Crucial question about optical clear – yet perceptive – words like Safety, Reality, Resilience, embracing uncertainty, imagination and taking red pills. And about why we would even want a Safety Jester in the first place.
Words don’t inherently posses meaning. Meaning is what we attribute to them.
You may recognize some of these common pains and inconveniences in your own organization:
Projects do not meet deadlines and budgets
No clear definition of ‘done’ or ‘good’
Disappointment for not meeting expectations
Recurrence of unwanted events or incidents
Diminishing involvement, increasing absence rates
Blaming Gen-Z mentality
Culture of silence
Bottomline: you know there is a lot going on in your organization, but you can’t tell exactly what and why. You would like to understand better and improve, but can’t find the right path forward. That’s where the Safety Jester comes into play.
“Reality” is one of those deceptively simple words that opens up a deep rabbit hole depending on how you approach it. It is crucial that we keep on talking about our intended, expected, experienced and observed realities. We must continue giving meaning to our own realities. Shared realities keep us connected, and support our safety and our resilience. We must keep our campfires alive!
Why can a jester be more candid than employees can be?
The Safety Jester sits in an independent position. There is no line of authority between the Jester and the lines of power in an organisation. The Safety Jester therefor has no boundaries to speaking up candidly.
The focus of the Safety Jester is not so much to prevent things from going wrong, but much more to ensure that things go right. That is in line with the so-called ‘New View’ Safety (which actually is not that new).
Following the definition of Safety – focus on ensuring success – the Safety Jester builds on principles and science in the field of Human & Organisational Performance (HOP), High Reliability Organisations (HRO), Resilience Engineering and Safety II / Safety Differently.
Organisational Resilience is an organisational capability. Resilience consists of positive, proactive activities aimed at being prepared for situations you cannot really prepare for. Resilience is the anchoring of necessary adaptations to absorb unexpected and often complex future events. Resilience is not something an organisation has, it is something it does. That means Resilience is what we continuously work for.
Human & Organisational Performance (HOP) is a modern approach to safety and organizational reliability. It recognizes that humans are fallible, and focuses on designing systems and responses that support learning, resilience, and improvement — rather than relying on control and punishment.
In times of uncertainty, we chase clarity and comfort. Any certainty will do. Most of our thinking is shaped by confirmation bias: we only see what supports our beliefs and ignore what doesn’t. That makes us vulnerable to manipulation, to kayfabe, to optic compliance and false assurance. Uncertainty itself is not dangerous, but our need for certainty is.
What about the power of wondering and imagination?
For Jester’s learning to wonder, to amaze, to think deeper and imagine what you see happening, or what might happen, is a powerful solution tool for many challenges.
The red pill is about waking up from comfort. From blind routines. From systems that reward obedience and punish curiosity. Some people complain and wonder whether there is more to live than to watch screens eight hours per day, line up in a traffic jam back homa and stroll through Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. We live in a dream we didn’t choose. The blue pill stands for fake freedom, the red pill for the courage to break the pattern, to embrace uncertainty and jump into the unknown.
If we dont choose our own path we got sucked into someone else’s plans. We then keep on being actors in someone else’s roleplay.
Learning from daily work is much more logical and effective for us than learning from incidents. Incidents are relatively rare. Opportunities to learn from accidents are scarce. Additionally, the circumstances of incidents and accidents are often difficult to compare. And when similar incidents don’t repeat, we can’t verify whether lessons learned previously were effective.
Guided Adaptability is term coined by David Provan in 2021. Guided Adaptability is about contributing to (or creating) the ability of employees to perceive and respond to changes in context and risks, and to facilitate taking the right actions — either to prevent things from going wrong or to ensure that goals are achieved. Guided Adaptability has an essential proactive role in ensuring organizational resilience.
If you want to help others reflect and grow, you can follow a training with us to become a Corporate Jester (Profnar®) Fellow (for employees) or Profnar® Master (for independent professionals). Check out the possibilities on our training page of Het NarrenGilde. Please note that this training is based on a scientifically proven method, backed up by a PhD Thesis.
“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.”
Ralph Fiennes
Actor in the movie “Conclave” (2024)
Your Safety Jester – Guardian Angel of Reality & Resilience in your organisation!
