The New View Police Podcast provides a fresh no holds barred perspective on policing in the United States.
The New View Manifesto:
1. Policies, procedures and training for high-risk, complex and unpredictable work (no matter how good they are) NEVER fully account for how this work actually gets done.
2. Policies, procedures and training are how administrators, managers and trainers (no matter how experienced they are) imagine high-risk complex work is or should be done from positions that are insulated from the risks, complexities and uncertainties of the work itself.
3. Workers must translate and transfer the abstract, overly simplistic, linear and incomplete policies, procedures and training of imagined work to the complex, high-risk, unpredictable problems of actual work in order to achieve good outcomes... and they almost always succeed!
4. Workers in high-risk, complex and unpredictable work environments often achieve good outcomes in spite of policies, procedures and training... not because of them.
5. Safety in high-risk, complex, unpredictable work environments comes from worker creativity, flexibility, and resilience (ability to recover from the unexpected) and not from rigid rules, perfectly specified procedures, or repetitive block training.
People are the solution to high-risk, complex and unpredictable problems... not the problem themselves!
P.S. This is not a criticism of policies, procedures, or training... We need all three. We just need to understand their limitations and how high risk work in complex environments actually gets done.