Fear of the new
We don’t like things that are new or unusual. It is part of our nature. When we were cavemen it paid to be risk averse. New things could bite us, so we preferred what we knew. The status quo made us feel safe.
That is why we invest in risk and control departments. It is their job to make sure that nothing unforeseen pokes its head above the parapet. It is the management response to the caveman instinct.
Here is a question…
In 2016 how many people were killed by:
- Diarrhoea
- Guns in the USA
- Heart Attacks
- Natural Disasters
- Road Injuries
- Terrorism
Which cause of death was the most deadly?
What can you remember about 2016?
2016 was a dreadful year. The “Islamic State” was on the rise and there were horrific attacks at Brussels airport, and on Bastille day in Nice.
In 2016 three major earthquakes shocked the world, killing people in Central Italy, Ecuador and Indonesia. Hurricane Matthew killed 100’s in Haiti. On a positive note the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa finally died out.
In 2016 gun deaths in the US rose following a 15-year period of relative stasis with 477 mass shootings. In one single incident a security guard opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando Florida, killing 49 and injuring 53 others.
The real picture
In 2016 the death tolls from those 6 causes of death looked something like this:
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Heart Attacks – nine and a half million deaths- Road Injuries – one and a half million deaths
- Diarrhoea – one and a third million deaths
And they were just the causes I picked out. 1.2 million people died of tuberculosis, 2.9 million died of respiratory diseases and 5.7 million died from strokes.
Then there was the stuff that you can’t really see on the graph
- Global terrorism – thirteen thousand deaths
- Natural disasters (all of them fire, flood and pestilence) – ten thousand deaths
- People shot in the US – ten thousand deaths.
These three causes of death didn’t really register. Their significance was blown up out of all proportion by the media.
In the UK in 2016 there were somewhere between 2 and 9 deaths caused by terrorists (depending on who you count as a terrorist). In our green and pleasant land newsagents have killed thousands of times more people than al-Qaeda ever managed. Cigarettes and alcohol are deadly.
It is the normal stuff that will get you
This isn’t a blog post about terrorism and racial harmony (though the French outcry about the burkini seems a little unnecessary).
This post is about perspective.
There is a huge amount of media hype and noise about issues that are novel and new. Yet precisely because they are novel and new they are largely irrelevant. Stories about children dying from diarrhoea, or middle-aged men having heart attacks don’t sell newspapers. The real killers pass by unnoticed. We see them every day, and they just blend into the background.
Worry about the unremarkable
The same is true in business. The biggest problems — money wasters, customer dissatisfies or general organisational screw-ups — are the mundane everyday occurrences, not the management noise. Worry less about the risks and more about the common or garden issues. They are the real killers.
You have precious few resources; focus on the things that matter, not the current panic.
Take it from me, a burkini never hurt anyone.
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