Risk Makes Sense, Human Judgement and Risk (Audio Book)

Risk Makes Sense, Human Judgement and Risk

Dr Robert Long and Joshua Long

In a world of growing risk aversion, one could be forgiven for thinking that risk doesn’t make sense. Risk elimination, thinking and behaviour sets a trajectory for a ‘dumb down’ workplace culture. The more efforts are made to ‘engineer out the idiot’, the more the system creates an unthinking workforce.

A Newsletter in 2011 by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK lists a number of things that have been banned: dodgem cars, school sack races and kite flying, amongst the activities which have been banned. Some schools have banned kids playing on monkey bars and others have banned leather footballs. A local council has instituted a $1000 penalty for kite flying on council ovals in case somebody might get hit. Even the Royal British Legion had to stop selling poppies with pins on Remembrance Day in case people might prick themselves.

The report above demonstrates just how absurd things have developed in our risk adverse society. The reality is, there is no learning without risk. Risk is not bad. You can’t live life without a ‘trade-off’ for risk. You can’t learn without risk. We seem more than ever a preoccupation with lawsuits than learning, more anxious about injury than adventure and, fear of harm rather than welcoming creativity. The quest for certainty, absolute control and the elimination of doubt is a fundamentalist pursuit.

The evolving language of risk elimination and cult-like fixation with everything ‘zero’ is a language that fosters the development of an unthinking workforce. As risk aversion increases, so do the resulting management systems that accompany it. This results in ‘flooding’ the worker so that they default to gut instincts, personal micro-rules and sometimes ‘risk quackery’, that increases risk.

Rather than resist risk or extinguish risk, we need to embrace it and better understand it from a psychological and cultural perspective. This is a purpose of the book. This book advocates a social psychology approach when applied to the risk, safety and security industries. It advocates a new approach to risk that identifies that risk makes sense and is sense-able.

In a Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) we need not fear risk but rather become learners in risk and thereby more risk intelligent. The book provides positive and practical alternatives to the growing absurdities of risk aversion.