After a decade of competency based training

It really is surprising how Australian culture now is so utterly adverse to questioning things. Part of the larrakin attitude was based around questioning authority and the established way that things have been done. Now instead, it seems that the political class, the powerful and the madia (now there’s a Freudian slip for you!) have taken that egalitarian ethos and turned it on its head. Now it is anyone who dares question authority and power who is now ridiculed – as if they were pretending to be an authority themselves – by those with authority. It is an inversion of the larrakin ethos that doesn’t work. It is more like an affirmation of the old class structure that you used to find in Britain. The public will now side with the powerful in any kind of exchange like that. Perhaps it has more to do with the powerful contracting advertising and marketing experts to frame their messages as if the mass media messages from a department packed with professionals came from honest Joe down the road. It teaches people to stay out of trouble anyway.

Over the last few decades there has been a push to make education more relevant to doing particular jobs without much concern for the underlying theories. If people learn some key skills, go through the checklists and go through the motions they will do a good job. People who are used to that kind of work environment don’t really know what to do with questioning or dissenting views. They misunderstand it completely. They take it as an attack on their competence. Any kind of system testing that identifies problems is a benefit because it allows the organisation to understand what could become a problem and deal with it before it blows up as a major problem. If warnings are persistently given and persistently ignored then the fault lies with the ignoring of the warnings and a closed system (silo) mentality. Anyway, I wonder if you could relate the cultural problem of not being able to deal with competing views in a healthy way as being related to decades of competency based training. Just a thought.