Editorial
Taking a risk
There was a story in one of the Sunday papers recently about a Christchurch father who was being investigated by Child, Youth and Family after letting his nine-year-old son and four-year-old daughter play unsupervised at a nearby school park.
It got me thinking about my own childhood. I grew up on a farm in the Manawatu and over the long school holidays, my brothers and I would often pack our lunch and head off over the paddocks for hours on end.
Before we left, Mum and Dad would issue instructions: stay out of the ponds, don’t swing on the supplejack vines, don’t dig caves in the bank, and if you open any gates, don’t forget to shut them.
Of course, we were good country kids so we always shut the gates. We also made endless attempts to build a raft that didn’t sink the minute we climbed aboard. We played Tarzan on the supplejack vines, which only occasionally gave way and sent us crashing to the ground, and we dug holes in the forbidden bank.
Along the way, we tested the ‘red rag to a bull’ theory on the neighbour’s bull, climbed onto any roof we could, made huts amid the hay bales and checked out the old bottles of chemicals in the shed we’d been told, in no uncertain terms, was out-of-bounds. It was all great fun and we survived childhood without major mishap.
Today’s children, however, are growing up in a considerably more risk-averse society. I’ve just been reading about a UK school principal who has spoken out about “misguided attempts to protect youngsters [from] trees, diving boards, escalators, uncomfortable social situations and incomplete homework assignments” which, he says, is almost certain to produce people who are ill-equipped to live successfully in adulthood.
Of course, risk aversion isn’t confined to saving children from the dangers lurking in the local park. Blame it on the recession, but its becoming increasingly entrenched in the workplace too.
It’s hardly surprising that people who are worried about their jobs have less appetite for risk. Who’s going to rock the boat if it means they might be ear-marked for the next round of redundancies?
But the problem with taking fewer risks is that we become less creative. We’re less likely to experiment with new approaches and more inclined to work harder rather than smarter—often becoming more anxious and, as a result, less effective in what we do.
The irony, of course, is that this aversion to risk comes just when organisations most need to be seeking creative solutions.
—Lyndsey Swan
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