I’ve got relatively young kids so my weekends are often occupied by children’s parties. As a result of the intake cut offs they tend to be clustered in a 3-6 month patch for each child – so time your births based on whether you like to have weekends away in summer or winter.

It’s pretty good actually for the one year old parties. The celebrating child is usually propped up on a rug or in a bouncer and its friends are similarly disposed. The parents on the other hand are enjoying finger food, quite often some bubbles and new parent stories.

Many years ago before my own contribution to population growth I attended a Sunday morning picnic as the only childless couple. We wondered why everyone was so happy to get stuck into a drink at 11am….now we know you need it after the night before! But I digress…

As the kids get older the parties get more adventurous. It’s actually really pleasing to see an increase in the freedom activities over the nine years I’ve been an attendee. The various centres with trampolines and Ninja Warrior style equipment are pretty much a guarantee of tears at some point in proceedings, but we are letting it happen.

There are limits of course, and I do recall an earnest conversation last summer about the potential for a pool party or a surfing party at the beach. The analysis of risk escalates when contemplating lifesaving duties for 10 or 12 other people’s children. Risk is a serious thing. Sometimes so serious it is just not worth taking on –  so there was no surfing party.

Sometimes it does seem worth taking it on, but you need to be in some way supported – like individual parents staying at the pool party to keep an eye on their own.

We assess, manage and make calculated decisions about risk regularly in daily life, and we don’t take on more risk than we need to, or accept additional risk without seeing some tangible reason for doing so.

I’m pretty sure you’re a step ahead of me as I tilt this conversation into architectural practice.

Both in personal practice and through the Institute lately I’ve dealt with what seems like an unusually high number of proposed contractual changes which significantly alter risk profiles.

Warranting, inspecting, signing off are all activities which may only take half an hour to do….but contractually position you with far greater responsibility. That’s ok, if there is far greater something else to go with it.

I suggest that architects too often respond to additional tasks or changed roles with a simplistic assessment of the work involved. Consideration must also be given to the responsibility imputed.

Our clients are usually pretty protective of their built form babies, so make sure that you are adequately resourced and rewarded for accepting more responsibility for them.

Mario Dreosti
Chapter President