National Blog Posting Month – March 2013 – Risk
Prompt – Do you always look before you leap?
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It’s a very sensible notion that one should check things out a bit before plunging into something that might represent a risk. What is less clear, and varies from person to person, is just how much effort should be put into checking before making a committment.
If you are an impulsive person, there’s probably not a whole lot of looking going on before you leap. The opposite end of the spectrum is the person who suffers from ‘analysis paralysis.’ These people spend so much time reviewing the possiblities and chances of failure, that they never actually act at all. Their inaction makes the decision. (And sometimes that doesn’t end well.)
With any decision, both the effort of checking (looking) and the amount of time that passes before making a decision (leaping) varies, and is dependent upon the personality of the person faced with the decision. The impulsive person doesn’t worry at all and jumps right in; the overly cautious person may not ever do anything.
For myself, I suspect I’m closer to the impulsive end of the spectrum, to a large degree because I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about things. I have OCD. It’s easy to start obsessing about a big decision. I don’t want that to happen, so I try to only think about things long enough to determine whether or not my decision could have ‘dire’ consequences (loss of life, job, marriage, small fortune etc.). If I don’t think that will happen, then I blaze forward, sometimes if only to see what the outcome will be. This has at times put me in a less-than-ideal situation, but it’s always been progress, which is better than not going anywhere. Sure, better opportunities might have come along, but what if they hadn’t?
For 3-8-13
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 
I struggle with analysis paralysis regularly. It’s pretty common among development engineers. We try to anticipate every possible problem and build a solution into our products. That’s fine for things like spaceship designers but for the rest of us, our employers need a product they can sell now, not “when it’s done.” There’s an old saying in this business: “In every project’s life there comes a time when it’s necessary to shoot the engineer.” We don’t let go willingly.
Having been “shot” a few times in my career, I’ve learned a couple of tricks for knowing when to quit fussing over something and make a decision. If the information you have shows one of your choices to be clearly better than the others, go with that one. If you have several choices, 2 or 3 will usually be obviously better than the others. Choose among them. If they all look equally good, then it doesn’t really matter. Flip a coin, throw a dart, roll a die, play eenie meenie miney moe, just use your favorite random number generator to pick one, and move on.
You may find out later that there was a flaw in your choice that you had no way of knowing about. That’s where my other trick comes in: a line from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven:” Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.
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