I am a product of the late 70s and 80s. I grew up without wearing a helmet, I drove around in a car without a seat belt, my mother smoked around me while growing up, and as a teenager my mom let me roam Washington DC all by myself to see the sites. As an adult, with children, I have come half circle (?) and basically forced my kids to wear helmets and seatbelts. I shun smoker's and have difficulty letting my older son go down the street on his own! What happened from the time I became an adult and then had children? Nothing ever bad happened when I was a kid so why have I become so risk adverse?
Obviously I don't raise my kids in a vacuum and today all we ever hear about is reducing risk to your children. Our society in some ways has come to believe that by reducing risk in all forms we will lead a better, safer life. I have to admit this isn't a bad thing. Reducing risk, being safe are all good things we should strive for, but has reducing risk caused us to forget or marginalize what risk is? By rationalizing our risks to such a degree do we simply placate our insecurities? Now of course the dichotomy of all of this is that our imagination runs wild when it comes to our kids safety and yet for trying to imagine using planes as missiles, Category 5 hurricanes, or financial catastrophes we seem to have a lack of imagination. Have we tried to quantify risk in such a way that we have forgotten what risks truly are?
As and an adult I tend to pay closer attention to the world we live in then I probably did growing up but it seems to me that since 2000 we have had three major events that occurred that simply defies what we would consider a normal, expected event. I wonder that the severity of these events is more due to us marginalizing risk in such a degree that we have lost imagination into what can truly happen. Insulating ourselves from risks and forgetting that is still does exist...
1. 9/11 - A well documented disaster of our nation's intelligence apparatus. A complex plot that was chillingly simple to accomplish. To me the biggest reason for the success on the part of the terrorist was surprise. Our intelligence teams lacked the imagination and our government wrapped ourselves in our airport security blanket believing the risk was successfully managed.
2. Hurricane Katrina - A "perfect storm" that slammed in New Orleans crippling and otherwise decimating a city. A week after the storm the newsreels showed something that could only be someplace other than America. Inefficient, unprepared emergency management bungled a relief that was unprepared for the devastation. Again I am sure plenty of table top exercises were performed and simulated. I don't fault the individuals but I do fault the system because again the system was unprepared. Risks of such an event were broken into manageable pieces, i.e. the levees would hold, but when the weak link broke, the risks magnified into an uncontrollable event.
3. Financial Meltdown of '08 - Still reeling from this far-reaching disaster. A definite herd mentality created this meltdown. The very essence was again dividing risk into manageable assets so that it could be packaged and sold around the globe with every buyer truly unaware or completely at ease with what was being done because the risk had been so managed that it was forgotten.
So have we become so well at managing our risks that we are actually more at risk? Maybe instead of being so risk aversed we should be more risky just so that we actually spend the time to use our imagination and determine what the potential hazards could be. We should realize that quantifying risk doesn't mean that it is understood and that we can tuck it away. Complex systems (the Earth, society's, financial institutions) are fragile entities that can collapse with very simple inputs. That imagination is more important. Maybe we shouldn't call it risk management but perhaps we should have a Chief Imagination Officer to not manage risks with belief that we can control them, but to layout visions of the impossible so that weak links in complex systems can be fixed to prevent the disasters if they fail.
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