Template:Apocalypse maxim

Let us coin a maxim:

“Before an apocalypse becomes an apocalypse, it doesn’t look like an apocalypse.”

Risk-free, twenty-twenty hindsight is by definition not available to those who must make the decisions that lead to it. Only later does the reactor core melt down. Only later does the market crash. Beforehand, no-one knew or — at least until it was too late, even believed — that things would turn out like this. Q.E.D.

Why did people do what they did when it was so obviously stupid looking back at it? Well, As Sidney Dekker puts it in his excellent The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations:

“Forks in the road stand out so clearly to you, looking back. But when inside the tunnel, when looking forward and being pushed ahead by unfolding events, these forks were shrouded in the uncertainty and complexity of many possible options and demands; they were surrounded by time constraints and other pressures.”

Ergo, the decision calculus then was nowhere near as obvious as it appears now, as an object in the rear-view mirror: if it had been, the catastrophe would not have happened.

And it is one thing to have a right to pull your trigger, it is quite another to be prepared to use it. Especially if you don’t know how this all will play out.

After the event, all that remains is is a smoking hulk and twisted wreckage strewn across the landscape and it could not be more obvious that there was only ever one option.

Before it, there were twenty million dollars of annual revenues at stake.

Few individuals will blow up a significant business relationship without diffusing responsibility through some kind of institutional escalation. But that takes time. And escalations are fraught: to recommend affronting a platinum client is to invite a shellacking from someone a long way further up the tree than you.

Now: if these are the options, and our valiant risk manager doesn’t yet have that twenty-twenty hindsight of what might come about tomorrow, is it any wonder she’ll be tempted to do nothing?

Before an apocalypse becomes an apocalypse, it doesn’t look like an apocalypse.