WOBO is grateful for the link to Gill Kernick’s book and podcast, and asks the question “are we ready for systemic change?”

WOBO Governor David Gibson found the interview and text provided challenging demands for society and reinforced the need for conceptual review and change.

SHP speaks to Gill Kernick, Master Consultant at JMJ Associates, a specialist in safety leadership and culture and prominent Grenfell Campaigner, about her new book ‘Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters.’

Having lived on the twenty-first floor of Grenfell Tower from 2011 to 2014, Gill Kernick has strong ties to the tragedy on 14 June 2017, in which seven of her former neighbours died. Her interest in the Grenfell tower fire is not only personal though, Gill has spent her career working in high-hazard industries, partnering with organisations to build their leadership capabilities and culture in order to prevent catastrophic events.

Gill’s book, ‘Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters’, published on 27 May 2021, explores the myths, the key challenges and the conditions that inhibit learning, and it identifies opportunities to positively disrupt the status quo. It offers an accessible model for systemic change, not as a definitive solution but as a framework to evoke reflection, enquiry and proper debate.

“Naively I imagined that the worst residential fire in London since World War II – a fire that killed seventy-two people in the UK’s richest borough – would engender a desire to learn and change,” Gill told SHP. “I was wrong. After discovering the multiple failed opportunities to learn, and realising that, far from being an isolated ‘bad building’, Grenfell revealed systemic failures in building safety and construction across the country.

“History predicted that we’d find out what happened, identify lessons and then fail to learn them.

“Rather than focus only on Grenfell, I needed to understand why we don’t learn from catastrophic events more broadly. Whether it be the COVID-19 pandemic or the Boeing Max air disasters, there is an ‘awful sameness’ to these tragedies, a horrific unifying failure to heed plentiful warnings and change.”

In an attempt to understand why our failure to learn makes sense, Gill explores two questions in the book.

• Why don’t we learn?
• What would it take to enable systemic change?

It is both a personal and a professional account of her own investigations and reflections, its intent is to promote enquiry and debate in the hope that it will help us learn from – and therefore prevent – catastrophic events. “My hope is that the book will spark some insight or thought that will provoke new actions that collectively, little step by little step will help us learn and change,” Gill added.

Listen, as Gill Kernick talks about the pressing need to improve building safety culture post-Grenfell.

Subscribe and tune in the Safety & Health Podcast to discover the latest issues facing the health and safety profession, and stay on-top of the developments affecting your role, from working at height, lone working and common workplace hazards, to safety culture, behaviours, occupational health and mental health and wellbeing.