Posted by Why the modern focus on safety at all costs is lowering our competence, confidence and capabilities while also making us less safe overall.
We all know that well-worn adage, ‘safety first’. A seemingly innocuous and perfectly reasonable phrase, reminding us to consider the risks and think about what safeguards might be a good idea within any given activity.
As a general reminder, it makes a lot of sense.
The problems begin, or rather began, when we started taking this phrase literally and applying it to just about everything.
Because, in reality, safety simply cannot be first. Nor should it be. Not if you actually want to do anything, anyway. And if that sounds controversial to you, it might just be because you haven’t thought about it very deeply.
Every decision we make in life is a risk-benefit assessment. Everything. Whether it’s playing a sport; or approaching someone at a club; or taking out a loan; or having kids; or changing jobs; or deciding whether to get up and go to work or stay in bed; or making a jump in parkour; or whatever. Every single decision you make is accompanied by a (conscious or unconscious) risk-benefit assessment.
You want the benefit of something, you assess the risks involved in making it happen, and you decide whether you’re happy with that equation. Typically, if you estimate that the benefit is worth the risk, you go for it. If not, you don’t. Simple, rational and an eminently useful way to approach life.
However, it isn’t that simple anymore. Because we’re making it more complicated than it needs to be.
In recent years, roughly since the start of the 21st Century but certainly in the last 5-10 years in the modern world, there seems to have been a radical and rapid shift towards what can perhaps best be termed ‘safetyism[1]’ as the fundamental philosophy underpinning, well, everything from politics to psychology to sport to health.
This is a philosophy that states that ‘harm’, of any sort and for any reason, is the worst possible sin imaginable and something to be prevented at all costs. This sounds good, in principle. It sounds compassionate, empathetic, caring. It sounds safe.
But it isn’t. It is, in fact, quite the opposite.
Let me illustrate using a field in which I am well versed: the discipline of parkour.
Parkour is an art of movement; a way of thinking and training that enables practitioners to adapt to and overcome any obstacles in their path. In its relatively short lifespan as a distinct practice it has quite literally expanded the understanding of human movement potential, with communities of practitioners worldwide today performing feats of complexity, precision and power that would have been thought to be impossible just a few short years before. And these evolve year on year, with no signs of stopping.
Don’t take my word for it; put ‘parkour’ into YouTube and prepare to be amazed. And if you aren’t amazed, I’m afraid that means you just don’t understand how difficult those feats are to perform and you probably don’t know much about movement in general.
Now, if parkour had applied the ‘safety first’ mantra it would never have come about. It simply wouldn’t have been possible. Those boundaries would not have been pushed, those limits would not have been surpassed and that phenomenal human potential would remain untapped to this day. Parkour would not exist.
But safety was never ‘first’. The activity was first! The challenge, the achievements, the effort, the training, the goals, the ambition, the striving for improvement: these were what motivated the early practitioners, and while of course they did everything they could to mitigate the risks and avoid injury they were willing to accept the risks that were and are intrinsic to achieving anything of worth in life.
This doesn’t mean they were reckless. Or that safety wasn’t considered at all. It was, and still is. Parkour, statistically, is less injurious than almost all traditional sports, including football, rugby, hockey, even running. The practice of parkour necessitates an awareness of risk, and an understanding and practice of the measures that mitigate those risks and allow practitioners to continue to engage in the activity for years without serious injury putting an end to their progress.
Parkour practitioners, like all sensible practitioners of physical activities, typically take whatever ‘reasonable precautions’[2] they can to reduce risk and avoid injury. In fact, in my experience the majority of parkour practitioners are exceptionally thoughtful and conscientious about risk-taking and have an ability to keep themselves safe that goes far beyond the norm.
But the risks do exist. Of course they do. They exist when you cross a road or drive your car, so why wouldn’t they exist in a physical activity like parkour or a sport like rugby? That doesn’t mean you don’t cross the road or take up rugby or parkour, though: it just means you accept and learn to manage the risks so you can pursue the activity.
But put safety first and you quickly begin to cut back on the risk-taking that is required to pursue almost all endeavours worthy of pursuit. If safety is first, then we wouldn’t play sport at all. We wouldn’t climb the mountain, or lift the weight, or get in the ring, or make the jump, or land on the moon. Those things happen in spite of the risk. That’s what makes them exceptional. That’s what makes them worth doing.
So it is my contention that safety is, and should be, the secondary consideration in any undertaking. The first consideration must always be the undertaking itself! And if you deem it worth doing, then the risks must be accepted and factored in.
Safetyism isn’t Safe
This brings me to the second point, and perhaps the more important of the two to grasp.
An over-focus on safety doesn’t necessarily make you safer. In fact, active attempts to increase safety can have the opposite effect from what was intended, and this is more common than you’d think.
According to the theory of Risk Compensation, for example, people adjust their behaviour in response to perceived levels of risk; in other words, we become more careful when we perceive an increase in risk and less careful when we feel more protected, which is both intuitive and rational.
However, the actions we take in response to those risks can often have unintended consequences that actually end up increasing the overall risk we are exposed to. This is often known as the Peltzman Effect after Sam Peltzman, an economist who published The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation in The Journal of Political Economy in 1975, which questioned the effectiveness of road safety laws designed to reduce car crashes. For example, while safety measures such as seatbelts might make it safer for the people in the car, the driver’s perception of increased safety can lead to faster speeds which in turn lead to more fatalities among pedestrians!
