Jump! Don’t look. Jump! Have you ever? When would this be okay?

This brings us to the seventh commandment: “Pre-mortem; be risk adverse to be risk tolerant (regression to the mean)!” Conduct the pre-mortem. Explore all the things that could go wrong. Determine the potential consequences and the likelihood of each one occurring.

In the opening example, if you know the lay of the land, and have done this before, the risk of jumping without looking is low. Maybe someone dug a hole (or filled one in) since you were last here, but how likely is that? If that is at all likely, then do not proceed without checking. If unlikely, then decide based on the price you are willing to pay if you are wrong. The biggest risks, both positive and negative, are under extreme conditions, when human nature is likely to have us make the wrong decision. We humans are not good at making decisions under cases of extreme certainty (positive) or cases of extreme uncertainty (negative). An excellent read on this topic is “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. We have talked about it previously and if you don’t know what regression to the mean is, you need to know … as that is the most likely outcome and the most useful metric to know about your circumstances.

How long does it take to conduct a pre-mortem? Not long. What can it save you? Potentially your life, your business, your career, your job, your customer, and/or your peace of mind! Are these worthwhile benefits for the expenditure? You decide. When it works, it’s working and you have avoided all the consequences. That could be boring to the master of chaos or the adrenaline junky (who often prefers to run from crisis to crisis in order to feel alive). How unfortunate if this is you. Unfortunate for you and unfortunate for us. Change now. Become an effective master of risk. Embrace the premortem and mitigate unnecessary risk!

You are warriors. You will be effectively risk adverse by managing risk. Through the use of tools like the pre-mortem, you will avoid all unnecessary failure. So it is written.