Industry View

How What You Know Can Hurt You

Some sage said, ’The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.’ That can be a killer in risk management. Guest columnist Mark Chussil offers tips for testing what you know.

By Jen McCarthy

Page 4

Whether you are in the private or the public sector, you can proactively uncover what’s so and what ain’t.

Ask questions that are different from those you might usually ask. For instance, in addition to asking whether a plan or function is ready to go, ask what would cause that plan or function to fail. Don’t go lightweight here.
Recognize that it is difficult to see intellectually or in the abstract what’s missing or what might not work. (If it were easy, plans would always work.) Exercises that explicitly and viscerally connect the dots, such as crisis simulations, are much more effective.
Work with senior leaders, not just front-line employees or emergency responders. Their decisions determine how the crisis will be tackled and even whether certain crises will hit.
Think less about precision and more about decisions. It almost never happens that the right decision depends on improving accuracy by another decimal place.
When a crisis hits, inexperienced executives or officials will feel a great deal of emotion, which can interfere with decision-making. One of the benefits of learning through simulation is that you process the emotions without placing real lives or real livelihoods at stake.
You have more options the earlier you begin, so think preparedness rather than management. You can preempt a competitor only if it hasn’t already committed to enter the market; you can vaccinate your computers or people only if they haven’t been infected yet; you can benefit from better levees only if you better them before the hurricane. Once things start getting really bad, you have fewer options, you have less time to make them work and you have to bet they’ll work the first time.
Learn expert decision-making skills: how to frame problems, how to avoid bias, how to build commitment. People aren’t born with those skills. Bring in decision-making experts to help, just as you would bring in experts to improve security, inventory management or public communications.
View crisis preparedness as a responsible investment. You can improve your company’s or community’s ability to deal with specific crises, and with crises in general, with programs and practice.

The moral of the story is to know there’s much we don’t know. We best protect our businesses and our communities by working through what could go wrong, rather than assuring ourselves everything will go right.

(We’ll conclude with a bit of trivia. Who said, "The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so"? Like many people, I knew Will Rogers said it. I checked. I found that line (with minor variations) attributed to Josh Billings and Mark Twain as well as Will Rogers. Billings’ writings predate the others’.)