I’m thinking a lot about safety and freedom and consequences this week.

I’m going to start with some definitions: freedom is freedom to act, and the responsibility that comes with that is acceptance of the consequences of the action. With absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility. But no freedom implies no responsibility and therefore no growth.

Safety is the space in-between: freedom commensurate with your ability to accept responsibilities. As a society we’ve got some odd ideas about that: at 16 you are free to do a number of things that could have massive consequences.

When I take on someone new, I have to balance freedom to act with the consequences of those freedoms. Laying out the specific how of a task reduces freedom to act but also reduces the potential consequences, because I know what may go wrong and I am confident they can handle it. As my confidence in their ability to deal with consequences increases so too does their freedom to act.

But this week I’ve been wondering if I’ve been selling my line reports short.

This is partly because I’m thinking about the way I went to university hundreds of miles away from my family. Immediately – almost overnight – I had total freedom to act, and absolute responsibility for the consequences. Some of those actions and consequences were:

1. Buying an incredibly expensive set of cutlery, including a set of steak knives, and then eating ramen for the rest of the month. With wooden chopsticks
2. Staying up all night partying and then missing lectures
3. Not doing laundry and going to class in a suit (which, to be fair, I then turned into a replacement for a personality)

With absolute freedom to act, I didn’t do anything completely out of pocket. I did some stupid things, for sure, and I got feedback from the world about those stupid things. The closer we get to our feedback, and the closer the experience is, the faster we learn. Learning is good. Learning is important. Learning is not always painless.

Still, at no point did I have access to anything deadly. I could’ve, maybe? But I didn’t. I suspect the number of things that are terminal – either in a personal or career sense – are actually quite rare. They are also devastating. We play with live ammunition, in my line of work, and small mistakes can poison an entire piece of work. That means rework, and that means lost time and lost money.

And we come back again to the line that we have to walk with people for whom we are responsible: they must have freedom to act; they must therefore bear consequences; they will sometimes suffer; we will suffer with them. Our own fitness is called into question if things go wrong, and too much freedom was offered too early. Maybe that’s part of what we accept, when we accept that responsibility. We have freedom to act in setting guardrails, and must accept the consequences.

It’s just freedom all the way up, isn’t it?

I think I need to create more freedom to act for people I’m responsible for. I think. I’m still figuring this stuff out.

Next I need to think about Sartre and analysis paralysis and the particular dystopia that is the modern workspace. When I think about being more junior, total freedom to act would have terrified me because without guardrails there’s no way of navigating the labyrinth that is the information architecture of the average intranet.

More thoughts next week, when they arrive.