A Survey of Risk
By Andrew Dendy
In the world of Information Technology, there are generally three ways an entity can deal with risks: mitigation, acceptance, and ownership. To mitigate the risk, you must find a way around it or find a way to lessen its effect. To accept the risk, you move forward with an action and accept the consequences of the risk as they come. It is unclear how it may affect your project. To own the risk, you call out known consequences, acknowledge the negative impacts of them, and you personally take responsibility for anything that happens (less unknown than accepting risk). It is either your claim to fame or your utter downfall.
The three sectors don’t particularly excite me in the context of my profession, but when I think about it in the context of life it seems like interesting theory. Is it possible that we inherently use these methods to approach the risks we take in our lives?
To say I am a risk-taker is just all too flattering. I am reckless. I have done some of the stupidest things that a young man can do as his frontal lobe develops; it often sends a shiver up my spine to reflect on myself gallivanting through poor decision after poor decision. This spirit has not completely gone away, but I have tried to redirect its energy to pose more wholesome results.
I have recently moved to a new city, where I don’t know anyone – leaving the comfort of my college friend group in Alabama who I miss every day. My family is there too, and the now five-and-a-half-hour drive makes visits less frequent. Still in the heat of a pandemic, I’m not meeting new people here as quickly as I would in normal conditions.
I’m unsure of how I am approaching this risk – there are many nuances at play. It’s possible I am mitigating the risk of leaving Alabama, putting myself somewhere that allows me to focus on myself, and improve my mental health. Or did I own the big move? Doesn’t feel that heroic yet, but I am still sure of myself. Will it morph into risk acceptance the longer I live here? There are still unforeseen consequences that lie in wait for me.
It’s all rather ironic, considering now in my job it is an expectation of me to approach risks in a tactical way. I am trained to recognize types of risks and have the foresight to engage them in the appropriate way. There are program-level risks, which have to do with factors outside of my team, such as licensing, funding, or client dependence. Then there are team-level risks, which entails problems that are found within the team (duh). This ranges from a team member not having the skill set to complete a task, or another team member going on maternity leave and affecting the team’s overall bandwidth.
Illustration by Aoife Broad
Life is not this black and white. If someone presents a playbook on risk in the context of life, there is just no way that it could possibly be accurate. All of us are so beautifully different on beautifully different paths that the variance of the risks we encounter is infinite – but I do believe we can learn from each other’s experiences and how to approach the unique risks we encounter as the years go by. Time to seek some wisdom.
In hopes to match my personal-life risk assessment skillset with my IT risk assessment skillset, I called on some of my best friends to learn about some of the risks they have taken, or how they approach risk, so I can brace myself for what might come next for me on the new journey of life I have embarked on.
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HAYDEN - is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences. When I spoke to her, she explained that she doesn’t really take risks. As a calculated person, she explained to me how she approaches risk in a lab setting. Entropy, put simply, is the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. “The more information you have, the more likely you are to fuck up!”, she explains.
The idea is that when you assess all the possible outcomes with every possible path, it multiplies into so many different theories of what could happen that you skew your decision-making ability. This generally results in people choosing the smartest or least impactful path – a mitigation tactic that I use frequently in my job. Hayden’s cautious nature makes her a natural mitigator.
I could learn a lot from this – I actively ignore red flags, which is probably why I have allowed so many women to break my heart in the past few years. She used another analogy for me to chew on: if you don’t cook anything, your kitchen gets messy. If you cook a 6-course meal, your kitchen is a mess, but you have obtained nourishment in a most luxurious way.
Hm, I don’t mean to quote the dark lord, but I think I want to live deliciously. I want a 6-course meal: experience after experience that may come with their dirty dishes, but also the nourishment. I think of the things that feed my soul. Music, running, being politically-minded, being romantic – all of these entail a huge amount of risk.
I respect Hayden’s approach to risk, the mitigation route, and others like her. They are who makes the world go around – which is probably why she is getting a Ph.D. and I barely squeaked out a bachelor’s in business administration.
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BRIT wrecked my car last summer and I didn’t make her pay for it, so she owed me this interview. After she graduated, with not many job opportunities on the table, Brit traveled to Thailand to teach English in a Catholic school for 7 months. If you’re like me, this is one of the craziest sentences you’ve ever read, but I digress.
The small town she moved to was called Lampang. She romanticized the thought of the adventure (blaming this on her Pisces tendencies) with lots of partying, traveling, meeting the love of her life – upon her arrival she quickly realized that none of these things were going to offer themselves in Lampang.
“I was the only white person, in this small ass town with no friends working at a private Catholic school.” She said the other teachers were rude to her, intentionally speaking in their own language in their breakroom so as to ostracize her further than she already felt like she was. “I started to weigh my options - it would be okay if I liked my job and the city sucked, it would be okay if my job sucked but I liked the city.” She quickly decided that her situation was all broadly negative.
Brit admitted to me that she had felt babied her whole life, and in an attempt to break herself of this mold, she decided to quit her job. Her parents were angry at her, she broke her contract with the study-abroad program that she landed the gig with. This was an unprecedented risk to take as a young woman on her own in a foreign country.
