 John Gladwin/Sunday Mirror Alton Towers victim Vicky Balch A friend showed me a job application form last week. One of the questions was “Show how you used diversity in your previous job.” He answered the question with words that he knew the employer would be ticking off on a scorecard, sprinkled some ‘passionate’ ‘committed to’ ‘enthusiastic’ ‘equality of outcome’ around and sent it off. He knew the diversity question, like every diversity question on every job application, is box ticking nonsense and this particular wording of it demonstrated only that the employer didn’t have a clue about what diversity in the workplace is. But he needed the job.
“Alton Towers and the wider Merlin group are not emotionless corporate entities, they are made up of human beings who care passionately about what they do." This passion and care resulted in “Catastrophic failure to assess risk, inadequate training, inadequate supervision, inadequate management, failure to communicate, failure to put in place safe systems of work.” “The far greater punishment for all of us is knowing that on this occasion we let people down with devastating consequences." The people who were punished for Merlin’s failures included two young women were trapped in mid air for 5 hours. Both had injuries so severe that they lost legs. 14 other people on the ride suffered various dreadful physical and emotional injuries. Nick Varney, chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, and his team are doing their job with real commitment and passion, saving Merlin £2m by admitting liability so that the case did not have to go to trial. He has not lost his job – no one has. Very significantly, no one has resigned. Merlin’s profits are up. Everyone will have learned valuable lessons. It seems that Merlin and Mr Varney genuinely believe that no one has done anything wrong. Back in the real world of human experience, of pain and nightmares, PTSD and lost relationships, two young women’s lives have been totally altered. Their funding - and the funding for all the other victims of the accident - for legal action has been limited. They are on the brutal hamster wheel of proving to the Department of Work and Pensions that they are, in fact, disabled that they will be on for the rest of their lives. Less than 24 hours on from the court case they have slipped off the news and they will be forgotten until they get a financial settlement in some years time and then be re-forgotten. The concept of Bullshit Jobs emerged from a 2003 article and developed into the book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. It's an important book that you should read. At Alton Towers all the forms were filled. Everyone was doing their job in the way that policy and procedure told them to. All that mattered was that policies and procedures existed, not their quality. We can’t alter the way anyone else thinks or behaves. All we can do is examine how we think and behave. When we’re immersed in a culture that tells us that we are doing the right thing even if it results in the misery and near-death of people we will never meet the desire to do that examination has to be very limited. Feelings of cynicism, defeatism and exhaustion; of a kind of self-hatred after brief exhilaration when we blame someone else that can only be cured by blaming them more; of powerlessness are clues that you know something is wrong, and those feelings, unexamined, are likely to spread into and contaminate your relationships. You can choose to be ‘successful’ by earning a lot of money and saying all the right things and ticking all the boxes. You can choose to be the kind of person who cares about what success actually means. (If it helps, these people tend to leapfrog up the ladder of success because they can think for themselves.) In one reality you are respected. In the other you are treated as if you are the machine you are emulating. 17/9/2016 Abandon Hope . . . This picture used to hang in my great aunt’s hallway. It’s called Hope and when I was a child I was frightened by it. I looked at the blindfolded woman sitting on a rock in water clutching a broken lyre. It used to make me very anxious indeed: Why doesn’t she take off the blindfold? Is she in the sea? Is the tide rising? Can she swim to land? Is she going to die there? What does that one string sound like? Doesn’t that one note just drive her mad? What happens when that string breaks?” I’m told that despair is not just a sin but an unforgivable sin and I think that this is relevant to so much positive psychology, all the inspirational posters ever produced, and the shame that so many people feel when they find themselves depressed and demoralised. Most of us are no longer religious in the sense that we don’t believe in a supernatural being or in hell and we don’t go to church other than for baptisms, weddings and funerals, but