Insights from Outside the Bubble: Your Everest

by Detlef Palm

Much is being made by spectacled risk doctors and highly paid risk consultants of the treatment of risk. Here is what they say, in their explain-videos on YouTube:

“We can reduce the likelihood of a risk event or taking a bad decision; we can mitigate the possible effect if something bad happens; we can share the risk and blame the committee instead; we can share financial risk by buying insurance.” At this point in the lecture, the eyes of UNICEF staff are beginning to glaze over. “Or we can accept or even take a risk”.

 Wow!!! Everyone wake up! We can take risks?

 

The latest generation of risk consultants will show a video of themselves unable to say anything, because of the shortage of oxygen, while stumbling the last meters towards the summit of Mount Everest. Back at sea level, the risk-taker will explain that everything is a question of determination and, of course, reading the weather and knowing what to get into.

The old-fashioned risk consultant is boring and the young freak climber seems irrelevant, but they are united in their life-experience and the basic dos and don’ts that hold lessons even for the UNICEF employee:

• don’t be reckless,
• take no unnecessary risk;
• the costs of any mitigating measure must not outweigh the benefits;
• it may not possible to walk away from risk;
• decisions need to be taken before things get worse;
• we need to see the big picture.

That is a lot of common sense and hence good advice. No risk can be reduced to zero, lest you never will cross the street on foot again, leave alone climb Mount Everest.

And risk and reward are inseparably linked. There is opportunity. The opportunity to save the life of children where nothing else has worked before; to be engaged to the person you love above everyone else; or – if you are so inclined - have some claim to fame instead of diving into obscurity.

Our biggest regrets tend to be for the opportunities or risks not taken. The mountain not climbed, the money not invested, the job not taken, the car not bought, the girl not kissed, the protest not uttered, and the new idea not tried.

The higher your ambition, the more risk you may have to accept. Taking risks can be liberating; it can also liberate you from a lot of bureaucracy. We just need to find the elusive balance.

👉 There is a lot of common sense about managing risk; your biggest regret will be the risk not taken

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