Decision Quality Blog

As much as we might like to, we can’t know everything. What we don’t or can’t know is called uncertainty. How we feel about it can be described many ways, but the word for the day is “risk.” The cover article in the December 4, 2006 Time magazine entitle “Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn’t… …And Ignore The Things We Should” does a nice job of exploring the topic.

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. “We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million,” says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. “Now it’s parts per billion.”

At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don’t use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas–and when they’re demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it’s something we’ll never do exceptionally well, it’s almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

So basically, as the title says, we wind up worrying about all the wrong things for reasons that range from genetics, a poor understanding of probabilities, possibilities, and statistics, and dread.

For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you’re eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That’s not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. “We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash,” says . “That’s the dread factor.” In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.

Rather than quote the entire article, let me encourage you to give it a look. It won’t tell you what to do, but you’ll find it illuminating.

Talking about, investigating, and coming to grips with uncertainty is a big part of decision making, particularly what we all think about as “big decisions.” We’ll have more to say on the topic as we open up our application to the public, but in the meantime, if you’ve got a decision to make, think about asking yourself this question . . .

If a genie popped out of a bottle and promised to answer one and only one question about the decision you want to make, what question would you want answered?

Somewhere in there is the uncertainty or risk you are most concerned about. In some cases you may be able to diminish that risk through research or through some risk mitigation strategy. If not, at least you’ll have put your eye on the the thing that you should really worry about so that you might let go of the rest.