waremark wrote:How sad - that a person who would be quoted like that should be IAM Roadsmart Policy Director.
I agree. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency over recent years for the IAM to jump feet first into many a road safety debate as the go-to "rent a quote" for the media and journalists, without too much thought as to exactly what the IAM and its members actually believe. And it's often embarrassing.
The cause goes back many years to when a long-gone CEO declared that the IAM would be raising its profile and would seek to be the media's "go-to" organization on all things road safety. At the time BRAKE appeared to have that monopoly, understandably, because a large proportion of its membership had tragically suffered from losing loved ones as a result of bad driving and their self-promotion carried a very emotional message. And still does. The IAM, as an advanced driving organisation, has a much less emotional message to broadcast and one which is generally of little or no interest to the general public. So, what did the IAM do to raise its profile? It attempted to emulate the success of BRAKE by focussing first and foremost on road safety and re-positioned itself as a road-safety organisation. I know at the time that the Charity Commissioners were making noises about the IAM charitable side perhaps not being more inclusive of the wider population, so that may have had some influence.
The problem with this approach, as far as the IAM membership is concerned, is that they believe that safety on the road results from the better training of drivers, not "go-to sound bites" about not speeding everywhere. The membership believes, unlike, it seems, some previous senior IAM managers, that improved road safety emanates from training drivers to adopt a systematic approach to dealing with road hazards; to observe, anticipate, and plan. The problem that all of us have, not just IAM senior management, is how to spread the word to a general public who believe that they're already excellent drivers, and are completely deaf to any suggestion that they should improve further.
I've said this directly to every CEO of the last ten years or more, and I'll say it to the current CEO, if he's reading this, what the IAM is selling is education. And we all know that education is very hard to sell. The desire for education has to come from within the individual. To be receptive to education the individual has to have reached a state of conscious incompetence, ie. I know I could be better and I want to find someone to help me achieve that. I estimate that 95% of drivers are in a state of unconscious incompetence over their driving. They have no idea how bad they are. They are the ones that the IAM have to target; and it's not easy.
So my message to the IAM's senior management is that we all know that it's difficult to sell "advanced driving". But I suspect that none of you were told that when you applied for the job. So, instead of just carrying on where your predecessor left off and simply focus on the IAM being the go-to "rent-a-quote" for all things road safety, I would urge you to address the much more difficult task of promoting "advanced" driving as it has been practised traditionally by the IAM for the last 60+ years. I know it's not easy, it's much easier to spout on about how speed kills and about wicked speeders, but please make the effort to promote what the IAM actually stands for, better-trained drivers.