Bertie - specialist kayak coaching - Bertie's blog: Confidence & Probability

Confidence & Probability

I'm currently having to think a lot about probability, severity and confidence (that you can address the severity) in my day-job, and it's equally applicable to managing risks in all these crazy antics that we get up to these days.

The problem is, whilst people seem to understand probability, and maybe severity, confidence is rarely understood or addressed properly.

Basic egg sucking..
An adverse event (or risk event) has a probability of occurance. That's obvious. In kayaking, I could get pinned on a rock but based on the number of rocks I successfully pass when kayaking the probability is fairly low.

Intermediate egg sucking..
However, once I'm pinned (i.e. the risk event has occured) this could go any number of different ways ranging from I free myself quickly without leaving the boat (most expected outcome), I escape my boat onto the rock (unexpected outcome), or I flip, get pinned with my head down in the water and drown (catastrophic outcome) - with many combinations between. If I was to look at it as a graph of probability versus severity it would probably look something like this..

In other words, there's a small probability I'll escape with no impact to me (i.e. I wash off, it doesn't affect my line or anything)

Most likely it'll impact me to some degree but it won't be too seriously.

But, there's also a small probability that it will have a serious impact to me. As the seriousness grows, the probability diminishes still further - but it could still happen.

(inspiring) Confidence..
Too often when faced with extremely small probability of serious impact from risk, I hear people say "It won't happen to me". Esentially, they're choosing to ignore that a given event could potentially have a serious consequence - they're burying their head in the proverbial sand

Confidence is your ability to handle any given scenario. How bad does a pinning have to be before you can't handle the outcome :

.. could you free someone stable but pinned on a rock in the middle of a river .
..supposing they were stood on the rock - could you get them off it and free the kayak,
..what if they were head-down pinned in the middle of the river - could you free them and give appropriate first aid, what if you couldn't free them - could you handle the press attention, the inevitable litigation, what about meeting their parents??

When talking about risk people often refer to their appetite for risk, which defines the level of risk they'll undertake. But if they are already buring their head to the potential for an extreme event to occur is their view on risk appetite really up to much.

Maybe we should change our approach to assessing what risks to undertake to factor in our confidence to deal with extreme scenarios.

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