A Spy's Guide To Taking Risks

by John Braddock

To increase the likelihood of good things: 1. Elevate OR operators as high in the model as possible by creating substitute causes of the good thing. 2. Where necessary conditions of a good thing exist, create more substitutes and backups and fallbacks. But there’s another risk that goes beyond good and bad things when you’re looking at risks: There’s the risk you got it wrong. There’s the risk you misunderstood the necessary conditions of bad things. There’s the risk that you got wrong the substitutes. There’s the risk you filled in the model in the wrong way. You could have the wrong data. You could have applied the wrong analytic framework. You could have everything else right, but still made a bad decision. And took the wrong action. You can mitigate that risk by taking a structured approach. A structured approach gives you a checklist. But you can’t escape the risk that the model you used was wrong. You can’t take that risk to zero. Because a model is not reality. A map is not the territory. No matter how good you are at judging risks and how good your model is, there’s always the risk your model and things in it are wrong. But a structured approach gives you something else: A vocabulary to get a second opinion. When you get a second opinion, it helps to talk to someone who has done a similar thing before.