By Nippin Anand

For good five years of my early life, we lived on the first floor of a busy market in a small town in the north of India. The front of our property faced a vacant plot and, in a country where public toilets are a rare sight, most shopkeepers and shoppers would come and pee in the plot.

Come summertime and the temperatures in the city would shoot up to 45 degrees (113 F). During the night as we lay on the bed, the smell of urine would get on our nerves. Mum would try to close all the windows not least to minimise the smell but, also to save her little children from disease ridden mosquitoes that hovered around the plot. But it was an old house, and the windows were made of wood. Not all of them would seal against the window frame.

What I realised in living through that experience was that resisting the stink of urine is of little use. After a while, the senses will go numb, and it won’t stink anymore. The risk becomes a part of you. We know this as desensitisation. Through our body, the smell of urine finds its way into our habits. What was sensitised yesterday becomes habituated today.

A few months ago, during an online workshop on Cultural Intelligence, we started with a question:

How important it was for everyone to hold the handrail when climbing the stairs up and down?

Without hesitation everyone said, ‘always.’

Bruna then introduced us to this picture, and everyone was speechless.

Human beings can’t cope with too much of silence. Someone said, I also think that those overhanging electrical cables are a hazard.

Hazard for whom? To those who live close by those wires, they have become desensitised to it. You and I can record it, measure it, write bulletins and publish alerts. But who is it helping? What is going to change?

What might help in such situations is that others don’t feel and see what we see, and people don’t think before they act. Risk is subjective and more than 90% of our decisions are made in an unconscious mode.

Shakespeare was right. Beauty lies in the eyes and Risk lives in the body of the beholder.

Next time you spot a hazard, don’t be so quick to record it. Instead, ask others what they feel and how they live with the risk. Listen with patience for as long as it is needed. And please (please) don’t tell them what to do.

And here’s a set of questions that we use in Social Psychology of Risk that may help:

✴️ What would you like to share
✴️ Where would you like to begin
✴️ Can you tell me …
✴️ Can you tell me more …
✴️ What do you see
✴️ What more do you see
✴️ What have you learned

✅ and most importantly, what have I learned.

The biggest risks to our organisations are not those that surprise people. It is often those that don’t.

Learn to encourage people to talk about the obvious. That’s when they become ‘risk aware’.