Two Wicked Problems: Psychosocial Risk Management and Cane Toads.
Psychosocial Risk Management and the Cane Toads of Australia are both what we call ‘Wicked Problems'.’ That is, a problem which is difficult to solve because of complex and changing requirements that interact with each other, to the point that there is no single solution.
For a really good analysis of Wicked Problems, see this LinkedIn post by Antony Malmo. Alternatively, imagine yourself trying to untangle an enormous bundle of Christmas Tree lights after they’ve been tossed into a loft for a couple of years.
Artist credit: Liz Climo
I learned about Wicked Problems last week, after writing a blog defining Psychosocial Risk Management.
Having finished (or so I thought) perfectly defining Psychosocial Risk and all of its parameters in an accessible manner, I went for a stroll and listened to an industry podcast. Halfway through the podcast, I realised I had committed a cardinal sin by conflating psychosocial risks and psychosocial hazards. I hurried home to correct my errors, consoling myself by remembering that I don’t have a particularly big audience (yet - so if you like this blog, please like and share!)
Great. Now I’ve got it all right, I thought. Absolutely precise. No room for any confusion whatsoever.
Then I listened to another Psychosocial Health and Safety podcast, featuring Antony Malmo and the connection to Australia’s problem with cane toads, and realised that when it comes to Psychosocial Risk Management (or indeed, any human, or toad, behaviour), things aren’t quite so simple. The podcast is a cracker - listen here.
Caravan parks and cane toads
The cane toad was introduced to Queensland in 1935, to control a population of beetles eating through their sugarcane crops. In handling this problem, the cane toads did a great job.
Unfortunately, they caused a few more issues in the process, namely, multiplying like mad, roaming across the country, and poisoning other wildlife along the way. By the early 2000s, they had spread all the way to the Northern Territory.
In 2004, I spent a night in a caravan in Kakadu National Park, completely surrounded by cane toads. I still, occasionally, have nightmares about sitting on the loo in the camp toilet block with poisonous toads hopping at my feet, wondering why in the hell I had emigrated to a place where basically everything kills you.
Australia tried everything, from ‘Twilight Toadbusting’ operations (run by Conservation Australia, so presumably humane), to scientists suggesting that perhaps the toads would ‘shag themselves out of existence.’
This is the face of a creature that knows it is basically unstoppable.
In managing to contain their sugarcane beetle problem, Australia had created a dynamic, adaptable, and ultimately unsolvable ‘wicked’ toad problem. And I’m not casting shade on our cousins across the pond here. NZ did the same thing with possums and rabbits.
That is the thing with ecosystems. When you take a reductionist view, sh*t goes south quickly, and the same thing happens in organisations.
Organisations as ecosystems
You have beetles in your sugar cane, so out come the cane toads.
What could possibly go wrong?
Let’s say your organisation decides to really get a handle on this Psychosocial Risk Management thing. You start by sending out an engagement survey, and then introducing a wellness package. Nothing really happens.
You learn that Psychosocial Risk Management is really a Health and Safety problem, not an HR problem, and requires Psychosocial Risk assessment, hazard identification and controls, just like physical health and safety.
So you bring in a Psychosocial Risk Management Consultant, who does all of the above. Great ! Finally your Psychosocial Risk problems are solved and you are working towards compliance with ISO45003.
The Consultant identifies that isolation is a psychosocial hazard for your people, and that effective job design is the solution, so you design workplaces or projects that force people to work together.
Image credit: Dilbert by Scott Adams
Completion of one team member’s work relies on another team member completing their work, and now you have an issue with job control. Some people love it, other people hate it.
As you address one psychosocial hazard, another pops up, and soon you see them everywhere, like an unstoppable force of whack-a-moles. You introduce more controls and policies about the controls. In other words, you have a cane toad problem.
Want to understand Psychosocial Risk Management, and how not to do it? Read Dilbert.
You hire another Consultant, who has a slightly different methodology. Same thing happens.
You decide what you really need is someone in your own organisation who is around all the time and can take ownership of the whole thing. Continuous Improvement. Compliance with Psychosocial Risk Management measures. Measuring, auditing and metrics.
Now, you have created the Catbert of Psychosocial Risk. Everybody smiles grimly as “Patbert” arrives to audit your team’s adherence to Psychosocial Risk Management policies. Yes, Patbert tells you, the systems are in place, and your employees are definitely very, very happy. Or at least, they had better be, or they’ll fail their next audit.
Artist credit: more Dilbert, by Scott Adams.
And so it goes on.
The “Patbert” of Psychological Health and Safety.
How can we solve an unsolvable problem?
Simple. Stop trying to solve ‘a’ problem. Wicked problems do not have a single solution.
Rather than looking at the components of Psychosocial Health and Safety in isolation, think of Psychosocial Health and Safety as part of your organisational ecosystem. Everything, from hazards to controls and interventions, impacts everything else and often has a two way relationship. You do not create a garden by removing one weed.
What’s the alternative?
The Knepp Estate
The Knepp estate is a 3,500 acre estate in West Sussex, famous for its unique approach to nature conservation. Once intensively farmed, the land is now home to a variety of healthy habitats and an extraordinary increase in wildlife.
When the current estate owners arrived on the Knepp Estate, and found it in an arid state, they presumed that the problems with the land were due to a lack of investment. So they invested intensively. More machinery, more fences, more drainage, more dairy cows and other species accustomed to intensive farming practices.
What happened? Everything got worse, including their balance sheet.
