Managing the unmanageable
Prime Future 303: Strategy, capital, and innovation in animal protein
Anytime a Boomer talks about life during the Cold War, when schools regularly conducted ‘duck and cover’ drills by having students get under their desks to prepare for a seemingly inevitable nuclear attack, I am overwhelmed by the obvious futility of it. In what world does a piece of plywood protect a kid against the effects of a mile-high mushroom cloud of radiation?
But we Millennials had our own equivalent of regularly held, equally futile safety drills: Stop, Drop, and Roll. Imagine a couple hundred 8-year-olds in a gymnasium being told that if they ever catch on fire, just stop, drop, and roll. Then those couple hundred 8-year-olds were told to drop to the ground and roll like a bunch of taquitos in the fryer to make sure they were prepared when this skill was needed in the real world.
Imagine our collective shock upon finding out as adults, that our mad stop-drop-and-roll skills are not at all useful.
In both instances, the futility is striking because either the risk management action is ineffectual (duck and cover) or because a low-risk risk is being treated as high risk (stop, drop, and roll).
These examples speak to human nature, that taking action makes us feel empowered, even when we have minimal to no control over a risk.
They are attempts to manage the unmanageable risks.
Which brings us to the world of commodity production and processing, where managing risk is literally the name of the game.
Today, let’s talk about why an emerging risk assessment tool disguised as a cultural phenomenon might hold the keys to the kingdom for managing unmanageable risks in agriculture.