Whether one takes a risk or not depends on many things, least of all the paperwork you just filled out. Learning to tackle risk is something that starts from birth. If you grow up under helicopter parenting or laissez faire parenting frames the way you approach risk in school. Your personality, family history, social groupings, genome and risk availability all determine what you think about risk. From your first bump on the head, fall down stairs, fall off a bike or jam your fingers in a door, you learn what to do about harm and your being in fallibility. All of this comes well before the age of 3. These and many more experiences shape your being. Such is the nature of the nature-nuture dialectic.
Being is about the whole person. We are embodied-social-fallible people. It is from this foundation that we learn to tackle the risks in life. This is why when we finally get to school we discover people who different experiences and approach life differently from us. We learn that our worldview is not the only worldview, even the worldview of the school and the teachers. We soon learn that the organizing at school is not like the organizing at home. We learn that our values and what we value compete with all the other values in space and time and it is from here we develop a view on compliance, rules, consequence and risk. We watch others do things we would never do and visa versa. Such is the nature of sub-cultures and the constraints in culture.
As a parent I see attitudes, values, personality and development of being in 40 year old children who hold consistently to how their being formed in early childhood. I have 4 children and 4 grandchildren and watch this formation of being for a second time as perhaps an even more educated observer. Then with in-laws one knows that observing is the limit of things, trying to influence grandchildren in a different stream to parents if fraught with problems and risk consequences. This is because their forming, norming and development of being was very different from your own child. Such is the nature of the development of being.
By the time we get to working age many aspects of being are firmly in place, some things change but mostly amount to tinkering about the edges. Once at work we learn the norms of social reproduction but also the expression of individuality. Then we also learn that good and bad fortune also contribute to the way opportunity falls on some and not on others. Some don’t succeed at things because they were born with a disability, others because their social environment offers no opportunity. Then some suffer under random events that could not been foreseen and their whole life takes on a new direction.
Then enter the world of safety where an engineer tells you they can program human behaviour with some mechanism as if doing is separated from being. And people still fall for this behaviourist rubbish.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- The Paradox of Conformity and the Challenge for New Ideas - August 11, 2020
- The Shape of Belief in Safety - August 10, 2020
- Motivation and de-Motivation in Safety - August 7, 2020
- Learning Styles Matter - August 2, 2020
- There is no HIERARCHY of Controls - August 1, 2020
bernardcorden says
Dear Rob,
Many thanks for the post, I have just started on Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, which is fascinating stuff. Needless to say it’s never referenced in the OHS BoK
Margret says
And so the age-old question in safety – HOW do we get through to the people who may have a flippant view of risk? How as safety people to we pressure into their skulls the importance of not taking that risk that they may not even see is there or if they do see it, not to give in to their natural desire and totally blow safe procedures off?
Rob Long says
Margret, your first question of course implies socialitie, but safety is all about behaviourism and individuality, this worldview inhibits the industry from being professional and also from engaging with others about risk. It is because people can’t see risks that others can, that we need to have an ethic of risk that includes social reality in its view. This is not the case. We all have blind spots and are vision impaired as part of fallibility but unless we understand and know how to engage socially the current situation will just keep on going.
Rob long says
Bernard, the BoK has never been about an open approach knowledge but rather a political criteria to define a club, and a small club at that. The end goal is to fool a government to make this the measure of criteria for compulsory registration of safety people so that the membership gates flood open. The conflict of interest and coagulation of agendas is there in plain sight.