Discussion - Risk Management/Aversion Generational or Familial ?

[WelshGas]

There was an excellent documentary on BBC4 about a Blind Climber.

Climbing Blind: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000jb7t via @bbciplayer

What impressed me was his and his parents attitude to his condition and to the risks he faced whilst growing up and to his chosen hobby.

Is ones attitude to Risk a Generational thing?
As a whole there seems to be an aversion to risk on a generational level. There will always be individuals who do things other consider risky but nowadays they seem in the minority. It could be the rise in Health & Safety Regulations or the rise of the “Nanny” state via Governmental and Council dictates and other Quangos “ all with the best intentions “.

But rather than Risk Management coming to the fore Risk Aversion seems to be the in thing for some.

Personally, I think it is more Familial in nature. I did many things as a youngster which would be frowned on nowadays. Likewise our children and some of those we’re only just finding out about , and the grandchildren just don’t seem to have any fear in the play park or the woods and definitely learn by experience .

It is also interesting to see and hear the comments made regarding relaxing the present lockdown. There seems to be a lot more Risk Aversion rather than Risk Management and unfortunately the Virus is here for the foreseeable future if not forever and Risk Management is the only way forward.

So what do you think?

 

[Louis II]

I think the volume and nature of information available to us over the internet and media drive distortions in perception of risk that the human brain cannot really cope with and results in both irrational response to all sorts of risks and also in taking undue risk in other situations.
Agree we need to start living with and managing this one pretty quickly before the death tolls from delayed treatment general povert etc overtake the virus.

 

[Legin]

I have been around this professionally all my life. For starters yes it is the result of regulation and to be blunt penalty. Youngsters are for the most part more enlightened as they have been brought up with it but the risk taker genes are still there.

Depending where you are on the learning curve and seat belts is a good example. Initially folks couldnt see the problem, next they were regulated into compliance through penalty and now i wouldnt mind betting most would use a seat belt irrespective of the law.

HSE started with regulation ie you shall.. then moved to guidance leaving it upto you to decide whats needed. However if you have an incident then you have to demonstrate you complied with the law and his is the rub and the reason companies run scared because by definition having had an incident your guilty.

HSE accepts the concept of residual risk (doing an activity) and fatality probability of 10 -6. There is some legislation that says gives rise to danger in for instance electrical area (HV switching) meaning an absolute you just cannot put a person in there at all.

And so it is with mobile phone hands free etc. Risk takers are still out there its just the consequence thats prevents them like speeding - Im in that category I have to confess although I ma moving to the I wouldnt speed even if not the law..

The problem with risk management is this. People think a risk assessment will protect them and therefore it wont happen and when it does they throw the teddies and put in fixes which then tend to over regulate.

Having written a few in my time the hardest ones to do are those high consequence low probability ones and how much to spend to mitigate also they are normally hard to define. They are hard to foresee and covid is one of these.

Also risk management is about preventing the event and mitigation post the event. So we have had the event with covid but because we didnt identify it in any risk assessment there was nothing in place to prevent it nor once it happened deal with it. It wasnt foreseen.

Back to seat belts. Traffic segregation, speed limits, training etc are all prevention of the event seta belt , airbags post event.

So for Covid its now all about event management which is unplanned and why things look haphazard. Some governments clearly see the 0.5% death rate as acceptable and they maybe right. UK government appears to be on a middle path as the issue is about NHS capacity being maintained above demand and not about eradicating it. The o called R number

 

[Bellcrew]

I have been around this professionally all my life. For starters yes it is the result of regulation and to be blunt penalty. Youngsters are for the most part more enlightened as they have been brought up with it but the risk taker genes are still there.

Depending where you are on the learning curve and seat belts is a good example. Initially folks couldnt see the problem, next they were regulated into compliance through penalty and now i wouldnt mind betting most would use a seat belt irrespective of the law.

HSE started with regulation ie you shall.. then moved to guidance leaving it upto you to decide whats needed. However if you have an incident then you have to demonstrate you complied with the law and his is the rub and the reason companies run scared because by definition having had an incident your guilty.

HSE accepts the concept of residual risk (doing an activity) and fatality probability of 10 -6. There is some legislation that says gives rise to danger in for instance electrical area (HV switching) meaning an absolute you just cannot put a person in there at all.

And so it is with mobile phone hands free etc. Risk takers are still out there its just the consequence thats prevents them like speeding - Im in that category I have to confess although I ma moving to the I wouldnt speed even if not the law..

The problem with risk management is this. People think a risk assessment will protect them and therefore it wont happen and when it does they throw the teddies and put in fixes which then tend to over regulate.

Having written a few in my time the hardest ones to do are those high consequence low probability ones and how much to spend to mitigate also they are normally hard to define. They are hard to foresee and covid is one of these.

