Tackling Risk – Book Giveaway
Following on from the very successful publication of the Risky Conversations video series and book, Dr Long and Roy Fitzgerald have released book six in the series on risk: Tackling Risk, A Field Guide to Risk and Learning. You can purchase your copy of books from the series here
This is a book that focuses on the interrelationship of risk with learning. As Dr Long writes inside the cover of many of his books: ‘there is no learning without risk, and no real living without learning’. This truism is often absent in many organisations that advocate risk aversion as a sense-able approach to tackling risk. The idea of wrapping oneself up in cotton wool and avoiding the risks of living in the world is a strange way to engage in living. Risk is not a problem, risk is not wrong. It’s how humans Tackle Risk that is important and what is traded off in that process.
Risk aversion mitigates learning by making people less experienced and more ‘fragile’. This fragility leads to less experience and increased risk. This is observed when we seek technical and bureaucratic solutions only to pay the price in depersonalised processes.
Gone are the days when kids were left to experience the discovery of free unsupervised play. However, the risk of harm in free play hasn’t been eliminated, we now have an obesity epidemic in the west with greater potential for long-term harm than the risk of harm in discovery, trial and error and play. This is the learning-risk paradox.
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