Our distant ancestors succeeded in defying many dangers while facing difficult
circumstances and producing offspring. They were masters of survival and have passed
on this art to us via the DNA. Considering this, you would not expect that we are willing
to undertake life-threatening actions during work which deliver only a small profit for
our boss. How that pattern has emerged and what the consequences are, that’s what this
message is about.
Whether or not to take risks?
Thinking about the relationship between risk and survival, it seems as if avoiding risks
leads to a greater chance of survival. As long as you don’t take many risks, nothing can
go wrong. But we also have to take care for our food supplies and for this taking risks is
sometimes necessary. For this perspective taking risks can contribute to our
fundamental desire to survive.
Hunting
To illustrate this I will take you 40,000 years back in time to the savannas of North
Africa. Our ancestors lived there as nomads. Unfortunately the potential prey was too
alert and too fast for human hunters. One of the best tricks in these days was to exploit
the qualities of a true hunter, for example, the lion. The trick was to follow a group of
lions and wait until the time that they had done a good catch. Then they needed a
substantial amount of bluff in trying to steal a piece of meat. If they did succeed, a feast
marked the diner.
Timing
In this story, timing is crucial. If we start approaching the hungry lions too early, they
will treat us as an unexpected dessert. On the other side, if we wait too long, we will only
find some leftovers from the lion’s meal. The trick is to surprise the lions after their first
hunger is appeased. Lions also have a herd instinct and prefer to run away for a moment,
just to check the situation from a distance. But before they discover that they are being
robbed, it is essential to be away again.
Optimum to the risk spectrum
This incident draws the dilemma of our ancestors. Take a high risk and potentially die in
action versus taking a low risk and die from hunger. Thus our ancestors learned that
taking moderate risks best ensures the survival of the species. Until today, we are risk
tolerant and some of us are even risk loving.
Our struggle with nature
If we examine different processes, we will soon discover that each has its own optimal
risk profile. For some processes (e.g. investing in stocks), people are willing to take high
risks, while for other processes we want to eliminate all risks if possible. The safety
profession takes an extreme position at this point: each risk is one too many. What we
see is that our first nature and the current safety culture collide. On a rational level, we
can never oppose any safety measure, but intuitively we experience some as heavily
exaggerated. That is unfortunately part of human nature.
Safety policy
If we want to win the hearts and minds of our employees for our safety policy, we
cannot suffice with the message that this is for his own well-being. Many organizations
strive for an accident free workplace and implicitly assume that all share this
commitment. That assumption, however, cannot be made. On a rational level people will
agree, but on an intuitive level they are programmed in a different way. A good safety
policy starts with the acknowledgement that employees have, on an unconscious level,
much more tolerance for minor accidents than they ever want and can admit. A small
wound is not seen as a troublesome event.
Then what?
Like all intuitive features our risk profile influences us in an unconscious way. This does
not mean that this profile cannot adapt to a situation in which there are higher
standards. Every time we want to reduce the amount of risks taken, e.g. by addressing a
new rule, we have to consider that we provide a solution for a problem that is not felt as
such because we are willing to live with some amount of risks. The most obvious
alternative for rules is to mobilize our personal alarm system: the sense of danger via
the assessment of risks. But then we face another problem: we are risk tolerant and we
often underestimate the seriousness of the risks. That brings us to the subject of the next
post of this blog: risk underestimation.
Wanting to know more?
- The described method of hunting was filmed by the BBC and featured in the documentary Grasslands.
- There are a lot of related items available on this website.
- The book “Human behavior in hazardous situations” (Butterworth & Heinemann), gives a lot more additional information
Juni Daalmans
November 2015