Risk and safety as allies, not enemies, in organisational culture

When your children can track a cheetah in the wild but not cross a road safely, you know they have the wrong skill set for living in a UK town. Our eldest was 8 and had lived largely outdoors but had never really had to live in a city or encounter a culture like that. 

And in a moment where some of the world’s needs feel more enormous and beyond our reach than ever, and where we need innovative and creative answers, it seems strange that large swathes of our society are being taught out of the skills they need. We have an adventure-less culture, and it is killing organizations. 

I think we are experiencing the after affect of a misplaced societal diagnosis. The basic premise was this. 

1. Things happen that hurt or damage people. 

2. We need to stop this happening. 

3. We put in place things to stop that. 

4. Now things are better.

But really, are they better? 

The intended result was that people would be allowed to carry on doing the activities and pursuits they had been, but in a safer way. However, the actual result was that, over time, we began to villainize the activities and pursuits themselves. And we actually confused something. We confused making activities safer with making people completely safe. So in the end, our pursuit became how do we make people safer and safer, rather than what is a good way to practice these pursuits. 

When I was growing up, I loved to be on my bike. I went everywhere on it, and my friends and I explored every part of our neighborhood for miles around. Not an inch of the forest was unknown to us. And obviously, I have the arrogance of chronology, but at the time, it never occurred to us that wearing a helmet was something we should do. I am not sure I even owned one. This was in a time, in the 1990s, when kids would pile into the boot of a neighbor's car for an excursion and think that this was a great idea. 

And then moods shift and we think about things and realise it is much better if we wear a helmet when riding our bikes. We are more likely to protect ourselves in case of an accident if we do. This is such a helpful move forward in thinking. But what followed was a culminating and strangling affect of safety that surrounds it, coupled with a societal response, to the point now where kids are much less likely to go out on bikes on their own or with friends, they don’t go and explore their neighbourhoods (just go and drive around and you will see) and they don’t spend as much time outdoors. Because we confused two ideas. The first idea was ‘kids love being on bikes, let’s take reasonable precautions in case of an accident to help them’. The second was a jump in logic from the first -  ‘when things go wrong, that is bad, so we must eradicate any chance of that happening in a dangerous world, let us never place our kids in unsafe spaces’. And we have a litany of media-stoked, fear induced, over-protective narratives that mean that if an 8 year old asked to go and explore the city or the countryside with their friends on bikes we probably wouldn’t allow them, despite the fact that if we are over 30 we definitely did. The actions for both are so close and interrelated that it is so easy to mistake the motives. But the net results can be so damaging. 

Paradigm shift - adventure and safety are not enemies to be fought, but allies to refine and push each other. 

We now have kids who aren’t allowed outdoors often, they have little unsupervised time and in some case are fearful or anxious about going out which was originally meant to be all about having fun. Yet beyond fun, adventure is key to working with and solving problems as we get older. 

I think we have weaponised two words on this causing us to avoid adventure at a time when we need it most. We have made ‘safety’ the superhero of our day and ‘risk’ the evil villain of our day and as humanity progresses our aim is to move away from our villain towards our hero. It looks something like this.

And as we do this, whilst we make our society able to avoid things, we teach people out of useful habits. What we don’t realise is that not only is the bottom left corner unhelpful, the top right corner is equally unhelpful just in much more subtle ways. Too much safety is as unhelpful as too much risk. I would argue that at the polar end of both of these points is ‘recklessness’. At the risk end is recklessness, where we allow things that are downright dangerous and stupid. But at the safety end is recklessness too, where often similarly we allow things to happen that are not helpful. For instance:

• Not allowing children unstructured and unsupervised time is robbing them of time to develop their own ways of problem solving, developing their imagination and basic ‘peer to peer’ social interactions. (Don’t believe me, go down a hight street during school holidays…kids are never on their own, they are either with an adult or not there because they have a whole week of scheduled activities planned.)

• Not allowing children to explore means they fail to understand limitations, boundaries, what can work and what doesn’t and they are left exploring other people’s imaginations and not their own. 

• Completely curated activities mean that often kids fail to learn risk profiling and decision making 

As we fast forward these things into our organisations we are seeing the net results of culture that prizes safety above healthy adventure: 

• People who prize not making mistakes rather than making progress

• An inability to communicate well with people 

• Teams focussed on not getting things wrong rather than getting things right

• A paralysing fear of failure

• Lack of resilience to handle and learn from feedback 

• Presuming that good safety training means good leadership 

• Becoming adventure-less 

In the organisations I work with I replace words safety and risk with protocol and adventure. But then begin to show them that in a healthy organisations they act in a polarity model. Not two opposite sides of our work but a healthy tension to be held and differing ideas that refine, shape and push us forward. 

But this is definitely a shift in thinking. So, take a couple of minutes with your people, have you drifted too far? What are the right voices that could help you keep moving around the polarity and keep refining your ideas? Polarity often leads to progress and polar scales only go one way. As Jonathan Haidt suggests we shouldn't stop kids building fires just carry water with you. How can you have both sides of this discussion talking and interacting well with one another? Seeing the value that both bring? Each side seeing the value the other brings. In this there is real chance of progress.