Decision-making reigns supreme in sports and life. Whether deciding to throw a certain pitch or quitting your job, all decisions have risks and consequences.
After playing baseball in college, I started to try out more non-traditional sports (think rock climbing, parkour, flipping). Something I like to do when learning something new is to watch people who are the best in the world at it. I watch not only to study their movement but also, and more important, to study their thought process. I am fascinated by the way athletes learn and practice but have found it difficult to find training footage of professional athletes. However, this is why I am so drawn to a sport like parkour, and more specifically, freerunning; the entire sport is essentially practice.
Every top clip in parkour and freerunning is a short segment of an athlete’s training. It is fascinating to see how their practice is their “competition”. For example, parkour awards are given to the individual who is able to capture the best “training” trick on camera. This dynamic produces awesome clips to watch while also offering unfiltered insight into these athletes’ thought processes.
In watching videos of top freerunning athletes, I often marvel at their skills but am even more awed by their relationship with risk. The simple fact that freerunners exist vexes me. Why would so many people do it if so many others say the risk and danger is not worth it? Are they adrenaline junkies? Do they have a death wish? I think it is more complex and nuanced than you would think.
For a freerunner, it’s all about risk and consequence. What sticks out to me when watching top freerunners is how they separate risk and consequence when it comes to performing a movement. When faced with something that looks dangerous or has a high chance of failure, most people will say it is too risky; they conflate risk and consequence. But not freerunners. Freerunners rarely talk about risk in the equation, because it is implied. They are more concerned about the consequence. If you asked an average person to do a flip and land on a rail, they would likely question your sanity. But, if you asked a freerunner, they would probably ask how high off the ground the rail is, what is the consequence of failing, and is it a flip they can perform. Consequence of failure plays a huge part in their decision. The risk of failing the actual movement is pretty consistent regardless of the environment; the flip, in isolation, can be performed successfully x% of the time. So, this is where consequence comes in; if the consequence is low enough, the freerunner may decide to do the trick.
This dynamic is elegantly evidenced by top freerunner, Dominick DiTomasso, known as Dom Tomato. In the clip below, Dom talks about practicing a front flip to a rail with low consequence (volume up to hear his thought process):
He found a rail extremely low to the ground where if he missed the landing, the consequence of injury is low. He practices on this rail to train his skill. The training of the skill results in the risk of failure decreasing because he has now patterned the movement. Next, in the clip below, he takes that exact same (now less risky) front flip to a rail and increases the consequence by doing it from height:
What develops from this observation is a relationship - an equation of sorts. Risk and consequence serving as inputs into a mental calculation to determine if a movement is safe or worthwhile to perform. It goes like this: if the product of the risk and consequence is below a certain threshold, perform the movement; if it is not, don’t do it.
In thinking about this threshold, the only way to lower the output number is to change either the risk or the consequence. And, as Dom Tomato knows, it is much easier to tinker with the consequence than with the risk. Lowering risk takes the time and effort of practice to master a movement; lowering consequence might only take a change of scenery.
The relationship starts to sound familiar. A logic professor or economist will likely tell you it resembles expected utility theory: Probability x Utility = Expected Utility. Probability is the chance of some outcome happening, utility is the payoff (or downside) of the outcome, and expected utility is the payoff (or downside) you would expect from any randomly performed trial. Substitute risk for probability and consequence for utility and you get the freerunner’s corollary: Risk x Consequence = Expected Downside (chance of injury) [using the formula in a negative sense here due to our exploration of limiting injury/harmful failure, but can be as easily applied in a positive context]. And since growth occurs just beyond your comfort zone (see Csikszentmihalyi, Ericsson), growth and fulfillment therefore become proportional to the amount of expected downside you are able to safely take on in performing an action.
It’s also important to consider thresholds and how they tie into the decision-making process.
Take, for example, walking. Something most people do every day. When was the last time you fell while walking? Probably ages ago. The risk of you falling while walking is extremely low. Now why do people get terrified if they are asked to walk at height, say on the edge of the Grand Canyon? It’s certainly not the risk; it’s the same exact action of walking. It is the consequence of falling that puts you over the edge (hopefully, only a metaphorical one).
To put this in terms of our equation, the product of the risk and consequence is too high; it has passed one’s threshold. With this, the threshold can be seen as a decision-making tool; one that I think is part conscious, part unconscious. I think a given person has a preset internal threshold that creates a mental block; the body knows how much risk and consequence it can take on while still staying safe. This could be why when you try to do something scary that you aren’t prepared for (i.e. do a backflip) your body won’t let you do it. However, you can overcome that mental block one of two ways. The first deals with the conscious part of the threshold and is inherently more dangerous. You can consciously try to override your body’s protective threshold and take on more risk/consequence than your body would normally allow. However, this is not a long term strategy because your body knows well its own limit of safety and anything exceeding that will significantly increase the probability of injury. Once you repeatedly get hurt, you will likely run into another mental block that will be harder to override. Here is an example of me not heeding this advice on my first ever backflip attempt (both risk and consequence were too high and I later had to try a different learning strategy, see next point):
The second way is more sustainable: either decrease the risk or the consequence so that the product of the two will remain under your threshold and your mental block can be overcome. As mentioned, consequence is easier to adjust than risk in the short term and this dynamic is the basis for progression at a task/movement. Here is an example of me using this gradual consequence progression as I learned to properly backflip (slowly increase consequence → hone the skill → decrease the risk):
So, what does this mean for the rest of us mere mortals? How can we apply these concepts in business and in life? All of this can be boiled down into a few simple takeaways to help identify ways to overcome hesitation and achieve your goals in whatever your chosen path:
1. Realize that if your body/mind is giving you serious hesitation, then the risk, consequence, or both are too high.
2. In the short term, lower the consequence to get past the hesitation. In the long term, train your skills to lower the risk.
3. Understand the difference between risk and consequence so that you can make more well-informed decisions.
To put this into an easy life example, if you are unhappy in your job but are hesitating to leave due to financial reasons, realize that although the risk of failure in finding a new job is the same, you can alter the consequence of that failure (via tutoring for extra money, etc) to lower your hesitation below your threshold and ease into the transition.
Let me leave you with a quote by one of the world’s finest at dealing with risk and consequence, free solo climber Alex Honnold: “It helps to know the difference between risk and consequence. [In free soloing] risk is low, but consequence is very high. The key is to take something that seems difficult and dangerous and make it feel safe.”
When making certain decisions, the risk vs. consequence equation can be a helpful lens. Email me your thoughts/criticisms (aj@ajferrara.org).