Also risk management is about preventing the event and mitigation post the event. So we have had the event with covid but because we didnt identify it in any risk assessment there was nothing in place to prevent it nor once it happened deal with it. It wasnt foreseen.

Back to seat belts. Traffic segregation, speed limits, training etc are all prevention of the event seta belt , airbags post event.

So for Covid its now all about event management which is unplanned and why things look haphazard. Some governments clearly see the 0.5% death rate as acceptable and they maybe right. UK government appears to be on a middle path as the issue is about NHS capacity being maintained above demand and not about eradicating it. The o called R number

Unfortunately we do have a blame culture, the MSM is always ready to gotcha any human fault or mistake.
We all enjoyed climbing trees but today if a youngster broke his neck falling from one on any owned property the responsible person would be taken to cleaners by a whole collection of lawyers and insurers, just the way of the world.

 

[Legin]

I agree. Very few people get the true concept of risk mitigation. I used to have to say to top mgt frequently. We said it would happen and it has so we should be commended not castigated. Got them thinking for a short while at least. The only area for debate is usually did you get the frequency correct. The old one in 100 yr flooding example

Trouble is scientific folk dream this stuff up but the greater population have a more simplistic outlook. Its your fault and I want compo.

 

[willwander]

Few things spring to mind.

Public are terrible at maths, most a can’t workout a 3 for 2 offer at Sainsbury’s never mind the concept of probability

Inability to grasp ‘correlation does not imply causation’

Inability to think more than one step ahead

Conformation bias and other cognitive bias

Party politics and agendas

 

[Wongo]

Humans are Irrational, the chances of catching snd become ill with Covid 19 in a campsite bathroom block that’s well run and having good personal hygeine is vanishingly small, but seen as unacceptable but we accept the much more likely risk of an RTA getting there.
Health & Safety ‘culture’ isn't to blame, proportional risk reduction is a good thing, its about proportion.

 

[GrannyJen]

I have been indoor wall climbing with a friends son recently. He is a big strapping lad, 19, working up his fitness for entry into the RM this Autumn.

I found the whole thing dreadfully technical and desperately boring. You can only climb on a tight rope with a sit harness and wearing a helmet. You are indoors with built-in brick sh!thouse belays, almost a total absence of risk. To him, climbing without a helmet with the rope trailing downwards not upwards and putting all your trust into a wobbly bit of flakey rock as a belay would be madness. A big shock coming his way!

I do fear we have both legislated and nannied risk out of everyday society which in turn breeds a dependency on the state and mitigates against an individual taking responsibility for themselves.

 

[Velma's Dad]

Unfortunately we do have a blame culture, the MSM is always ready to gotcha any human fault or mistake.
We all enjoyed climbing trees but today if a youngster broke his neck falling from one on any owned property the responsible person would be taken to cleaners by a whole collection of lawyers and insurers, just the way of the world.

I think the 'elf-and-safety-gone-mad' and 'predatory litigation' notions are actually often over-stated. In your tree-climbing case for example - even though I realise you may not be being literal - it's not actually, really the case that a landowner is in jeopardy of being 'taken to the cleaners' if a kid climbed their tree and broke their neck. Unless the landowner had been so recklessly irresponsible that any reasonable person would say they were blameworthy... maybe they built a children's playground around a rotting tree.

Anyway, to WG's question, yes I do think there is a progressive societal shift towards risk aversion in many respects. But I do think we need to look at both 'positive' and 'pointless' risk taking.

What I mean by 'positive' risk taking is where the whole point of the activity is that it's risky. That's mainly in certain dangerous sports, but I guess also in some other things like youngsters doing petty crimes for kicks (the risk of being caught). I can't see that changing much and indeed even though some previously crazily dangerous sports have become massively safer - like Formula One since the 1960s - at the same time the numbers of people participating in moderately dangerous sports like skiing and mountain biking have gone up hugely. So that might tell us something.

By 'pointless' risk taking, which I do think we quite rationally seem to minimise, I mean things where the risks have no real pay-back for the individual and alternatives are readily available. For instance, we now have alternatives now to sending men and boys down coal mines in hazardous conditions, so we come increasingly to regard those risks as unacceptable. Or, because I can nowadays buy decent quality smoke detectors for my house at negligible cost, I'd regard myself as pretty stupid if I didn't. My attitudes to that risk have changed, even though I know the chances of my house catching fire are still very low.

But I'm not sure if there's a generational aspect to any of this, in the sense that discrete generational cohorts have different attitudes. It would be interesting to look at it longitudinally, ie to study how the risk attitudes and behaviour of a specific age cohort changes over their lives.

