When I wrote my first book years ago, Risk Makes Sense, its target was a culture that argued that risk was bad, evil and irrational. When you don’t approach risk from an assumption of safety but rather the importance of learning, Risk Makes Sense.
All educators and parents know that there is no learning without risk.
Humans are Not the enemies of safety (https://safetyrisk.net/the-enemy-of-safety-humans/) rather; Safety is the enemy of learning.
The moment Safety identifies as Zero any focus on learning must cease. Instead, the preoccupation moves to hyper-safety, that is unachievable and dangerous (https://safetyrisk.net/the-horrors-of-hyper-safety/). And, Zero is the global mantra for safety, sponsored by regulators and associations in Australia, as well as by companies like: Sentis, Forgeworks, Riskware and ICAM Australia (https://safetyrisk.net/the-sponsors-of-zero-are/).
The quest for zero is the quest of anti-learning. So just engage with regulators, associations or any of these companies and ask what zero is about! What you hear will be gobbledygook like zero is a moral goal and other myths about ‘toward zero’ etc. (https://safetyrisk.net/zero-is-an-immoral-goal/). The reality is, none of these groups have any expertise in moral philosophy or ethics and so believe that zero has no moral effect.
It was back in 1992 that Beck published Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity. Beck’s thesis was how modern living creates and manufactures risk and how society responds to it. And, how society responds to risk and the future often doesn’t make sense.
Take for example the fact that fireworks are banned in many states in the USA but fatalities due to gun violence is 3000:1. And, examples like this abound. USA society is happy to accept 40,000 deaths per year due to gun violence but is obsessed with risk about fireworks.
The subjectivity and perception of risk is not objective but rather conditioned by cultural norms, ethical priorities and political beliefs. And, if you exist in the safety world where culture is never defined well, you are not likely to understand how culture conditions risk perception. This is why things like the silly coloured risk matrix that is deified in the safety industry is nonsense. The opposite is the case. The risk matrix is one of the most dangerous methods in the safety industry. Greg Smith states that this is his ‘go to strategy’ whenever an organisation is in court. We do not perceive risk without political, ethical, moral and cultural filters.
We learned a long time ago through the work of Slovic, Kasperson and others that the perception of risk is determined, amplified and attenuated by many factors.
See how risk is created in the following diagram by Kasperson (Figure 1. Risk Perception):
Figure 1. Risk Perception
All of the following affect the perception, attenuation or amplification of risk (Figure 2. Mitigating or Aggravating Risk)
Figure 2. Mitigating or Aggravating Risk
Add to these the many factors in Social Influences in Risk (https://safetyrisk.net/mapping-social-influence-strategies/ ) and you now have a wicked problem. This is why trying to solve problems like gun violence in the USA is nearly impossible.
Yet, in the USA emotions run high when groups call for banning assault rifles yet fear runs hot on banning transgender people using toilets (https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/transgender-advocates-stage-sit-protest-us-capitol-bathroom-rcna183077).
Many of the activities, systems and models adopted in safety (that don’t work), are adopted in the safety industry for political, moral and emotional reasons. We see this with models such as the: bow-tie, swiss-cheese, dominoes, curves, pyramids and the risk matrix. These models don’t work but must be adopted for identity into safety culture. In the same way, supporting the ideology of zero (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/) is compulsory if one wants to work in safety in large corporations.
Indeed, when companies like Downer advertise for safety people they ask for ‘zero harm advisors’. You couldn’t think up anything more stupid. This is because to Downer, risk doesn’t make sense. Companies such as these have no idea what to do or say about fallibility or mortality so, they just deny it.
When you accept the reality of fallibility and mortality you know that Risk Makes Sense.
When you are able to think critically about the perception, amplification and attenuation of risk, you realise that many of the things we think are dangerous are not and, the things that we think that protect us, don’t. In this way, Safety creates a culture of fear about things that are low-level risks and heats up the emotions when such risk is low.
This is what an ideology of zero does. It freaks out about safety-belts for Santa (https://safetyrisk.net/the-horrors-of-hyper-safety/) but is selectively silent about significant harms it cannot control or pushes to the margins things it doesn’t want to think about. Particularly, moral decisions it makes about risk according culturally generated norms.
If you are interested in learning more about the nature of risk in a positive, constructive and practical way, you can study here: https://cllr.com.au/
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
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