Small numbers

Sometimes I try to wrap my mind around the big numbers, the ones we have no reference to truly grasp, like life being formed for the first time in our planet around 4.1 billion years ago. How to process that? And maybe more mind-bending, how something as dumb and fragile as life can have been so persistent?

While I struggle with the magnitude of the time scale, life’s resilience may come to something closer to home for me: Risk Management.

For life to prosper, all it needs is to beat the odds (of completely dying out). It is diversity that makes more likely that a species survives. This diversity is preserved by small isolated populations, some will have the right traits and others will not; this is very similar to the principle of Resilience (Manage Continuity). Bypassing those traits through generations, the mechanisms of nature’s framework are perfected and reinforced over time; the same principle of the Deming’s Cycle (PDCA).

To be fair, there are many definitions for Risk Management. Still, since this is within my expertise, I’ll stick here with mine: to reduce uncertainty and manage resources to prepare accordingly for threats and opportunities. In general, that is what we do at every moment of our lives, even in micro-decisions likes crossing the street, or having tea or coffee in a flight. In my view, the challenge of Risk Management is not so much to manage risk per se, but to make the management of risk a conscious, educated and intelligent exercise.

Nature’s Risk Management framework is incredibly effective to its purpose of perpetuating the gene pool. It is not its priority to protect individuals, nor to respond to specific threats and scenarios, but to save the most individuals possible in the largest collection of extinction events possible. So how does our civilisation survive and prosper when nature does not appear to privilege it?

Two million years ago, we started controlling fire and developing tools, which I see in a significant part as due to the development of a rational approach to Risk Management. That is a result of humans grasping the concept of delayed gratification and accepting gradually more risk, consciously investing now under the assumption of likely enhanced return later. That changed everything with the development of the tribal organisations, agriculture and division of labour.

As a result, a little over 12000 years ago, a group of people came together to erect a large stone circle. The building was constructed in the hills of southern Anatolia, where today is Turkey. It is believed it was a temple, and the most ancient building known to mankind, predating the pyramids in Egypt for 7000 years. That’s the beginning of the Holocene era, as it marks the foundations of our civilisation as we know it. Merely 12000 years later we got internal combustion, refrigeration, we went to space and created the Internet.

Our world has changed so massively in recent years that rather than measuring our success by having more than 1 in 2 children surviving childhood, we are devastated by 1 in 50 children dying worldwide. Average life expectancy is estimated to have been 30 years in the pre-modern world, and now it is 70 years. Granted that there are huge disparities that need to be addressed, but still the lowest life expectancy in the world today is 53 years. So we must conclude we are in the right direction when privileging a rational Risk Management over our instincts.

To be clear, I do not believe a “call for reason” is a groundbreaking thought, but I do find important to remind people that nature’s Risk Management framework had at least a 600 million year head start on our rational approach to risk. It has probably worked on us from the first animals that appeared, manifesting itself as fear alongside other evolutionary forces.

Fear is normal, the absolute absence of it is as bad as its predominance, but fear’s priority is to our gene pool and not us individually, nor our achievements. We should know our fears and then let them aside, so they do not get in our way. By understanding our fears, we have some tools to police ourselves into not rationalising the irrational and mixing up the frameworks we are using in our decision-making process.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, remember how far reason brought us and trust it to take us even further. We should not get distracted by the big numbers that are outside of our control, but rather focus on the small ones, the things that are reachable and are within our control. By managing our risk consciously and rationally, we will get through it, coming out at the other side stronger for it.

#riskmanagement #humanism #evolution