 

[Vagophile]

A pandemic event was foreseen and preventative measures discussed some years ago. As I understand it what prevented some of the measures being implemented was cost versus likelihood. I think that in workplace situations, cost of prevention can influence the measures taken for prevention. This can be where regulation comes into play.
In domestic situations, I feel that most modern parents are less likely to allow their children to do the sorts of things that I did as a child, like build tree houses in high trees or make rafts from oil drums and planks, then capsize them in the middle of a lake by dramatic overloading.
There are situations where HSE would probably jump on farmer parents allowing children to drive quad bikes, tractors and even combine harvesters. Invariably, these sort of parents, like those of the blind mountaineer, have assessed the risks in relation to the knowledge and experience of their child.
It seems that in construction, virtually every activity is subject to a risk assessment, sometimes to the point where it is almost practically impossible or prohibitively expensive to do the task. Two assessors can have differing views of risk and due to the possibility of being sued, the possible financial consequences of an "event" make most employers very twitchy about these things.
Welsh Gas was discussing some parents in the U.K. The attitude to risk in other parts of the world are quite different. In Greece, you can buy a device to fit your car seat belt to stop that annoying buzzing noise because you haven't put it on. Some of my friends there laugh when the first thing I do is fasten my seat belt in their car, but I also know that their attitude to risk whilst driving is quite different to mine.
We have all seen films of parents and two small children on a small motorbike in other parts of the world.We probably wouldn't do it, but they think nothing of it.
On a personal level, I won't let workmen near my house or car unless they have adequate third party insurance, because, you never know, do you? At an even lower level, I scold my wife for folding her hand round her coffee mug while I am pouring boiling water into it.
I have rambled on quite a bit here, but I think that, like beauty, risk is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Velma's Dad]

A pandemic event was foreseen and preventative measures discussed some years ago. As I understand it what prevented some of the measures being implemented was cost versus likelihood. I think that in workplace situations, cost of prevention can influence the measures taken for prevention. This can be where regulation comes into play.
In domestic situations, I feel that most modern parents are less likely to allow their children to do the sorts of things that I did as a child, like build tree houses in high trees or make rafts from oil drums and planks, then capsize them in the middle of a lake by dramatic overloading.
There are situations where HSE would probably jump on farmer parents allowing children to drive quad bikes, tractors and even combine harvesters. Invariably, these sort of parents, like those of the blind mountaineer, have assessed the risks in relation to the knowledge and experience of their child.
It seems that in construction, virtually every activity is subject to a risk assessment, sometimes to the point where it is almost practically impossible or prohibitively expensive to do the task. Two assessors can have differing views of risk and due to the possibility of being sued, the possible financial consequences of an "event" make most employers very twitchy about these things.
Welsh Gas was discussing some parents in the U.K. The attitude to risk in other parts of the world are quite different. In Greece, you can buy a device to fit your car seat belt to stop that annoying buzzing noise because you haven't put it on. Some of my friends there laugh when the first thing I do is fasten my seat belt in their car, but I also know that their attitude to risk whilst driving is quite different to mine.
We have all seen films of parents and two small children on a small motorbike in other parts of the world.We probably wouldn't do it, but they think nothing of it.
On a personal level, I won't let workmen near my house or car unless they have adequate third party insurance, because, you never know, do you? At an even lower level, I scold my wife for folding her hand round her coffee mug while I am pouring boiling water into it.
I have rambled on quite a bit here, but I think that, like beauty, risk is in the eye of the beholder.

I guess that still leaves the question of whether the variations in attitudes to risk are generational or familial, per WG's original question.

I know there is quite a lot of evidence that economic risk taking behaviour of young people is highly correlated with their parents' own attitudes and behaviour. That might imply that we get a lot of our risk appetites for other things from our parents, which does seem to me pretty likely. That would support a big role for familial transfer of risk tolerance and we can probably all think of families where that seems to be true.

Of course we also know, generally, that so many attitudes are acquired from within a peer group. Peer groups tend to be mono-generational (we mostly hang out with people of similar age) but does that mean our risk attitudes are inherently 'generational'? If we lived in a large multi-generational community, would we acquire most of our attitudes to risk from the prevailing norms of that community, regardless of which generation we happen to be from?

I find anti-vaxxers, as a group, fascinating in that respect. They of course tend to be parents with young children, in which case they themselves are bound to be probably Millennials or close to it (but are there also grandpa/grandpa anti-vaxxers?) and their motivation seems for the most part to be about their perceptions of relative vaccine risks to which they are highly sensitised. It would be fascinating to know whether, and if so how, their risk perceptions and behaviour work are also highly sensitised for other types of risk.

 

[WelshGas]

What considered and thought full posts. I've enjoyed reading them. It would seem the general consensus is that the overall attitude to risk is more familial than generational in nature.
Thank you all for participating.