{"id":4448,"date":"2022-05-31T11:56:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T11:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.carolinegourlay.co.uk\/?p=4448"},"modified":"2022-06-07T15:54:04","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T15:54:04","slug":"the-riskiest-behaviour-ive-engaged-in-and-i-bet-you-have-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carolinegourlay.co.uk\/the-riskiest-behaviour-ive-engaged-in-and-i-bet-you-have-too\/","title":{"rendered":"The riskiest behaviour I’ve engaged in – and I bet you have too"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think of myself as much of a risk taker. I’m generally fairly cautious – no high risk investments, Vegas holidays or adventure sports for me. But recently I’ve noticed just how risky some<\/em> of my behaviour can be. I guarantee some of yours is too.<\/p>\n

To illustrate, let me tell you about my garden. When we moved into our house 20 years ago, the small garden was very basic – a scrappy lawn with some flower beds round the edges. Despite being a novice gardener, I wanted something grander. I wanted a stately home garden in a matchbox. Flowerbeds of abundant colour, edged by neat box hedging around some cobblestones with a pedestal centre piece. So that’s what we created (well sort of).<\/p>\n

Truth be told, we’re fair-weather gardeners and not very good at it, so the abundant colour was a bit hit and miss. But we did grow and clip and shape four neat box hedges around the flowerbeds, so the garden always had that formal structure that I loved. Or it did, until we had a problem. A couple of months ago I noticed that something was wrong with one section of hedge. I did what I always do. I googled. I looked into the two main problems with box – box blight and box caterpillar – and kept the tabs open to show I meant business. I did some high quality fretting. Every time I went into the garden, I shook my head and said “We really must do something about that”. I took the situation as seriously as it was possible to take it without actually doing anything.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the world moved on<\/h2>\n

While I fretted and then got on with other stuff, an army of highly camouflaged, very hungry caterpillars devoured our hedges. Almost two decades of growth, thousands of pounds worth of hedge, gone. By the time we gave up and decided to dig it all out, there was barely a leaf left on it. My risky behaviour was to be aware of a problem, to let it take up mental energy but not to act.<\/p>\n

I see parallels with other areas of my life, with the issues my clients bring me and in the world around me. As an allegory for our collective response to climate change it’s almost perfect*. The ratio of fretting to meaningful action on the environment is way too high, for psychological reasons I’ve discussed here before<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this kind of behaviour turns up in the business world too. I’m an associate member of the Institute for Turnaround<\/a> and do some work with businesses in distress. Many companies coast towards insolvency, unwilling or unable to face up to the realities in their business. I suspect more businesses fail because of this kind of passive risk taking than because of massive misjudged gambles.<\/p>\n

We don’t even need to look at the extremes of business failure or catastrophic environmental breakdown to see this inadvertent risk taking at work.<\/p>\n

(*perfect aside from the fact that saving the hedges would have involved killing a lot of caterpillars. A wildlife friendly garden can be a right pain).<\/p>\n

Everyday examples<\/h2>\n

These are some common workplace situations that happen in businesses every day – and the day after that and the next one…<\/p>\n