The Sky is Falling… The Challenge with Highlighting Outlier Risks

In 1833, the sky fell… quite literally.? At 3am, November 13th, 1833 it rained fire from the sky.? A meteor shower generated over 150,000 shooting stars per hour!? I’ve been out during the Perseids Meteor showers and I’ve been lucky to see 5-8/hour.? Can you imagine how frightening it must have been to have it raining fire in a period where these phenomena were not well explained?

Predicting a major astrological event like this would have solidified your reputation as a prophet of great stature.? Perhaps this is why the great engineering feats in early civilization were engineered to predict astronomical events.? Predicting the future gives you great influential power.

Correctly predicting a future failure can be a path to career success. ... But along the way, something else happens.? You’re not invited to the same meetings you were before.?

We often see this in team dynamics in businesses.? Some employees, stereotypically engineers though not always, are great at predicting outlier doom risks.? Perhaps you’re one of these people who are well trained to consider the range of possible failures.??

Correctly predicting a future failure can be a path to career success.? If you successfully warned people that the sky might fall and you were proven right, your credibility immediately skyrockets.? You’re prophecies demand respect.??

But along the way, something else happens.? You’re not invited to the same meetings you were before.? Your prophecies are respected, but you’re not invited to open-ended discussions.? You’re brought in after decisions are largely made, but someone wants to vet them just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.??

It’s exhausting to consider a navigable path through a new space when someone is pointing out all of the challenges.

Why is this?? I think Simon Sinek explains this phenomenon well.? “If you ever see skiers go through trees, do you know how they do that?? It’s very easy, it’s actually surprisingly easy.? If you go through trees on skis and you go ‘don’t hit a tree, don’t hit a tree, don’t hit a tree’ guess what you’re watching?? You’re only looking at trees as opposed to snow. ‘Follow the path, follow the path’ the only thing you see is the path.? Skiers know this.? If you say ‘don’t hit a tree’ you’ll hit a tree.? If you focus on obstacles, all you will see is obstacles.”?

Said more succinctly and credited to Henry Ford, “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.”

As leaders and employees in a company, managing risks is a huge part of our job.? And particularly when doing something new and bold, risks are everywhere.? All kinds of bad things can come along and wipe you out.??

This is where the doomsayer is most valuable, right?? The person who can illuminate all the ways it might fail should be king as they can help you anticipate everything you need to watch out for.? Except in practice, if you embark on something new with this approach, then all you see are trees.? Another quote I like, attributed to Samuel Johnson is “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

just being able to come up with outlier risks to pepper into a conversation or as examples of what might go wrong is not a particularly valuable contribution

In practice, this is why the individual who sees the outlier risks is left out of the room when new ideas are considered.? It’s exhausting to consider a navigable path through a new space when someone is pointing out all of the challenges.? I recently had the opportunity to meet Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and he pointed out that if you knew all the pain and hardship in starting a company on day one, you’d never do it!? Better to spread that pain and hardship over 30 years and deal with it as it comes.? Ultimately, all successful companies work to become less and less dependent on everything going right, but realistically, particularly in new areas, also a lot needs to go right and a little luck helps too.?

If you’re one of those people that naturally sees all the risks, but you also want to be in the room while new ideas are considered and new paths explored, how do you find the balance???

let your aspirational side come through as you conceive of ways to build the best plan possible through this new ambiguous space

The first step is to recognize that just being able to come up with outlier risks to pepper into a conversation or as examples of what might go wrong is not a particularly valuable contribution.? In fact, it can be a fairly negative contribution as it distracts from focusing on the goal and forces people to debate the merits of a risk that probably isn’t worth the time spent.? And frankly it’s exhausting for the team to spend all their time mitigating risks, many of which? aren’t that likely to happen or wouldn’t have a material impact.??

The art is to know the difference between a) risks we need to pay attention to now and b) risks that are sufficiently outliers that we shouldn’t.? The way to do this is to ask yourself… a) is there evidence of sufficiently high probability this risk could really hurt us?? b) are we going to be able to work around this if it does come up? c) would the damage be material, or just annoying?

If there's a reasonably high probability that the team would be unlikely to be able to work around this risk or just handle it if it emerges, and the damage would be material, then it’s worth building the plan to avoid that obstacle.? Otherwise, jot it down in your own notebook and let it go.??

Instead, let your aspirational side come through as you conceive of ways to build the best plan possible through this new ambiguous space rather than the lowest-risk path possible.??

Hope this helps!

Brad Porter is the CEO and Founder of Collaborative Robotics, Inc, a Sequoia, Khosla and Mayo Clinic backed robotics company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Prior to founding Cobot, Brad was the Vice President and Distinguished Engineer leading a global team of 10,000 people overseeing all of Amazon’s logistics robotics work. Brad also served as CTO of Scale AI, Platform Architect for Tellme Networks and an early engineer at Netscape. Brad holds a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from MIT. His research focused on computer graphics under Professor Seth Teller.