Your Survival Depends on It - But You Are Probably Ignoring It
Risk judgment and decision-making (RJDM)—arguably the most consequential human competency—is among the least cultivated.
When did you last ask yourself: “What is more likely to harm or kill me or my partner in the next six to twelve months?” Or start a conversation with your kids by saying: “Your instincts can be useful, but here’s when to trust your gut and when to ignore it…”
From the COVID-19 pandemic to the debate on crime in US cities to the purported existential risks posed by AI, we see increasing evidence of the inaptness of our risk judgment and decision-making quality.
Our risk judgment is, at its core, a forecasting exercise. One that we carry out most of the time as a background, subconscious effort involving memories, feelings, and base rates.
Most of us have a complicated and sometimes unhealthy relationship with the idea of personal risk. Similar to concepts like freedom, faith, or justice, risk is often a value-laden concept, as easily invoked and traded daily as it is shrouded in ambiguity and illusory confidence. This complexity often leads to perplexity, confusion, shame, anger, and fear when discussing threats, hazards, disease, or death.
Unlike most culture-bound, identity-forming, or motivated opinions, our safe-esteem determines our survival odds. Yet, it remains one of the most overlooked aspects of our decision-making processes.
Dangerous Assumptions
The journey to higher safe-esteem begins with recognizing the many problems with our risk awareness and competency assumptions, as well as the limitations of professional risk management guidelines and best practices. It also requires becoming increasingly aware of our thinking in this domain - what psychologists call metacognition.
Our risk judgment and decision-making (RJDM) competencies are popularly thought to be either (evolutionarily) inherited, honed by life experiences, or developed as a byproduct of other professional training and education (e.g., engineering, finance, or policing).
While these assumptions form the basis of how most of us navigate life, they often lead to very poor, if not deadly, decisions. Our instincts are frequently biased and inadequate for the modern risk landscape, and our experience is a poor and often deceiving proxy for statistical base rates. Even more counterintuitive is the realization that risk-centric professions like law enforcement, protective security, or corporate risk management do not inherently translate to RJDM competency.
I have spent the last 35 years in risk-centric professions, from managing threats and hazards in a protective security capacity to serving as a strategic advisor and enterprise risk intelligence expert. The most surprising insight of my career has been the lack of RJDM training or competency—even across roles and professions where it is most needed.
Recently, my work has largely centered on how to leverage technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to elevate the quality of human risk awareness and decision quality. Just as I have for the past three decades, I speak weekly with professionals on both the leadership and consulting sides of the Fortune 500 risk mitigation industry. To ruffle some feathers, I must reveal that most corporate security, protection, and intelligence professionals know as much about risk as welders know about structural engineering or impact windows installers know about climatology. RJDM education is (sadly) neither required nor evaluated in professional development curricula or associated with employment, career, or commercial success.
Despite the plethora of risk management best practices, procedures, and decision support tools and frameworks I have studied and deployed over the years, most guidelines and protocols lose their value when applied beyond their original professional, functional, or cultural contexts. Many don’t even share a basic definition of risk or agree on whether it should be limited to adverse outcomes.
…most corporate security, protection, and intelligence professionals know as much about risk as welders know about structural engineering or impact windows installers know about climatology.
The Cost of Low Safe-Esteem
The stakes are high. Poor RJDM can lead to disastrous outcomes, both on a personal and societal level. Tens of millions of annual global deaths are considered preventable. For instance, road and workplace accidents, or non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and chronic lung disease—all are often linked to preventable risk factors and behaviors like tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and harmful use of alcohol.
Similarly, debates around crime in US cities often highlight our collective struggle with risk perception. Media coverage, focusing on sensational but rare events, skews public perception, making people believe they are in more danger than they statistically are. This "availability heuristic" – where vivid, easily recalled events distort our understanding of reality – exacerbates fear and leads to policy decisions driven more by public emotion than by data.
The Risk Competency Tetrad: A Recipe for High Safe-Esteem
So, what constitutes RJDM competency? And how can we increase our fitness to survive in a post-industrial landscape and make smarter decisions?
The Risk Competency Tetrad offers a comprehensive framework to enhance our RJDM skills. It consists of four interconnected components: Measurement, Communication, Judgment and Decision Making (JDM), and Domain Expertise. Developing and integrating these competencies can improve our ability to navigate the modern risk landscape.
