Let’s face it: cobwebs are not nice to see; in the worst case they remind us horror films, vampires’ habitat.

They kind of inspire a dirty feeling.

But …

But cobwebs are used by spiders to catch flies.  And let’s face it once more, flies are not the most hygienic beings at all.

So, what is worse? Cobwebs or Flies?

This is – of course – an example tending to extremes but interestingly enough, it does not express a point of view.  It expresses instead a line of thought.

Points of view and lines of thought, at a first glance, may seem to be quite the same stuff.

But it is not actually so.

In the opinion-making and -driving world where we have to live, personal views dominate.  Though the very persons who express – more or less loudly – their views, very often have evident difficulties to track the “points” from which their views originate.

Views are facts.  Sight is one of our physical / psychical senses.  The expression “point of view” has been transformed and used in time to mean opinions, rather than its original meaning of “standpoint”, or similes.

This is a reason why I am convinced that it makes more sense to use the expression ‘line of thought’ instead of ‘point of view.’

Let’s try to explain to a – possibly clever – child what we mean by point of view.  He or she will certainly understand what we say as ‘seeing – or looking at – something from here or there’, is a very physical act.

The child would hardly understand that by ‘point of view’ we mean a process that results in opinions, instead.

When we assess risks, we meet with cobwebs and flies.  Cobwebs are static.  They are there to be seen all the time, until they are swept away.

Flies are much more dynamic.  They annoy us all the time, unless we use powerful insecticides to kill them – and ourselves, in the long run …

So, once more, what is worse?

Last night I was thinking of a big, heavy german manual on quality management systems: a handbook, you would say.  However quite difficult to handle, 500 pages or so. I was struck by the resemblance of the word manual with the name Emmanuel – God is with us.

Wherever and whatever we dig, we always find that we cannot build our castles on sand.   Looking and searching outside ourselves for solutions to the problems we daily encounter is mere folly.

The first and most important question on our job check-list is “Am I aware of myself?”.

It is a millennia-old question.

We may pray God to be with us, with our manuals, that’s all.

As far as I know and understand of Pragmatism, it is a question of developing theories that result in practical output.

Having said this, the previous paragraph is intended as a reminder: “Man is the measure of everything”.

Of course, a worm – or whatever living being – would say the same of itself …

Thinking again on risk assessment and risk prevention, my impression – that is, “line of thought” – is that the US are really maniac about safety helmets.  You see US people wearing them always and everywhere.  Most surprisingly even when safety helmets are the least necessary safety equipment, or device.

Is in the US a safety helmets industry lobby very powerful?

When we work on risk assessment and prevention, we have to be aware of such “political risks”, too.

If we want to improve our risk assessment & prevention check-lists’ effectiveness, we have to enlarge them to include what I synthesize as “economical / commercial, political, social issues – or concerns”.

We have learned from ISO 9000 that quality-above-all policies are more dystopian than utopian.

There is a lot of writing and speech about the new-coming ISO 9001:2015, I would say, much too much.

There are dramatic expectations: what about if the elephant will give birth to a mouse?

Chances are that this will be the crude – and sad – reality.

John Seddon has been right campaigning against ISO 9000.  Unfortunately he was David against Goliath.