Much of the initial understanding or Risk Compensation came about following these and other studies into road safety laws and their efficacy, or, very often, their lack of efficacy. There are at least three studies[3] which show that most drivers’ response to antilock brakes is to drive faster, follow closer and brake later, accounting for the failure of ABS systems to result in any measurable improvement in road safety.
This doesn’t mean safety measures don’t work. Some do, very clearly, and should be observed. I’m not advocating for removing seatbelts. The key is to think about the larger picture and what unforeseen knock-on effects our safety measures may be having that in fact increase risk exposure over time.
The most obviously visible example to me is that of the decline of health and physical literacy (they are inextricably intertwined) across the modern world.
As society has become more and more obsessed with creating safeguards around any and all physical activity for children – including insane policies such as removing climbing frames from playgrounds, banning cartwheels during break time, insisting kids visit the school nurse following any fall[4], even outlawing push-ups (100% true) – so those children have become more risk-averse and less likely to engage with physical activities and locomotor play. As this compounds over time they fail to develop what should be natural human physical literacy; they move less, play less sport, build less muscle, grow weaker bones and let their cardiovascular systems degenerate.
The result? As adults they are physically incompetent and highly unlikely to engage in any physical fitness pursuit or sporting practice. They lead sedentary lifestyles, have no deep connection to their bodies, eat poorly and develop terrible posture. And we wonder why the big global killers are heart disease, liver failure, diabetes and obesity-related diseases?
What has happened is that by focusing on the perceived avoidance of the very small risks associated with sport and physical activity we have created much higher and more severe risks of ill health, disease and early mortality. By obsessing over almost insignificant risks we have engineered something far worse.
Overall, the risk factor to the individual has gone up, not down.
The Immune System of Risk
I like to think of our capacity to engage with and manage risk as something similar to the body’s immune system. The immune system can only be effectively strengthened by exposure to threats; it needs to encounter germs, bacteria, viruses and the like in order to develop the ability to fight them off. The more micro-dosing an immune system receives in this way, especially when young, the stronger and healthier it will become. All complex systems tend to work this way, in fact. Anyone who has heard of Taleb’s concept ofanti-fragility will understand why this is the case: truly strong systems don’t just resist stressors but instead respond proactively to them and in their adaptation become stronger – they do not remain the same, they grow and evolve under pressure.
Humans are anti-fragile, both as individuals and as a species. So it is that our capacity to manage risk only develops through exposure to risk. And exposure to risk necessitates the exposure to a range of potential consequences, otherwise it’s not a risk!
So the paradox rules, once again: In order to become safer we must engage with risk. Prioritise safety and we end up generating more risk.
In the final analysis, the attempt to eliminate multiple small risks from your life will result in the certainty of encountering larger ones.
As Safe as Possible, and No More
So how do we know which safeguards to keep and which to do without?
I think the best way to get this balance right in any activity is to follow a simple rule:
Utilise whatever safety precautions you want, as long as they don’t detract from or reduce the nature of the activity itself.
In other words, by all means take whatever precautions you can within reason; but if those precautions begin to have a deleterious effect on the experience of the activity then you’ve probably gone too far. Make it as safe as possible without distorting what you set out to do or achieve or learn in the first place.
Am example. A few years back a small group of parkour practitioners began advocating the use of protective clothing during training. Helmets, kneepads, gloves, etc. On paper, it makes sense, right? Only in reality, it doesn’t. Not if you understand the nature of parkour and what people are trying to extract from the experience of the practice.
Not only does such equipment begin to restrict your freedom of movement, fundamentally altering your biomechanics in subtle but significant ways, but it also takes away from the whole purpose of learning to keep yourself safe through understanding your physical and psychological limits and abilities. That profound sense of what risks we can and cannot undertake can’t develop properly if clouded by the awareness of protective equipment. It changes things, it muddies the water. It’s a different experience.
Parkour practitioners understand the need for a healthy awareness of risk at a deep level, so you’ll be happy to know that the idea of protective equipment in parkour was swiftly and universally rejected by the global community, and rightly so. We are both stronger and safer for it.
In sum, I say this. Life is an adventure. It is an incredible, stunningly complicated series of immense improbabilities. There is risk in everything we do, and everything we don’t do. It is just the nature of things. So embrace it. Lean into it. Enjoy it! That way lies skill, confidence and the ability to navigate safely the eternally uncharted waters we sail upon.
[1] Defined as a culture in which safety has been elevated to a sacred value, to be adhered to even at the expense of other practical, moral and rational concerns.
[2] C.W. Fuller, Safety in Sport
[3] Grant and Smiley, “Driver response to antilock brakes: a demonstration on behavioral adaptation” from Proceedings, Canadian Multidisciplinary Road Safety Conference VIII, June 14-16, Saskatchewan 1993
Sagberg, Fosser, and Saetermo, “An investigation of behavioural adaptation to airbags and antilock brakes among taxi drivers” Accident Analysis and Prevention #29 pp 293-302 1997
Aschenbrenner and Biehl, “Improved safety through improved technical measures? Empirical studies regarding risk compensation processes in relation to anti-lock braking systems.” In Trimpop and Wilde, Challenges to Accident Prevention: The issue of risk compensation behaviour (Groningen, NL, Styx Publications, 1994)
[4] I have been to schools in Hong Kong where children average hundreds of visits to the school nurse each per year. When I was at school we typically went to the nurse once in total, which was for our BCG jabs…
Dan Edwardes 