PART ONE IN A SERIES – Let’s start with the basics.
Survival is a human’s main motivating force.Note: Survival is an organization’s main motivating force, too. Like humans, organizations do what they must do to survive.
Because humans are social creatures, our most foundational survival tools revolve around interactions/relationships. It starts when we are born, helpless and weak. If other people didn’t meet our needs, we would die. As we develop competence, power and knowledge, we apply those skills within and against our social structure. This, in turn, causes our environment to adapt. The most foundational aspect (underlying process) of human survival is to interact in ways that are, overall, beneficial.
If no one interacted with your company or your safety program, you/it would not survive. Therefore, the goal of every organization is to cause people to interact with it in beneficial ways. If the organization wants to survive in the long term, that interaction must be beneficial to its social environment as well as to itself. Based on this underlying principle, we will discuss three common survival tools both humans and organizations use:
- Be relevant
- Be Efficient (Do what has been done before)
- Innovate (Find new solutions, apply them intelligently, and adapt continuously)