By Jessica Kirby
If there is anything Bruce Kirkby, author, photography, adventurer, and speaker at the 2025 TIAC Conference in Whitehorse, Yukon, knows, it’s risk management. An engineer who quit the cubicle life after just four months, Kirkby has conquered wild adventures by foot, wheel, air, and water, including a crossing of Arabia’s Empty Quarter by camel, a raft descent of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge, and a 13,000-mile overland journey to Ladakh with his family.
His ability to achieve, he says, is about learning to access true potential and possibility, the opportunity for growth that is within each of us.
“When you meet challenges, ask how you can use them as a catalyst for growth, rather than being ground down,” he says. “We are all going to try things we don’t achieve. What matters is who we become in the process of pursuing those things.”
In his talk, Protecting Good People from Bad Decisions, Kirkby talked about risk management on the severity to probability axis and noted that although we tend to chalk mistakes up to inability, most skilled people still make poor decisions.
“PPE, training, equipment, and your expertise are all the result of a safety/risk management plan,” he says. “All the equipment can be perfect, but if we are not operating at 100% ourselves, it triggers mental shortcuts like we see in distracted driving, for example.”
Distraction is one of three universal human factors that increase the risk factor in any situation. Complacency and familiarity are the other two, and in action they lead to over confidence bias—anything we are good at, we underestimate others and we overestimate our ability in familiar tasks.
“High demands and constant distraction define the modern workplace,” Kirkby says. “As employees grow desensitized to hazards, it is easy for safety compliance to lapse.”
Even the most well-intentioned and highly-experienced teams can fall prey to biases and heuristics—mental shortcuts that speed operations but unwittingly increase risk exposure at the same time.
Kirkby shared seven judgement mistakes that people often make that can increase the risk factor in the workplace—and just about any situation.
- Availability bias. “The more easily we can imagine it, the more we worry,” he says. This is why team members tend to focus on exotic or alpha (primary) risks. The key to avoiding this risk is ensuring the entire team knows how to handle the primary risks. “That’s how you take it off the table,” Kirkby says. “That’s why there has never been a bear fatality for group of more than four.”
- Novelty bias. We recognize fast change—change that comes with lights, sirens, and loud noise, metaphorically or literally. The solution? Watch for flow change in small steps, which are typically missed.
- Near miss bias. “We misinterpret luck as skill,” Kirkby says. “When there is potential for luck, we have to have a culture of openness to recognize and learn from that.”
- Continuation bias. Individuals tend to adhere to the original plan despite changing conditions, when all situations call for an open mind and flexibility. “Understand that a deadline isn’t worth a safety risk,” Kirkby says.
- Risk creep. People tend to become desensitized to hazards the more often they see them or their precursors. “We can’t trust people’s instincts over time,” Kirkby says. “Always use a checklist.”
- Risk shift. There is a strong tendency for a group of four or more to make a riskier decision. “Having a trusting, open culture where someone new can say anything and express concern is the key here,” Kirkby says. “Don’t supress instinct.”
- Human risk. Kirkby says teams tend to think of equipment, environment, and each member’s personal contribution, but challenges teams to think about human error, because it accounts for 80% of accidents.
“In industrial settings, we have budget, production, and risk,” he says. “We feel like risk management will cut into the other two, but the ability to manage risk informs and improves the other factors. Risk management allows us to reach our full potential. It becomes an important part of our power.”
Learn more about Bruce Kirkby at brucekirkby.com ▪
