Reference reading
Recklessness
Letting an exciting commitment outrun consideration of its foreseeable consequences.
Disregard for foreseeable, significant consequences, including risks imposed on other people.
Imagine this: A worker commits to a hurried delivery before considering the unrestrained load and the step in its path.
How the pattern works
The trolley’s timetable has encountered a step that was visible all along. Recklessness gives insufficient weight to a foreseeable significant consequence. Confidence, excitement or the attraction of a quick result is allowed to stand in for an examination of what could happen and who would bear it.
New work involves uncertainty, and a worthwhile undertaking cannot always wait for certainty. Thoughtful risk differs from disregard: identify what is at stake, seek relevant knowledge and consider what options remain if the first attempt fails. The person who receives the credit for a bold promise is not always the person who must absorb its failure.
What it costs the work
A rushed commitment can transfer pressure to customers, colleagues or suppliers who were never asked whether they could accept it. Checks are shortened, explanations arrive late and ordinary difficulties become emergencies. Even when the gamble succeeds, that result alone does not show that the decision gave the consequences their fitting weight.
A distinction worth keeping
A calculated risk is not automatically reckless, and an unsuccessful decision is not proof of a vice. Negligence concerns due care and attention; Recklessness concerns disregard for foreseeable significant consequences. Impatience may drive it, but a carefully planned attempt can also be reckless if its plan simply treats other people’s serious losses as acceptable scenery.
What a useful response can change
Before an assurance becomes another person’s plan, the decision can identify the important uncertainty, who bears its downside and what grounds support proceeding.
A limited trial may produce information without creating the full commitment. Its limits, necessary checks and stopping conditions need to be genuine rather than a reassuring label attached to the same exposure.
Where the stakes require expertise or safeguards, enthusiasm cannot replace them. The small trolley is a comic illustration, not a procedure for assessing financial, legal or physical risks.
Questions for reflection
- Who is being committed to the downside of this promise?
- Which foreseeable difficulty has confidence quietly removed from the account?
Other perspectives
Wherever the increased speed of the engine would lead to injurious or dangerous consequences, this is applied; and it is equally the regulator of the water-wheel which drives a spinning-jenny, or of the windmills which drain our fens.
Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source
Babbage describes a regulator that restrains dangerous increases in speed. The mechanical example makes safeguards part of effective operation, rather than evidence that an operator lacks ambition.
It is some glory to fail in great designs; and some punishment is due to having rashly or presumptuously embarked in them.
William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source
Hazlitt permits admiration for a great attempt while questioning rashly embarking upon it. The aphorism resists the idea that an impressive aim excuses every foreseeable risk.