Preparation over Prognostication and Preparation over Panic - How Leaders and Analysts should respond

When I was a young man I was in the fire department. We were volunteer, but we took it seriously. I once made the mistake of referring to some other departments as “professional” as a contrast to “volunteer“ and was quickly corrected by my captain. Those other departments may be paid, but we’re all professionals. 

Every Tuesday night was department night. Twice a month we drilled and practiced. Once a month we cleaned and inspected gear, tools, and trucks. And once a month we had a business meeting to handle administrative matters. In addition to Tuesdays, we had fire school training , incident command training, hazardous materials training, emergency egress training, live fire training, confined space training, and, on a voluntary basis, physical workouts. We were, in short, prepared. 

The nature of emergency services is that they are unpredictable. While there may be seasonal or regional patterns, the individual incidents happen at all hours, in all seasons, in all weather conditions. The variation in event types was wide ranging, from brief false alarms to flooded basements to long, multi-alarm fires. 

Now I work in Analytics. It is our job to measure things that are difficult to measure and to predict things that are hard to predict. Under normal conditions, we can do some pretty great work and produce surprisingly accurate predictions of all sorts of phenomena. However, there are times, like now, when believing that we can accurately predict what will happen or when is not only unlikely, it is arrogant. These events are what Nassim Taleb would refer to as a Black Swan event. A situation in which our past has little to no predictive power over our near term future. Under such circumstance, the wisest answer to “what will happen” is “I don’t know.” 

In the analytic biz, it takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to say “I don’t know”. It takes humility. It takes stuffing down how much we absolutely love to find answers to difficult problems and gnarly questions. It takes a commitment to the scientific principles on which all our work should stand; the data that we have is simply an inadequate foundation on which to draw a conclusion. 

So what do we do? How do we address the feeling of discomfort that lack of knowing produces?

We do what the fire department does. We prepare. What do we prepare for? We prepare for the wide variety of possibilities that could be presented to us. We prepare the tools to handle any number of problems that we may need to solve at the speed of a sprint or at the speed of a marathon. The analyses best performed in these situations are scenario analyses, in which we lay out a series of possible situations and then assess their likelihood, not in absolute terms, but in probabilistic terms in order to prioritize our preparation activities. The fire department trains hooking up to fire hydrants a lot more often than they train for a trench collapse, because one is more likely than the other, but they put some degree of work into both and make themselves ready for a wide set of circumstances. 

In business, we can and should operate the same way. And as analysts, we can support the business by being honest about what is and is not predictable, and helping lay out the possible areas where preparation required. 

There’s one more benefit to preparation: it eases the nerves. No soldier who has faced combat or firefighter that has been licked by flames and steam or searched for a missing child will tell you that training is the same as the real thing, but what so many of them will tell you is how much the practice and preparation allowed them to act effectively when the time came to act. In other words, preparation also rescues emotional unease, because despite the discomfort of not knowing what is going to happen, one knows that they are better prepared for it and that sensation is a relief. I speak from firsthand experience. 

Let’s spend less time prognosticating, less time panicking, and more times preparing. Let’s be like the fire department. 

#SwarthmoreFireandProtectiveAssociation #Company14 #DecisionsUnderUncertainty #BlackSwans