A Shaky Alliance

Most of us live and work in a world where safety and security is primarily provided by others. Even those of us who fly airplanes, fight fires or work in other so-called high risk industries are surrounded by devices, processes, and procedures that have been developed and refined over decades to keep us safe and secure while we go about working and playing in our day to day lives. The world seems stable, so our situational awareness grows dull, and we lose our respect for things that can bite. We trust that the world will stay tame – as it always has for us up to this point. This is a shaky alliance at best, but one we grow increasingly reliant upon as we gradually lose our edge. When it goes bad, it goes bad quickly, ends badly and usually leaves a humbling epitaph.

For those of us who work and play in lower risk environments, the problem is even worse. We become so far removed from the mental possibility of having to perform at our best – we can’t comprehend that danger lurks nearby. We text as we drive, ignore dark corners of the parking lots, and allow our skills and awareness to atrophy as if tomorrow is guaranteed.

It is not.

Over the past few weeks, I have reviewed a few tragic endings where good men were overwhelmed by conditions they should have been able to handle. Out of respect for their memories, I will not go into further detail here. It is sufficient to say, that they had the training and technology to handle the situations they were put in, but when the world turned on them, they did not respond with their best - or what should have been their best based on their training and experience - and they died ingloriously. They also took others with them.

To put a somewhat finer grained analysis to this line of thinking, I believe many of us have lost the distinction between accuracy (good enough to get by) and precision (as good as I can be). Or perhaps better said, we have lost sight that precision is important in life - or worth the effort. Or maybe, in a world where competition is devalued and every kid in Little League gets a trophy - we never understood the importance or value of staying at the top of our game the first place.

In truth, striving for precision is seldom critical to either safety or success. Good enough is usually good enough. But not always, and the time of reckoning is not of our choosing. The world is not bound by any law to stay stable or safe for us or those we protect. Rogue waves – once thought to be a myth of drunken sailors – exist everywhere in our world. There are times when the alliance will be broken and we will be given one chance to respond with our best judgment and our most refined skills.

On the back side of this challenge – we will be judged.