Though the Japanese Kamikaze air attacks in World War II did not change the War’s fate, the name stuck.  To the West, it still means a quite horrifying kind of warfare, that we in the West face with Islamists.’  They’ destroy their life with a bomb in the attempt to kill, to eliminate ‘us.’

I dare say their strategy is pretty useless. We do more than enough to destroy ourselves by our own.  Let me explain:

I was grown up to a basic creed: to see walnuts fall, to shovel snow, and to believe that to kill people is useless. Walnuts fall on their own. Snow melts on its own.  And people die, sooner or later.

What my grandparents meant to teach me is that time is the greatest power, not man.
We don’t use time.  We are obsessed with time: time scheduling, time monitoring – everywhere, “always” trying to control time.

Why can’t we get away from this vision?  Why can’t we live without thinking of it? We have elected time our tyrant and we keep wanting to be its slave.

It is possible, it can be done.  We would benefit greatly.  As someone once said:  we are not killing time but time is killing us instead.

We live longer than our predecessors.  The quantity of life keeps increasing but what about its quality?

People now ‘talk’ more with their smartphones than among themselves.  When I have meals with my family, my wife’s son chats to his i-something, my wife keeps touching her tablet screen.  My only way to communicate with living beings is to hug our doggies.
Is this human communication?

It’s no wonder that we have to live more and more on pills.  We have made our life so unnatural that we have to rely on unnatural remedies to carry on.  I dare say that without the drugs industry our average lifespan would be more or less the same as in the Middle Age.

Years ago we were obsessed with safety in work places.  Laws and standards overwhelmed us resulting in increasing the budget of consultants and certification bodies, but certainly not reducing the occurrence and severity of work accidents.

Nowadays it’s ‘cyber security.’  We depend so much on computers that we are not capable of moving to a nearby town without using our car’s computerized navigation system.

And when we go jogging we don’t listen to our heartbeat and lungs but we look at the figures on the smart watch on our wrist.  Anyone using his / her common sense would say that this is quite crazy. Or not?  So, are we improving our lives?

SO WHAT HAPPENED?
After the ‘quality age’  that revealed focused on product improvement we are now entering a ‘risk age.’  At a first sight, it looks promising. But we have all become cynical and believe less and less in words.

Will this ‘risk age’ be a true step forward with respect to the previous quality age?
A difficult question to answer.  The expectations for the quality age have been largely disappointing both for the doers and the users.
Since the risk age starts from the same assumptions, why should expectations be different?

Mine is no dystopian vision.  By nature and education I am inclined to stick to facts.
We have made a wonderful world of machines and widgets and we keep doing so.
But we keep ignoring that before and after machines and widgets there is man. I sincerely wish this message of mine will support you – risk professionals – to improve your job – and, why not, personal – performance.

I look forward to your feed-back, thank you.