Some of the most memorable times in my life have involved some degree of significant risk. Indeed, those moments when I have felt most alive have often been characterised by a heady mixture of danger and excitement, a rush of adrenalin, soon to be followed by the warm glow of achievement and finally a reminder that life can be very good.  A trip climbing with no recognised safety equipment in very wet conditions to the top of the Pinnacles in Borneo was one such moment!

Something that both infuriates and saddens me in equal measure, is the fact that we live in an ever increasingly risk averse world. While we recognise on the one hand that taking risks is a necessary part of life, the systems around us seem to increasingly conspire against us, cramping our style with more and more ever tighter regulation.

At one level risks can be relatively mundane such as crossing the road or using a sharpe knife. The latter was reported in the Guardian newspaper recently as the dangers of “avocado hand” – apparently a growing number of people are injuring themselves with this middle-class culinary favourite!  Often these risks are unacknowledged and when they are, they are generally regarded as essential to getting on with an ‘ordinary’ life.

Other activities perhaps fall into a somewhat more exotic risk category such as climbing El Capitan, the vertical 3000 feet granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park.  Tragically only last week a British man died due to huge rocks dislodging from the rock face and crushing him.  Risks such as these are acknowledged, but almost all involved in such pursuits report the pay off as far outweighing the potential danger.  Why is this?

Apart from the simple fact that many activities that are enormous fun have some degree of risk associated with them, there is in my opinion a very close relationship between personal growth and risk taking.  Pushing the boundaries takes us into learning territory; learning about ourselves, those around us and the world itself. If and when we take up these challenges, new possibilities open up and our lives become significantly richer. This is true at an individual level, but also true at a macro level; much of civilization’s progress has been the result of mankind pushing boundaries, exploring new arenas and general experimentation.  Put another way, risk has played a central role in our progress as human kind.

Returning to my frustration…  In recent years a growing culture of blame and burgeoning litigation has frequently led to severe penalties dished out to individuals and organisations for things going wrong. The result has been the emergence of an almost institutional fear of risk, the imposition of risk assessments for almost everything and often suffocating restrictions established to reduce or remove the risk altogether. I have seen this influence time and again when working with people with learning disabilities.  In each and every case, the person would not be in receipt of paid support unless they had significant needs of some sort.  These so called needs lead to a degree of vulnerability and therefore risks with getting on with life independently.  Yet unsurprisingly, just like everyone else, they want to live life to its full which involves those mundane risks and of course at times the more exotic risks.  Surely a primary role of social care must be to support people to actively take risks and as a result to both grow and have richer lives.  If we fail to do this the social care system becomes little more than a method of containing people; keeping them safe rather than enabling them to flourish.  In short, not something that I, or the many others I know striving for the very best, want to play a part in!

If we want to lead rich lives and be part of a thriving world where on-going learning is the norm, we need to start #SeeingThingsDifferently   We must embrace the fact that we should promote and support people to actively take risks (of course in a managed and responsible way) rather than shy away from them.   We must prevent our organisations from grinding down peoples’ aspirations by insisting on restrictions that seemingly exist to make those in charge feel safer.  Instead we need to find ways to ensure people can get on with the lives they want to lead.  I for one want to take a stand against the growing tide of blame and litigation and to live in a world where anything (or at least almost anything) is possible.

Lucy Hurst-Brown