“I got on a bus on Christmas day and moved into this motel where a bunch of creepy white dudes were living that had married Thai women,” she infers that this was a circumstance of them using their money to exploit foreign women. “I’m broke, my parents are pissed at me, I’m alone on Christmas day just crying so much.”
But she persevered, accepting the consequences of the risk she took. She found a private tutor job a couple of weeks later for a Korean family, where she met another English-speaking tutor who was teaching the other age group of children in the home.
“Kelly, she’s old, and was living alone in a house ‘cause her husband had passed away.” Brit and Kelly became friends and when Kelly became aware of her motel situation, she immediately told Brit to move in with her. She stayed out the rest of her days here and said it felt like an eternity, but she was comfortable.
In the moment, Brit said she didn’t know if anything that she was experiencing was worth it. Now she thinks it is the sole reason that she was able to grow into an independent person and prove to herself that she could manage her life on her own. Ah, the beauty of risk acceptance. It rewards in powerful ways. “I wouldn’t choose to do it again, but I am glad I did it. I lost a lot of my things, I quit jobs, and it made me realize how good I had it back home,” she says.
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ETHAN was at a crossroads in his life last spring. Graduating from Auburn and accepting a job that he wasn’t necessarily excited about, and having to let go of a romantic interest, he spiraled into a depression as many of us do during such turbulent times.
He had planned a trip to Moab, Utah. “I think in a way I was kind of doing it to impress the girl, she was the outdoorsy-cool-climber-Phish-listening type.” A couple of friends who he wasn’t super close with ended up being his company – the anxiety of driving across the country with two people he didn’t know that well caused a sense of dread, the risk at hand was potentially not having a good time while 1800 miles from home with two acquaintances.
One night, one of the friends had made fun of Ethan for smoking cigarettes. Ethan was intoxicated, and he ended up reacting by tearing this man’s character completely apart. Knowing him very well, I imagine what he said was cunning and absolutely devastating for this poor bloke.
“I was working on my Capstone project to graduate,” (for those that don’t know, this is an absolutely nightmarish collaborative project you must do to graduate from the business school at Auburn University. It is complete cheeks.) “and I was the only person who knew how to use Tableau, but I just couldn’t get anything done and basically was like, ‘Guys I am sorry, but I have to leave,’ and I left the building and just burst into tears.”
In the wake of his episode, who else does he pass but the friend whom he roasted while on the happy juice just nights before. They end up addressing their confrontation, and his friend begins to weep during a deep and beautiful conversation. They decide to go to Utah together.
“Since I wasn’t as close with them, I was kind of able to venture out on my own when we were out there,” he says. “I was able to be in nature and process that I was putting way too much pressure on myself to make things work with this girl.” His physical distance from her and everything else he had left back home while on the trip allowed him to process things in a healthy way.
“I think a lot of things that I thought were cool about her were actually things that I had been avoiding in myself because I associated them with painful memories. I ended up being grateful for our short time together because she helped remind me of things I love about myself and had forgotten about.” Ethan sat looking onto White Sands National Park, listening to American Dream by LCD Soundsystem, experiencing this conversation with his inner self.
Shortly after this, Ethan moved to a city where he didn’t know anyone and started a job he was unsure of – both turned out to be perfect for him. His role at his company is exactly where he belongs and living in Chattanooga is allowing him to continue to take advantage of the outdoors, while he enjoys other more unexpected things about the big move.
Ethan credits this outlook with being able to process his hardships of a transitional phase in nature, and with music, and by being so far from home that it can leave a knot in your stomach (I know the feeling of a cross-country road trip all too well). To me, Ethan took one risk through a path of acceptance and was able to own a larger risk with confidence from his previous experiences. What a strong life approach, he is also so handsome and well-dressed!
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From these conversations, there are a few things that became clear to me. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to approach risk – while in my profession there is, in life there is not. The claims to fame are everywhere around us, the only “utter downfall” is not being able to confront the risks that are presented to us.
Even when things go awry, it seems like our misfortunes are ultimately the breeding ground for positive growth. Whether you make a mess cooking a delicious meal, end up in a motel in Thailand, or cry your eyes out with a new friend, these things seem to be what shapes the soul.
Risk is also necessary. No matter the scale, we cannot achieve anything without confronting a risk and finding a way to deal with it – a requirement of journeying through life in a mindful way. If I am trying to be anything, I am trying to be mindful more and more every day through everything I do. I think all three of these stories are from risk-takers who feel the same – even if they all tackle risk in a different way.
With the wisdom of these friends passed to me, my anxiety of the unknown amidst my new move is not tamed, but I can now imagine the slate of possibilities that will come to me in the future. What is certain, is that I will never ignore an opportunity of risk, I will merely assess how I need to act on it: mitigate, accept, own.
Andrew Dendy is a young professional balancing a work-from-home lifestyle with an active lifestyle. He enjoys running, weight training, playing the drums, the outdoors, and the company of friends.
