These ideas have far reaching implications for WHS. For a start we need to recognise that the health issues with which we are dealing are complex. For too long we have accepted a reductionist approach – focusing on the easier to identify workplace risk factors and neglecting workplace psychosocial risks arising from precarious work, bad job design and toxic managers.

Our KISS approach (keep it simple stupid) stood us in good stead for decades. It has its advantages but we have well and truly come unstuck on mental health.

I recall the Productivity Commissioner who led the benchmarking review on OHS regulation in the early 2000s saying he was astonished how unprepared Australian OHS authorities were for mental health.

We have been slow to grapple with the complexity of the inter-relationship between physical and psychosocial causes and physical and mental health outcomes; and the obvious fact that health at work is affected by a combination of personal and environmental determinants from home and the community as well as in workplaces.

We know but largely ignore that the broader economy is a major driver of claims performance, and that when people run out of workers’ compensation they fall back on the social security system. We have shockingly failed to adequately address the significant contribution work makes to cardiovascular disorders, cancers and other diseases.

Diane Finegood, the President of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in Canada addressed CEIPS event (below).The session was described in a CEIPS blog which said Finegood explained how a systems approach differed from business as usual in public health as it would support adaptive change rather than imposing standardised interventions through models, guidelines and frameworks.

The blogger wrote, quoting an interviewee in his or her own research, “The day of scalability, of standardised programs, is dead”: Recognition that one size does not fit all.

Reporting on the discussion following Finegood’s presentation, the blogger described some resistance to the idea of throwing out governments’ “command and control” role completely, pointing to its effectiveness in tobacco control.

In October last year CEIPS sponsored an event in Melbourne covering the topic the topic “Solving Complex Problems: Adaptation vs Attribution”.

In the course of this work the question emerged: “What is the difference between complex and complicated?”. The first time I read this it did my head in, even more so than my new daily ritual of The Age crossword.

The answer is (I think), complexity is a property of the system and complicated is a reference to an intervention applied to that system. According to Allan Shiell, CEO of the Centre for Excellence in Intervention and Prevention Science (CEIPS) in Victoria, speaking at a conference in 2013, “Communities, work-sites, schools etc … are complex adaptive systems … more ‘biological’ than ‘mechanical'”. Complex adaptive systems require complicated interventions.

“A complex (complicated) intervention is ‘built up from a number of components, which may act both independently and inter-independently.’ This makes it hard to define the active ingredient.” Shiell again, writing with others in 2008.

Systems thinking focuses on the whole and relationships and connections within. Interventions based on systems thinking work with or around relevant properties of systems, and have an emphasis on implementation, quality improvement and adaptation to context, according to Shiell.