Shane: General McChrystal, welcome to the show. Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal: Well, Shane, call me Stan, please. Thanks for having me. Shane: I appreciate you coming on. Let’s start with, what is risk? Stan: Well, it’s interesting. I used to think of risk as something bad that could happen and, typically, the intersection of probability and consequence. So what’s the chances that something occurs and, if it does, how bad will that be? That sort of becomes a risk and you buy insurance or you try to dodge it and whatnot. Now I think of it a little differently. Now I think of it as a mathematical equation, and this is the extent of my math expertise. But if you think of it as threats times vulnerabilities equals risk, then you suddenly realize that threats are things that are out there that are inevitably coming our way, in most cases, and then our vulnerability to them. So if we can drive threats down low or to zero in a perfect world, which we usually can’t, then we’d have no risk. But if we can’t control the threats that are out there, which we usually cannot, then we’ve got to focus on our vulnerability to them. We have some agency over that, not perfect, but we can do something about that. That can decrease our risk. So I think of risk as the result there and what we’re trying to have some level of control over. Shane: Is it fair to say that threats are effectively uncontrollable and our vulnerability to them is controllable or more controllable? Stan: I think it is. There were people who would argue that if we are really good at predicting threats, we could dodge them or some threats you can reach out and do something about. But I would say, practically speaking, you’re right. We’re really not very good at seeing where all the threats are coming from, particularly in a complex environment. Also, we’re not very good at predicting when they will come. So I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to think you’re going to swat away every threat, but you can do a lot about your vulnerabilities. Shane: Did you come to this idea through the immune system, or was that just a way to explain this? How did you use that? Stan: Well, we came to the idea of risk first with this gap between what I’d studied about the theory of risk and what people had tried to teach me in my career… Become a Farnam Street Member to access the full transcript.
The Knowledge Project Podcast Transcripts