What was the problem? The soil. Sussex clay, on which the farm was built, simply wasn’t suited to the activity taking place upon it. All of their attempts to fix their wicked problem created more wicked problems.
What the Knepp Estate learned from this experience, is that you can’t solve a wicked problem with the same tools that created it.
So they tried a new tool.
Re-wilding
They removed the fences, the dairy cows, the drainage. They just let what was already there do its thing and then watched what happened. They sat back, and the solutions came to them.
Some of the results were cascading and unexpected, like the rootling of roaming pigs that via a dominos-falling sequence of impacts on soil, anthills and bees has led to thriving populations of purple emperor butterflies, turtle doves and green wood-pigeons.
Rather than solving the problem with controls, they solved the problem by removing the controls, and created a series of new opportunities in the process.
There is a wonderful series of films in which Isabella Tree (yes, this is really her name) talks about this process. Worth a watch just to listen to the purring of the (extremely rare) turtle dove.
How does this relate to organisational behaviour, and Psychosocial Risk Management?
Should you ‘re-wild’ your organisation?
The answer isn’t ‘either / or,’ but rather, it depends.
A ‘controls-free’ approach might work for an online Psychology business (like ours - in fact, I might describe the cultural change story at Glia as ‘re-wilding), but it might not be right for a Manufacturing facility.
In regenerative agriculture, we see elements of control; but successful interventions consider the impacts and relationships between variables on the wider environment. They work with the environment, not against it. Management techniques are used to restore the system, with improved productivity being a bi-product of an optimally functioning environment.
Consider how psychosocial hazards and controls work together
There’s a great meta-analysis here, looking at research on mental health in Construction industry workers which found that controlling for one psychosocial hazard resulted in an 8% improvement in mental health. Controlling for a whole cluster of psychosocial hazards, on the other hand, resulted in 88% better mental health outcomes. The impact is even more significant if we can identify which hazard and control has the greatest cascading effect.
You can hear more about this research here, in the totally fascinating ‘improving the evidence-base for mental health in construction’ episode of the Psych Health and Safety podcast, with Joelle Mitchell, Jason van Schie and guest Dr Carol Hon.
This is a bit like how the rootling of pigs at the Knepp estate kicked up sods of soil, which triggered the building of anthills, which encouraged the arrival of green wood-pigeons, who eat the ants.
The researchers in the above-listed study did not expect to find that both the psychosocial hazards and the controls cascaded. They stumbled on this finding by accident, and it has since created a whole new pathway of research.
But I thought that Psychosocial Health and Safety was just Health and Safety?
It is. Frankly, we often take a reductionist view of physical health and safety as well.
There is a benefit to clear definitions, and in creating a Psychosocial Risk Management system that fits into existing Management systems.
But the danger of taking a ‘Psychosocial Risk Management is Health and Safety!’ stance is that we risk creating more problems by focusing on identifying and controlling isolated hazards.
Instead, we should focus on creating optimal environments for our people by adding more of what makes people flourish, and removing the barriers to flourishing.
This is true for both Psychosocial and physical health and safety.
Let’s not ignore the OSH pathway of psychosocial hazard identification and controls altogether. Rather, before we assess, control, or measure any specific psychosocial hazard, we should consider the cascading impacts that doing so may trigger in our wider ecosystem. Reductionist approaches are only a part of the story, and in isolation, will not solve a ‘wicked problem.’
Health and Safety is a part of culture. Culture travels downstream, and a psychologically healthy workforce starts at the top. In rewilding terms, focus first on the health of your soil.
Psychosocial Risk Management is a wicked problem.
Let’s re-frame that. Psychosocial Risk Management is a wicked opportunity.
Seven golden rules that will turn your wicked Psychosocial Risk Management problem into a wicked Psychosocial Risk Management opportunity:
Whenever you consider implementing a process to solve a Psychological Risk Management problem, stop, and think of the cane toads.
Before you ask “how can we solve this problem,” ask yourself, “how are we creating this problem?”
Don’t try to solve the problem with the same tools that created it.
Rather than focusing on fixing your people, work on optimising the environment in which they operate.
Put the right people in the right places, let them create their own environment, and watch the magic happen. Remember the rootling pigs of the Knepp Estate. Let your pigs rootle, and you might end up with turtle doves. (Psychologists call this ‘job crafting.’)
Stay curious, and be prepared to be wrong. Much like ecology in the thirties, Psychosocial Risk Management is an emerging discipline. Everything we think we know now will soon be outdated.
Go back to point 1.
Wicked problems, and wicked opportunities, are a bit like regenerative farming. The work never ends. Even if you optimise your estate, the seasons will change, the harvest will need bringing in, more and more species will arrive, and from time to time you will experience floods, droughts, pests, birth and loss.
In the face of all of these challenges and opportunities, your knowledge, your systems, your creatures and your crops will continue to grow.
Before you try to control your people by adding a process, remember the cane toads.
Blog by Ngaire Wallace - follow me on LinkedIn here.
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Afterword
Feels a bit ridiculous having an acknowledgements section on a blog post, but this blog has been heavily informed by the work of other people and I need to credit them.
Thanks again to Antony Malmo, whose commentary led to the vast majority of this blog, to Dr Carol Hon and the research team for their work on mental health in construction workers, and Jason van Schie and Joelle Mitchell of the Psych Health and Safety podcast.
Props also go to Psychologist Clive Lloyd, author of ‘Next Generation Safety Leadership: from Compliance to Care’. As Clive would say ‘behaviours are not the problem, they are expressions of the problem'.