Ventures, Decision Making, and the Inevitable Consequences

40 dead and $3 billion dollars in losses are more egregious consequences than we hope or expect to ever incur from a decision we have made. But as I stared up and the flakes falling from the sky late at night January 23rd I doubt they ever thought so either.

(Storm Jonas that recently struck the eastern United States, a record breaking blizzard depositing a rough average of 20 inches of snow in 11 states, the storm while causing excess damages and taking 40 lives left 250,00 people without power.)

The sight of those wistful flakes drifting into cotton banks bore no malintent, they struck me as quite beautiful, as if they were tucking the landscape into bed.

The implications and impact of our decisions, our life’s work, our words, and dreams is hard to grasp, hard to quantify. Some inspiration in this area of thought struck me as I looked at those flakes; It is as hard for those flakes to understand the consequences of their falling as it is for us to understand what may come into being or happen to others because of what we do.

I group how people do anything into four categories: knowledge, decision, execution, and reflection. The basic processes in any action fall into these categories, knowledge of the scenario, decision based on that knowledge, execution of that decision, and reflection on the result. As you may have noticed if logic were to reign supreme in this process the final step would be reflection on the execution as that is the predecessor to reflection but it is not, the result is the one piece of the puzzle that is a mystery in any system. The result cannot be carefully concocted no matter how deliberate the execution. Understanding this mystery a little more and more with each completion of the cycle is how we modify and hope to achieve a more predictable result in the next cycle.

The thoughts I hope to collect here are focused on decision making and the two components of decision making: motivation and consequences. Note that these consequences have not yet made themselves known, this is simply our best guess at what those consequences may be.

I’ll narrow that down to just a deliberation on how people make negatory decisions, there will be a lapse in one or the other of motivation or consequences. we will not do something because we either have no desire to, or we will not do something because we have determined the outcome to be negative.

Let’s take a scenario of stealing a piece of candy from the convenience store: We have two options we either desire the candy or we do not, and we either get caught stealing or we do not. Assuming no desire we would not take the candy so we would neither have candy nor get caught and this is a moot point, assuming we have desire we would then weigh is the candy worth the risk of getting caught i.e. the consequences

If we have no desire for candy we make a negatory decision and we do not take it, if however we have desire and we have determined the costs to outweigh the benefits we still make a negatory decision, only when we have both desire and positive determination will we take the candy.

This example is rather uninteresting as the consequences of theft are well understood as are the benefits of candy. The basic components of making a decision are outlined and will still be quite relevant for the next example.

For the next section I will narrow this down even further and just focus on the consequences component of decision making.

Let’s take a scenario where we are starting a non-lethal weapons research and development company with many government and private contracts lined up for our technologies, we have looked carefully through and researched the recent emphasis on police brutality and concluded a simple solution to accidental or purposeful murder by officers would be to remove their lethal weapons and provide them with infinitely more effective non lethal solutions over their current non lethal solutions i.e. batons and tasers. Our first big hurdle in doing this is do we want to do this, sure the idea seems sound and well researched we have the knowledge we need to make a decision, but do we want to start this company. Because no provides us no further insight lets go with yes. Congratulations we are now the proud founders of a progressive tech company tackling social issues.

Now onto the interesting part the consequences, we can imagine thousands of possibilities, so the real answer is we have no fucking clue what the consequences are.

The company could be a great success and save thousands of lives over its lifetime, or there could be an unfortunate components sourcing issue with a faulty component that releases a lethal dosage of a very painful and environmentally hazardous material endangering more lives than the initial problem encompassed.

This struck me poignantly while looking at the snowfall before the impact numbers were calculated and released, I knew people would die not how many but some would, wether the heat would fail in their homes and they get hypothermia, wether they crash on an icy road, or maybe something yet more unprecedented as a gas leak caused by a snow clog that started to fill a small family home of snowed in college students with noxious fumes as what nearly happened at my own home.

But I also looked back on the Snowmageddon of 2010 on the east coast United States in February and how maternity wards were filled to record capacity nine months later from the inevitable romance only being snowed in together can instill. Those numbers aren’t out yet but I would guess nine months from there will be more than 40 more births than average in those 11 states combined so could this be viewed as a net positive event for number of human lives on this planet.

Impossible to say, and there in lies the point, January 23rd the snow was falling, the consequences were set in motion, the snow itself a stubborn act of nature with no awareness of what was to happen when the last flake had fallen. This is us, just as the last line is written and our pencil hits the table, when we walk off the field, when we say our vows on our wedding day, when we sign the dotted line with our new business partner, when we make our first sale, when we walk into out new office. The only thing that matters is the answer to the question; “Do I have the desire to do it?”