In this 10 part series of Reducing Risk Tolerance we will explore each of the ten factors that influence risk rolerance and provide more details about each.  When taken together, this series should provide a more comprehensive review of the factors that influence risk tolerance so action can be taken to reduce risk toerlance and keep people safer. The factors that influence personal risk tolerance are:

• Overestimating one’s own capability and experience (increases risk tolerance)
• Familiarity with the task i.e. complacency (increases risk tolerance)
• Seriousness of the potential safety outcome (decreases risk tolerance)
• Voluntary actions and sense of being in control (increases risk tolerance)
• Personal experience with an outcome (decreases risk tolerance)
• Cost or implications of non-compliance (decreases risk tolerance)
• Confidence in the equipment (increases risk tolerance)
• Confidence in PPE and rescue (increases risk tolerance)
• Potential profit / gain from the action (increases risk tolerance)
• Role models accepting risk (increases risk tolerance)

This episode discuss how overestimating one’s own familiarity with a task and how it tends to increase risk tolerance when undertaking a job.  

As we become more and more familiar with undertaking a task a couple of interesting things happen.  First, our confidence builds with our experince nad familiarity.  And while often we think that this is a good thing, often it can be detrimental as familiarity breeds complacency, especially when nothing bad has previously happened.  We can get overconfident with repetitive tasks and as part of our evolutionary brain adaptation takes hold we begin to automate the work that is in front of us.  Our brains like to automate things that we do repetitively so as to conserve energy and allow our brains to do other things.  Our brains also crave novelty and when we do certain tasks over and over again in conjucntion with "automation” our brains begin to wander to other thoughts and ideas rather than the task at hand.  Both these things us at risk for complacency and for gettign hurt on tasks and jobs that are “routine” in nature.  All things we need to guard against.

Situtational awareness is critical to combating the complacency that can set in from familiarity with a task as well as challenging yourself and colleagues  about what could go wrong with the job as part of the toolbox discussions.  Leveraging job observations and less skilled people to observe the job and ask questions also works to keep one’s mind on the task and prevent an incident from occurring.