The Risk Business - life is a risk, manage it safely
We manage risk everyday in our own lives, whether that is crossing the road, making a cup of tea, using a power tool, risk is involved.
A self-appointed industry has sprung up and as such created a monster of hectoring, in many cases unregulated 'experts' who diploma in hand, 'advise' us, sometimes badly. Very.
Risk has become an industry, rather as race relations was in the 1970s.
Risk management is important but common sense should prevail.
Any Tom, Dick or Harriet can become a health and safety consultant. And that is the problem, they often miss out real risk, where it is obvious to the lay person that a risk exists. I have experience of this, having identified a list of possible risk situations which a consultant had missed or not appreciated.
Issues such as paint fumes, lack of eye wash information in case it got into the eyes, no suggested use of safety footwear, the list went on and was not rocket science. Just plain and obvious common sense. A most uncommon commodity it would seem.
This may have stemmed from the business model of the company being of the FCNK type - that is fur coat, no knickers.
Even basic and obvious requirements such as backing up of computer data was not done on a 'cost basis', even though the business would have been finished if that data had become corrupt or destroyed and the 'cost' solution was perhaps a couple of hundred pounds. This was an area where risk should have been managed but was chosen to be ignored. So it went from that basic disregard and extended into a production environment. Dangerous.
Managing risk is good, but has to be balanced with common sense
We are breeding a new generation called 'Generation Snowflake' this has come about as a part of the 'health and safety' (often gone mad) industry. A few years ago, I worked in a workshop and we had a couple of school age students who came for work experience. This was to be an education.
The first student came with a two page list of hectoring do's and don'ts from a teacher. Use of power tools was banned, the use of hand tools had to be supervised and the best bit.... yes, the kid was not allowed to boil a kettle! No I am not joking.
So what did we do? We adopted common sense. We ripped up the list in our own minds and empowered the student with the use of common sense and moderate supervision.
And nobody got killed, or injured and actually did learn something. Essentially the student could see how we managed risk, adopted responsible working practices and worked safely.
Looking at risk should be kept proportionate to the situation
The real fallout of this situation is that we are now creating a generation of people who stand on the sidelines, who are dependent on other peoples for decision making and to do things FOR them.
How many people have recently drowned in a few feet of water because someone stands and waits for somebody to do the necessary? Too many.
It is essentially a control culture of dependency. We now have people who cannot change a fuse in a plug, cannot use basic hand tools, so it goes on. But there is on the other side of the coin, plenty of youtube evidence of 'fails' where people foul up on camera.
We read about it in the papers of someone being injured doing something really stupid.
We have lost the ability it seems for many to know what common sense is. The fact that people make dicks of themselves with ladders etc. is because they have been 'cotton woolled' and have little risk management ability it would seem. Rather like a child that runs into the road without apparently thinking.
Its about time we got real.
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