Uncertainty Management in Career

They say that a cat has nine lives. As for what happens to the fate of this fluffy wonder on its tenth free fall out of the window, is, of course, left to our own perverted conjecture. I was recently checking my passport as preparation for my upcoming trip to Lagos. It shows that I have been to that city of joyful uncertainty eight times in the last five years. This is going to be my ninth trip! Since I have always considered myself a Bengal Tiger (just another cat of a higher magnitude) and this project has been sort of a lifeline for me during this downturn, the feline connection appears all too strong to ignore. It makes me wonder what happens after my 9th ‘life’ in Lagos. Will I get any more consulting project from Chevron after I’ve completed this one? From anywhere? Will I ever get another full-time job? Is this downturn in the oil & gas industry ever going to end?

I recall not too long ago, someone wrote an article in LinkedIn entitled “What if there are no jobs?" which got numerous “likes” as a testimony to our collective pessimism as the oil price continued to fall. Things do look a little less bleak right now. Yet, who knows when there will be a full recovery? Or is there a new slump lurking in the near future as we engage in a new fracking frenzy and the sheikhs get nervous upon their shaky camels of prosperity?

Once you sip that weirdly pleasant poison of despair, you will ask your bartender Ms. Melancholia for more…what if I am not able to keep my house? What if we can’t afford to send our kids to college? What if I am forced to pack up and move back to Bangladesh, the original abode of all Bengal tigers? A cold shiver rushes through my imaginary tail.

But let us press a hard brake right here before we zip through that treacherous labyrinth of ‘what if’. Let’s stop and think for a moment. What we are dealing with here is ‘uncertainty’, not a known disaster. Haven’t we done enough Uncertainty & Risk Management in the oil & gas industry? In fact, dealing with uncertainty is the very bread and butter for many of us. We do not stop our drilling program just because 7 out of 10 of them turned out to be dry holes ‘or P10 producers’. We acquire the new knowledge, factor in all the risks more precisely, and drill our next 10 wells with equal enthusiasm. And we just keep good faith that the residual uncertainty will not hurt us too much. When my whole life is the project at hand, my approach should be no different:

1.     Identify what is risk and what is uncertainty at any stage of life. Risk is a known element of threat. For example, oil companies lay their people off when the oil price keeps low for a prolonged period. Therefore, my job is at risk right now. Uncertainty on the other hand is something about which we are totally clueless. My children are middle school-ers. I wonder when they grow up, get married and have children, if my grandkids will be able to make it to the Harvard. That’s a huge uncertainty at this point in time.

2.     Quantify your risk and take measures to mitigate or minimize them. For example, a total of 518,577 car crashes were reported in Texas in 2015. I commute in Texas every day. Therefore, I will drive very cautiously, with defensive driving in mind and minimize the risk. Otherwise the cat will kick the bucket even before starting its 9th adventure right here in Texas on Interstate-10 rather than in Lekki or Victoria Island in Lagos.

3.     Take measures to reduce uncertainty. Observe that risk and uncertainty are but the two ends of a spectrum. The more information I have on a threat issue, the more I can assign it to risk rather than to uncertainty. For example, right now I have no clue of what will happen to my career after I come back from this next trip. But I can reduce that uncertainty by taking certain steps. I can check how it is going with the rig count in the U.S., how politics is impacting the oil price, which companies are getting ready to hire, etc. If I can factor in all those risks, I will have a better grip on my future career path. It is important to realize that having risk is always better than having uncertainty!

4.     Take the residual uncertainty as a positive entity. Keep faith and move forward. There is something in me confirming that the sun will still rise tomorrow in the east. That something also tells me that I will remain alive and strong in the foreseeable future, that my family will be around me, so on and so forth. Otherwise, who would even care about the oil price?

But why do you keep that faith? Not because all these inductive assumptions are necessarily true, but because it is the best strategy that is in- built in our system. Let us do a thought experiment here. Let me ask an unpalatable question to all of you reading this article: How many of you seriously think that you will be dead by tomorrow morning? I believe none (because otherwise you would be busy right now writing your will rather than reading this LinkedIn post by a dude whose last name you cannot even properly pronounce). This is in spite of the fact that many healthy people have been found dead the next morning due to a sudden heart attack or as a result of some sort of mayhem. So, my deepest condolences if you actually wake up dead tomorrow (sorry for the oxymoron here). But we are still hardwired to have positive faith when it comes to uncertainty. Who or what has instilled that faith in us is a discussion better left to the professional psychologists and meta-physicists. 

But one cannot ignore the obvious evolutionary advantage of this strategy. Think of the caveman who refuses to go out of his cave and join his group on a mammoth hunt just because the group was about try out a new route full of uncertainty. How much roast-meat would he have on his plate (or whatever they used those days) at the end of the day? It is true that not all of them came back in good shape: one lost a toenail, another fell and disappeared in the canyon…but that’s the chance they took, having faith that everything will go alright. Faith does not guarantee success for everyone. But faith is the best strategy and the very dynamo of our activities in an uncertain world. And I daresay that if you think carefully, you will see that all spectacular achievements of the world are largely a construction of faith.

Sometimes, the stress of life distorts that faith and we trust in nothing. While someone is softly snoring beside you on your flight to Lagos, you toss and turn, and shout in your mind: OMG, I am up in the sky... what if the plane crashes? What if there is a bomb? What if my baggage gets lost at Murtala Muhammad Airport? What if Boko Haram takes over while I am in Nigeria? What if they force-feed me bush meat and I get Ebola out of that? What if the Oro Festival is going on and I accidentally have an eye-to-eye contact with the Oro priest? That's a high-time to push the reset button and go back to your old Caveman (or woman) Mode of faith and trust.

Who said that a cat has only nine lives? Roar!!