Let’s dive a little deeper:
Measurement
Key Question: How do you quantify and forecast risk?
Why it Matters: Once you lift the mental fog and ambiguity of useless risk language and ratings (e.g., 'We have a medium risk of terrorism.'), risk judgment reveals itself as a forecasting exercise with two essential dimensions: likelihood (0 chance to 100%) and impact severity. These measurements aim to reduce uncertainty about future events, with disambiguation—precisely defining what risk we're assessing—serving as both a critical premise and benefit.
What It Is: Risk measurement is fundamentally an exercise in prediction, demanding mastery across multiple domains. At its foundation lies the basic understanding of measurement scales, methods, and tools, alongside their inherent limitations. But effective risk quantification extends beyond traditional statistical approaches, encompassing the full spectrum of forecasting methodologies—from expert elicitation and prediction markets to machine learning algorithms.
This expanded toolkit requires deep knowledge of data sources and their limitations, paired with an understanding of both human and computational forecasting techniques. On the human side, we draw from practices like judgment calibration, crowdsourced predictions, and structured expert elicitation. These complement more technical approaches, from classical statistical methods like confidence intervals and probability distributions to advanced machine learning models that can process vast datasets for risk patterns.
The key is recognizing that different risks demand different measurement approaches. While some domains benefit from Bayesian updating and probabilistic modeling, others might be better served by prediction markets or carefully calibrated expert judgment. Success lies in matching the right measurement tool to the specific risk context while maintaining rigorous standards for accuracy and validation.
Communication
Key Question: How is risk information disseminated?
Why it Matters: The way we communicate risk significantly affects how it is perceived and acted upon. Effective communication can bridge the gap between complex data and actionable insights, ensuring that risk information is understood and utilized appropriately.
What It Is: The art and science of conveying risk information involves principles from information theory, data visualization, and UI/UX design. It also requires an understanding of psychological and social factors influencing risk perception, literacy, numeracy, and cultural values. Effective risk communication leverages these principles to create clear, compelling, and actionable materials that resonate with the intended audience.
Judgment and Decision Making (JDM)
Key Question: How are cognitive biases and heuristics shaping RJDM?
Why it Matters: Risk perception is inherently subjective because it involves personal judgments about the characteristics and severity of a risk. These judgments are influenced by personal experiences, demographics, education, numeracy, and emotions.
What It Is: JDM is the interdisciplinary study of how people make judgments and decisions under various conditions. It draws from research in neuroscience, psychology, economics, and other social sciences. Key concepts include heuristics (mental shortcuts), biases (systematic errors in thinking), and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Understanding these factors can help us recognize and mitigate the biases that affect our risk judgments.
Domain Expertise
Key Question: What specialized knowledge is needed to improve risk estimates?
Why it Matters: Deep understanding of a specific field or area, including its unique challenges, causal relationships, and driving forces, is crucial for applying the principles of measurement, communication, and JDM effectively in real-world risk decision-making.
What It Is: Domain expertise provides the context and nuances necessary for effective risk management. Even the most advanced techniques can fall short without a solid grasp of the specific factors influencing the phenomena in question. Integrating measurement expertise with domain-specific knowledge and insights from the cognitive and behavioral sciences ensures a comprehensive approach to risk assessment.
Now What?
Is the Tetrad framework as simple and appealing as a "Three Steps to Ensure Your Survival" checklist? Probably not. But then again, this is one of the more complex and important competencies of our lives. It extends beyond managing risk to reducing and navigating the uncertainties that define our world and shape our future. Such a critical area deserves deep and lifelong learning.
If this seems overwhelming or abstract, hang in there. We will continue to unpack insights and strategies to cultivate these competencies and enhance our safe-esteem in this space. Together, we'll explore practical steps to integrate the Risk Competency Tetrad into our daily lives, making us better equipped to handle whatever challenges come our way.
Embrace the journey towards higher safe-esteem, and remember that building these skills is a continuous process. By committing to this path, you empower yourself to make better, more informed decisions, ultimately leading to a safer and more confident life. Stay tuned, and let's navigate this journey together.
Risk is such an odd topic where it's more about the psychology of the individuals / groups than the event in question.