Risky Conversations – Audio Book

Be very afraid, the Regulator is out to get you! Paperwork covers your backside in court! Inductions have to cover off everything in the Act. Due diligence is measured by six elements. Counting and measuring indicate the presence of safety. High-Vis is number one. Risk is simple. These and many other myths plague the risk, safety and security industries. Challenging these myths is risky just as talking about risk is risky. Furthermore, conversations about risk across disciplines is risky, but this is what this book and project is about.

It is challenging to move beyond the boundaries of one’s worldview and move to ‘meet’ those who come from different disciplines. This is what this book does. The book models risky conversations and implores the reader to undertake risky conversations. We need to have conversations about risk and, risk having those conversations. This is the fifth book in the series about risk.

This book is the result of three days of discussion, dialogue and listening from thee dispositions: the law, social psychology and ‘collective coherence’.

Sometimes what makes a conversation ‘risky’ is that those involved belong to different groups or collectives. This means that there is the potential for disagreements or confusion to occur based not on a difference of opinion over a particular idea, discourse or ‘text’, but over a deeper conflict of colliding trajectories of one or more, alternate, coherent views of reality, that is, different Collective Coherences. This can happen when people belong to different groups that make assumptions about:
… the nature of things, the categories in which they think, and the logic that organises these categories into a coherent understanding of reality. It becomes increasingly clear that people live not in the same world with different labels attached to it but in radically different conceptual worlds Hiebert (2008, p. 15).
The three authors gathered together for three days and recorded their conversations producing a series of videos, a talking book and transcripts that form the content of this book.
A proper appreciation of the social psychology of risk, and the legal boundaries within which it operates, helps us understand how to tackle risk in a more mature, coherent and intelligent way.