Acceptable Risk - A Bike Trick Gone Bad

We look at another childhood error and its somewhat humorous result as an example of how to plan for acceptable risk.  We often think of that as something where you are willing to pay the price.  However, we also need to examine mitigating the consequences to where they are acceptable.  It is sort of like placing a monetary bet.  There is a limit we can lose, but maybe a side bet will help reduce the overall loss. 

Preventive action is an excellent way to adjust acceptable risk.  We see examples of this in beta testing and limited releases in the business world.  Yes, the product may fail. But, on the other hand, we have less invested and less potential for negative backlash.  That allows us to push out a new product and consider it an acceptable risk rather than delay release or continue to redesign or refine it. 

Momentum is so often an underlying item of concern in our discussions.  This story is no different.  Sometimes the best way to approach a novel idea is incremental.  That allows us to verify our assumptions without building as much momentum and even limiting potential loss or harm.  However, sometimes we have to reach certain minimums of progress or speed to provide a proper test of our idea.  We can't attempt to jump over a portion of a gap.  Likewise, testing the result of an impact is useless if the impact is so slow as to be unnoticeable. Nevertheless, we can take incremental steps towards our solution.  They need to be adequately sized to be effective.

If you like this season, you will probably like Scott Adams' book, "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life."