge away. This was due to many reasons such as time, corporate confidentiality rules and availability.
Now I am seeing much more one-to-one sharing of knowledge. Requests from members and affiliates come through my office to collaborate on CPD planning, mentoring and cross industry examples of safety and reliability knowledge. I have attended some of these collaborative meetings, and rather than a formal presentation the knowledge is shared in corporate and personal storytelling and the sharing of experience.
I am also seeing more follow ups to online meetings. I receive more phone calls to clarify points in online meetings or from people who don’t feel their point was conveyed properly – these are responses to the vague feeling of ‘not enough’ that some people have experienced when ‘presenting’ to an online meeting – or simply from not getting their voice heard which, in comparison to a face to face meeting is much more difficult to remedy online where the non-verbal cues are much more difficult to spot.
Knowledge containers such as this journal and various reports are also shared, but as part of the story of safety and reliability because practice and operation depend on the human output of knowledge.
This Journal 41.4 contains two papers. The first from Altelarrea et al. is on Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and its use in safety assessment when architecting complex systems. The second from Saarikoski et al. looks at the significant differences in the quality of incident reports at hospitals in Finland.
I have no preference for either online or face to face meetings, and whether these new ways of working develop into collective schemas and are normalised remains to be seen, but my psychology background allows me to observe the differences in more depth and adapt my personal style to suit. If you would like to discuss anything about the Society, please do get in touch and share your knowledge about your own safety and reliability practice.
This leaves me only to thank you again for your continued support of the Safety and Reliability Society.
Registration with the Engineering Council through the Safety and Reliability Society
The Safety and Reliability Society was successful in April 2020 in their application for a Licence to Register CEng and IEng SaRS Members. The SaRS Engineering Membership Committee has been busy in the first year of the Licence honing our systems and working with the Engineering Council to provide a route to registration for our members. Many thanks to the Engineering Council for their guidance and support in SaRS achieving this goal. In March 2021, the Engineering Council extended this interim licence for a further four years.
We are delighted to announce that two SaRS Members have been registered with the Engineering Council since the last Journal. Congratulations to:
Karissa Chan Helen Evans
Registering with the Engineering Council through SaRS
Our registration application programme is open, and we are happy to receive applications from candidates for CEng or IEng.
You can find details of how to apply and guidance for your application on the SaRS website under the main Membership green tab – please select ‘Registering with the Engineering Council’ on the drop-down menu.
We strongly recommend that you read UK-SPEC in conjunction with the application process and make sure that you are planning and completing your continuing professional development (CPD).
As always, we are happy to answer any questions and assist you through the process with three rounds of professional review advice (PRA). Please get in touch if you have any questions by emailing [email protected].
We very much look forward to receiving your application to begin your journey to registration with SaRS
Chief Executive Officer
The Safety and Reliability Society
[email protected]