I’ve been thinking of writing a piece about commonplaces for some time, for I hold them liable of – sometimes very severe – errors.

I’m no anti-feminist but if “men come from Mars and women come from Venus”, then men-drivers and women-drivers come from different planets, too.  Let me explain:

A few nights ago I was in our car with my wife.  She was driving and it was snowing, not a real snow storm but it was snowing gently.

But she had both the windscreen and the rear glass wipers continuously scratching the glass, thus making an unpleasant noise.

Why did she do that? Because it was snowing.  It did not matter that the windscreen was perfectly neat and dry, and that the rear glass was only mildly covered with water drops.  It was snowing and she had to have the wipers on.

Why did she have it on?  She was told so at the driving school, was she not?

This is a trivial example, of course.  The only risk – and an almost certain risk – would be a faster wear of the rubber covering the wipers, therefore increasing for a few euros the car maintenance costs.

THE RISK QUESTIONS?
But how many similar examples do we come across with, daily? That imply much higher expenditures?

How often do we allow presumption to overcome perception or observation?

If we are in good faith, our presumption should be to do no harm to anybody.  But if we are not in good faith, our presumption can have disastrous effects and history abounds with such cases.

Both presumption, perception, and observation have their strong and weak points:

Presumption can be more easily acknowledged or accepted than perception.  It does not need any hard work to overcome it, one has just to follow the stream. On the other hand, presumption does not allow for discussions that would highlight discrepancies in the subject matter or let me put it in a more philosophical way or allow more free thought. Presumption that can quickly grow into excessive conviction seldom allows for questions and questioning.  It encourages status quo conditions.  It simply discourages any change or any improvement.  This is the best that we have done, where we have  arrived to, hence there is no sense in looking further.

Perception and observation cannot necessarily be objective and can therefore be contaminated by some presumption such as I found evidence that …   Clashes can often arise among observers.  The goal is no longer to have better knowledge and understanding, it becomes more and more a question of an individual’s supremacy. Nevertheless, when perception and observation are allowed to make their voice heard and developed into facts, great results can be achieved.

On the entry gate of a beautiful castle in Valle d’Aosta – a valley that borders Italy and France – it is written “Everything is and nothing is”.   Probably also meaning that subjectivity is everywhere, probably in this very last sentence, too.

We are used to presumptive sentences like “it is … “, where the dots can be whatever adjective, instead of translating them into perceptive sentences, like: I think it is … , to me it looks like …, and so on.

In the former, communication becomes soon quite sterile.

Epicurus wrote that when discussing to defend one’s opinion, the loser wins, because he learns more.

RISKY BUSINESS
When doing risk auditing, consulting, and other risk related business, perception and observation mechanisms will be much more important than for quality.  Though complex as it may look, quality issues can be measured, therefore made objective, thus substantiating presumption.

When looking for the risks affecting the quality of a product or the connections between risks and quality – we will soon find ourselves in an intricate maze of causes and effects, obviously tremendously difficult to solve.

We will have of course some presumptive starting points but we must be open to perception and observation, and abandon the initial points as soon as what we experience feeds our knowledge with more realistic data, though “revolutionary” they can be.

Although the following statement may seem, at a first sight, inconsistent with itself, we should, when working on risk, put aside presumptive expectations such as “it should be” and “it should not be”, but view the risk condition with “as-is” eyes, that is a non-teleological, aimless thinking.

Thinking of the tutors presuming to be smart because they had memorized the number of the “shall’s” and “should’s” in QS 9000, ISO/TS 16949, and so on, I believe that they did not do any good service both to the standards, to the companies implementing them and to their customers.

They simply did look at the house from the outside and stopped on its threshold, but did not enter it. Francis Bacon said that houses are made for living, not to be looked at.

COMMONPLACES
Some oddities on commonplaces:

The term commonplaces was first found in T. Man’s translation (London, 1562) Commonplaces of Christian Religion of W. Musculus’s Loci Communi Sacrae Theologicae, Basel, 1561.

On April 14, 1561, in Nuremberg’s (Germany) sky, people saw unusual flying objects, that in modern times were classified as UFO’s and the same phenomenon was observed five years later above Basel.

1561 is also a prime number.

I read on Wikipedia that the name of the US Route 666 was changed, because 666 is “the number of the beast”. Be it superstition or a commonplace, we often fall in this kind of trap.

In our quest for solving risks, we have to be very careful of what is presumption, or taken for granted, and what is not; that is, what we become aware of by direct experience.

We should strive to base our conclusions and resulting actions on observations and perceptions, in spite of the intrinsic man’s laziness that pushes us all to the more short-time convenient, easier way out.