Why Risk Is Important

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It's not so dangerous if you know what you're doing: climbers Steve Stenson and Jeff Hollenbaugh leave their shelter on the northwest ridge of K7W in Karakoram, Pakistan. Marko Prezelj, http://mark.amebis.si/

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The rope attached to the climber's waist is clipped to the anchor, from which it runs to another person who is anchored below, paying out rope—but also positioned to catch the climber with the rope, should a fall occur. Properly placed, the ice screw will hold the load, with the ones below it as backup.

Fitness is critical. It doesn't matter how good my training is or how good my tools are: If I am halfway up a climb and run out of strength, I am a liability both to myself and my partner. The middle of a route is not the time or place to suddenly realize that it might have been a good idea to do some jogging, pull-ups, or other conditioning before setting out. If people want unnecessarily to put their lives at risk, I guess that is their prerogative. But they have no right to jeopardize that of their partner in the process.

The Element of Trust

This last point relates to the fact that the whole exercise is based on trust; trust in our training, our assessment of the situation, our tools, fitness, and—especially—our partner. You wouldn't consent to being driven on the freeway by someone you didn't trust, or who was impaired in one way or another. Nor would any reasonable person put their life in the hands of such a person in the mountains. Your partner is someone you trust with your life. Perhaps because of that, a partner is also the kind of person who makes the experience doubly enjoyable, being shared.

If all four of these factors are well considered and adequately addressed, the recreational ice climber can undertake routes with a margin of risk that is comparable to a typical urban bicycle commuter. If any or all of them is not adequately addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic.

The lessons for business are simple: the four considerations employed by the ice climber are exactly the same as those used by the serial entrepreneur or the effective business person. Of course it could be argued that the rich scope of business constitutes a much more amorphous challenge than a frozen waterfall. But that makes it all the more rash to proceed without carefully considering the following:

Training: What, in fact are the skills that would best equip me to engage this problem? Are they evident in my team? If so, how do I hone them? If not, how do I bring them onboard?

Tools: What tools are relevant to the problem? What are the potentially useful processes, technologies or other instruments that might give me purchase and protection throughout the exercise?

Fitness: How does one prepare? How rusty are my skills? What would constitute a warm-up exercise, or a "preliminary heat" that would let me find out if I were ready for the game?

Partners: No matter how good you and your team are, in most significant cases you will need partners. Do you have the right ones? My approach in this is simple: Get the best. If you can't, you might want to question the wisdom of proceeding. After all, if they aren't working for you, they may be working for someone on the other side of the table.

These basic points provide a skeleton on which you have the opportunity to flesh out your creativity. The more innovation and insight that you bring to determining the answers pertaining to each of these four points, and the more effectively you execute on the answers, the lower the risk of your endeavor and the higher the probability of success.

Are there any guarantees? Few. Yet if you fail, which you might, at least there is a higher probability that you will live to try again. But remember, business—like life—never was about certainty (as long as we rule out the proverbial death and taxes).

Finally, what struck me most about the question from Roger's student—a student in an MBA program at Rotman—was the implicit assumption that risk was the domain of the entrepreneur, not him. If there is a single message in all of this, it is this: The most dangerous way of all to play it is so-called safe. Safe leads to atrophy and certain death—of spirit, culture, and enterprise. There is not a single institution of merit or worthy of respect in our society that was not created out of risk. Risk is not only not to be avoided, it is to be embraced—for survival.

Anyone for ice climbing?

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.