religious culture is deeply wound into the societies that we grow up in. For many of us despair is entirely appropriate. If you watch the news and don’t feel some sense of despair every day then you may want to consider that denial is just as powerful. Closer to home relationships withering away or being destroyed; being forced to do something that you find meaningless; feeling trapped; feeling obsolete . . . If you’re holding on to hope in a relationship that has gone nowhere for months or years; if you’re in a job that is crushing you; if you feel abandoned and lost or trapped feel free to carry on listening to that one string twanging away for as long as you can bear it. But like that poor woman on a rock there will come a point when you just can’t twang it any more. You can wear your fingers to the bone and at some point the string will break. Despair can look and feel like death. But only when we give up hope are we able to take off the blindfold, stop making the same old noise on that one string and start gathering new information about what else might be around us. You might want to smash the lyre to bits or throw it away or put it on your back to be re-stringed as you get off the rock and do something new. It may be that you can wade ashore. It may be that you need to swim for a long time before you get somewhere. Sometimes it can be so exhausting that you feel you might die, or that death is a better alternative to the exhaustion of trying. But for most of us acknowledging that all hope is gone gives us new energy. Frightening? Very likely. But sometimes we have to give up hope, to really acknowledge our despair, before we can move on to something that brings us genuine fulfilment rather than a one-note, blindfold life. |
CategoriesAll Abandonment Abuse Ancestors Anger Anxiety Ash Wednesday Attitude Banking Bereavement Birthday Bravery Breivik Bystander Effect Camila Batmanghelidjh Carnival Cbt Challenger Charlotte Bevan Childbirth Childhood Children Christmas Coaching Compassion Contemplation Control Counselling Culture Dalai Lama Death Death Cafe Democracy Denial Depression Domestic Violence Dying Eap Earth Day Empathy Employment Eric Klinenberg Ethics Exams Existential Failure Family Annihilation Founders Syndrome Francis Report Gay Cure Genocide George Lyward Goldman Sachs Good Death Greg Smith Grief Grieving Grooming Groupthink Happiness Hate Hungary Illness Interconnectedness Jason Mihalko Jubilee Kids Company Kitty Genovese Life Light Living Loneliness Love Mandatory Reporting Meaning Men Mental Health Mid Staffs Mindfulness Money Mothers New Year Nigella Lawson Optimism Organisational Collapse Oxford Abuse Panama Papers Panic Panic Attacks Parenthood Petruska Clarkson Pleasure Politics Positivity Post Natal Depression Power Priorities Priority Productivity Psychotherapy Ptsd Red Tent Reflection Rena Resilience Riots Rites Of Passage Ritual Robin Williams Sad Sales Savile Scared Seasonal Affective Disorder Self Care Self Preservation Self-preservation Shock Sin Singletons Sport Spring Status St David St Georges Day Stress Suarez Suicide Support Talking Terry Pratchett Time Transition Trauma True Self Truth Understanding Unemployment Valentines Day Viktor Frankl Violence Whistleblowing Who Am I Winter Blues Women Work Archives
July 2018
CategoriesAll Abandonment Abuse Ancestors Anger Anxiety Ash Wednesday Attitude Banking Bereavement Birthday Bravery Breivik Bystander Effect Camila Batmanghelidjh Carnival Cbt Challenger Charlotte Bevan Childbirth Childhood Children Christmas Coaching Compassion Contemplation Control Counselling Culture Dalai Lama Death Death Cafe Democracy Denial Depression Domestic Violence Dying Eap Earth Day Empathy Employment Eric Klinenberg Ethics Exams Existential Failure Family Annihilation Founders Syndrome Francis Report Gay Cure Genocide George Lyward Goldman Sachs Good Death Greg Smith Grief Grieving Grooming Groupthink Happiness Hate Hungary Illness Interconnectedness Jason Mihalko Jubilee Kids Company Kitty Genovese Life Light Living Loneliness Love Mandatory Reporting Meaning Men Mental Health Mid Staffs Mindfulness Money Mothers New Year Nigella Lawson Optimism Organisational Collapse Oxford Abuse Panama Papers Panic Panic Attacks Parenthood Petruska Clarkson Pleasure Politics Positivity Post Natal Depression Power Priorities Priority Productivity Psychotherapy Ptsd Red Tent Reflection Rena Resilience Riots Rites Of Passage Ritual Robin Williams Sad Sales Savile Scared Seasonal Affective Disorder Self Care Self Preservation Self-preservation Shock Sin Singletons Sport Spring Status St David St Georges Day Stress Suarez Suicide Support Talking Terry Pratchett Time Transition Trauma True Self Truth Understanding Unemployment Valentines Day Viktor Frankl Violence Whistleblowing Who Am I Winter Blues Women Work |
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