[SystemSafety] Risk .... again

[Les Chambers]

Bernard
I feel your pain. I empathize but encourage you to crack on. You are a good 
soldier for the cause.
I’ve had my own problems explaining risk to none other than the sisterhood. 
A while ago a young woman - a SCEGGS girl - went to a party and got legless 
drunk.
SCEGGS is an exclusive girls high school based in Darlinghurst Sydney. My 
mother was a SCEGGS girl in the 1920s. 
All the boys at the party were students at exclusive Sydney boys schools. One 
of them decided to have sex with this unfortunate young woman when she was not 
in a state to reject or except him. She may not even have been conscious. 
Another boy filmed the encounter and the video appeared on the web.
I know. Jesus wept.
Time passed and I could not walk past this story. My mother was a SCEGGS girl 
for Christ sake and I have three daughters.
So I composed a 4000 word email  on risk management to the headmistress of 
SCEGGS. 
The skinny was as follows:
1.Young women have no control over the actions of male animals who feel 
entitled to hurt them. They do not have the muscle mass to stop them.
2.They do have control over who they associate with, where they go, how much 
they drink, how they dress, and so on. The issue is risk assessment and risk 
reduction by having two wines and leaving the party if you’re concerned about 
the rough trade leering at you.
3.Conclusion: young women should be taught risk management as a subject at 
school.
I was about to deliver a keynote at a Safety-Critical Systems Club conference 
in Sydney so I volunteered to visit SCEGGS and meet with the head mistress to 
further explain.
The response was – crickets.
At the conference I told the story and asked for volunteers to visit SCEGGS 
should they change their minds as I am not a Sydney resident. One lady 
volunteered. Nothing came of it.
But there’s more. 
Proud of my attempt to protect young women I related the story to one of my 
daughters. A few sentences into the narrative she stood up and screamed at me 
for “victim blaming”. I’m still trying to recover my relationship with that 
young woman. Since that horrible experience I have noticed exactly the same 
response from many intelligent (but risk illiterate) women who I have had the 
stupidity to engage in discussion on women’s issues. The almost universal 
response from the ladies is hand wringing. The narrative  is invariably: “A 
woman should be able to go anywhere she likes, dress anyway she wants and 
drink as much as she likes”. Followed by, “These misogynous pigs should be 
trained to respect women”. If the lady hasn’t left the room and the screaming 
is only moderate I try to express furious agreement with these sentiments but 
with the caveat that lectures on how boys should be trained will not protect 
her daughter at the party she is attending this evening. Risk management will.
I note that there was no such reaction from the many professional women in the 
room at the Safety-Critical Systems Club conference. Card-carrying risk 
managers all.

>From all this I conclude that:
1.It takes significant training hours to produce a person who understands and 
values risk and risk management techniques. Even more to motivate them to 
actually use the techniques. It often takes blood. Contrast the professional 
women at the conference with the ladies in the wild.
2.The standards wonks are  therefore wasting their time redefining risk, it’s 
a simple concept but hard enough to explain as it is. Let us leave its 
definition alone and concentrate the substantial intellectual energy penned up 
in these working groups to designing pathways to educate civilians on what it 
really means together with how to implement effective risk management.

As for me, I refuse to give up. It does my head in to contemplate all the 
young women who will be abused tonight for lack of a simple element of 
education. If anyone on the list has ideas I’d love to hear them. I have 
considered stealth. Get my 4000 words published under a female Pseudonym. My 
working theory is that women just don’t want to hear suggestions from blokes. 
Hope I’m wrong.

Back to your pain Bernard. In extremis there’s always the Rudyard Kipling 
option.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s planes
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier

Cheers
Les










> ISO and IEC have finally determined that there is an issue with figuring out 
what people mean when 
> they use the term "risk" technically. They have convened a "joint task 
force" to try to sort it out 
> https://www.iec.ch/ords/f?
p=103:85:612946702359029::::FSP_ORG_ID,FSP_LANG_ID:28611,25. I am 
> sceptical they will come up with a good solution, because candidates for 
such WGs are self-selecting 
> (the actual members of the JTF nominated by the National Committees are not 
shown. More to the 
> point, I know some of them :-( ).
> 
> They might improve the outcome if the JTF included by invitation at least 
some internationally 
> acknowledged experts with well-regarded publications on the subject.
> 
> But, whatever. There are little things we plebs can do. Here's a picture 
caption from a piece in The 
> Guardian today: "Adults who took part in ‘regular’ weightlifting were 
found to have a 14% lower risk 
> of death."
> 
> Source: 
> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/27/exercise-with-weights-
linked-to-lower-risk-of-early-death-study-says 
> (no paywall)
> 
> So, folks, go out and buy yourselves some weights and use them. It gives you 
a 16% chance of 
> immortality. But what I think is more significant is the crystal-ball 
technology the investigators 
> seem to be using to judge the immortality. I'd be keen to know more about 
that.
> 
> PBL
> 
> Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de



--

Les Chambers

les at chambers.com.au

+61 (0)412 648 992