Risk Management and Good Judgement
August 12, 2011, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
An injury that doesn’t happen needs no treatment. An emergency that doesn’t occur requires no response. An illness that doesn’t develop demands no remedy. The best way to stay safe in the outdoors is to avoid getting into trouble in the first place. That requires planning, training, leadership, good judgment, and accepting responsibility—in short, risk management. We manage risk in almost every aspect of our lives. (Boy Scouts of America Fieldbook)
Modern Survival ideology to a large extent, is risk management, or at a very minimum – risk awareness.
“At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.”
(Benjamin Franklin)
Good judgement may be the most important trait to successful risk management. The problem is, to an extent, good judgement does not come naturally and is not equally distributed to all human beings.
Good judgement is a learned thing. Will Rogers once said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
Good judgement comes from life experience, the knowledge gained from good decisions and bad, and the common-sense that is applied or learned from the situation.
When experiencing, observing or examining the world around us, both local happenings and those afar, many of us are subconsciously judging the events that we see, or read about, and are filing them away in our memory banks, ultimately to be added together with all of our other experiences to form a judgement, opinion, instinct, or decision.
The key is to ‘be aware’ that your experiences and interpretations of them, are adding together to form ‘your judgement’. Be aware that if you are in your 20′s or 30′s, that someone who is in their 40′s or 50′s probably will have better overall judgement.
The old saying, “Respect your elders”… that’s what it means.
If you enjoyed this, or topics of survival preparedness or current events risk awareness,
check out our current homepage articles…
Being human, we can also learn from the acts of others, sometimes far removed from us in space or time, written down and analyzed. And sometimes more directly from the idiots that live across the street.
This is so true. Also you can learn from other people’s mistakes. You don’t have to break a leg to learn a lesson if you are observant. Preparation and thinking things through will go a long way towards preventing accidents. One obsevation I have made over the years is that often an accident or incident occurs when some simple thing goes wrong or you make a change in your routine. This first of all frustrates you and now you aren’t thinking about safety but how to get around this minor problem. Second you are now doing familiar things but with different conditions and you are lulled into thinking everything is the same. That is why so often when investigators look back on an accident they find two human errors not one. The first one is minor and sets you up for the second one. My suggestion is when something goes wrong, stop and think it through because things have changed. At the least, if you are in a hurry and don’t habve time to think it through, focus your mind on what you are doing and eliminate other distractions.
Respect your elders does not apply to politicans though. The longer they are in office the more corrupt and crooked they become, they become masters of the GAME. Many people that are new to politics actually have an idealistic approach to making certain parts of the government only to fall into the same pattern almost all of them end up at. In fact risk management and good judgement are gone on vacation in Washington, been that way for decades. I truly respect those with new and logical ideas that make good common sense and adapt to the situations as they warrant, regardless of the age. The true survivalist kind of fits this well, don’t you think?
The only ‘good judgement’ that politicians have is how to separate you from your money and liberty.