a short discourse on random and statistical risk.
by bruce w. marcus
professional services marketing 3.0
risks are different in context and magnitude. a good mathematician can often statistically quantify the boundaries of risk, such as telling you that one in every hundred people will slip in the bathtub and break a bone, but that depersonalizes it and tells you nothing to help you avoid it. and that’s only halfway to understanding it.
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when a random risk is combined with a decision not to take an action in a situation (or even a potential situation), there is fuel for disaster.
one example is seen in the virginia tech tragedy, in which a deranged student went berserk and killed a number of students and professors. it would appear that by assuming that, statistically, there was little likelihood that such an act could happen on their campus, they were not prepared to cope with the aftermath. the school was not prepared to warn students about the shooter on campus, nor to respond appropriately after the event. they could have assessed the possibility — if not the probability — that a crazed gunman might kill students. here, too, mathematicians might still have assumed that it was likely to happen somewhere, which might have warranted simple preparation. there was no crisis plan in place, no designated hierarchy of either practices nor authorities – and so every decision had to be synthesized in a vacuum and on the spot. this, despite the vast array of articles about crisis management that abound in every industry and management course.
the potential danger is greater in doing nothing than in making a choice among potential actions. apparently, the school administration saw the risk from an actuarial – or statistical – point of view (calculating the number of such happenings and assuming that a serial shooter was unlikely to come to their school), when in fact the risk was a random event, which means that there is no statistical system that would serve to warn them other than to say it could happen.
they took the risk that a mentally unstable individual would not act out on their campus, and so had no plan in place. the result was that as bad as the event itself was, it was made worse for lack of preparation.
by the same token, if we assume that our clients understand, appreciate and cherish us, and don’t act to take steps to find out if they really do, we are risking that client relationship, as well as losing the opportunity to strengthen and cement our relationship.
