Following up on this post.

I was discussing this post with someone who was giving me feedback, and their comment was, “well yeah nothing happened, but that’s because the consequences weren’t big enough. What if the driver had been seriously injured?”

So I thought about that while I was writing the post, as in, what would happen if the driver was seriously injured or even killed. And I decided at the time to not write about it because I didn’t want the post to be too morbid. But after that feedback I decided, no, let’s go ahead and be morbid.

So what happens if the realized risk is actually much, much worse than the minor inconvenience? What if the consequence turns into millions in lost revenue? Fines from regulators? Lawsuits? Charges and jail time? Does that change things?

I mean first of all, yes the outcome is obviously different. A direct finger point from some organization with more power (regulators, legal municipalities, etc) will result in the changed behavior. The drivers will start wearing seatbelts again, so there’s a moral victory there I suppose.

But then what? Does the company actually change its behavior? What I predict is, if this is a smaller business, then they either have to make dramatic changes, or potentially just go out of business. But a really, really large corporation? Some executive leadership might be shown the door, but history has shown that ultimately these “too large to fail” industries and companies don’t really undergo any sort of dramatic culture shift. It is still just business as usual.

This can put you, as a business leader, in a difficult place. The primary mitigation to this is to continue to look at this through a business-oriented risk management lens. And by “business oriented” I really mean financial. You can try to take the “moral high ground”, but instead frame your arguments as numbers.

Using traditional Risk Management verbiage:

IF: One of our drivers gets into a minor accident,

THEN: We may have to pay fines and legal settlements.

IF: One of our drivers gets into a major accident,

THEN: Our company may be fined millions, and some of us may got to jail.

A quick web search gave me this fact; “The odds of being in a car accident are approximately 1 in 366 for every 1,000 miles driven. This means that for every 366,000 miles driven, there is a statistical expectation of one accident.” Which means you can now calculate the actual probability of the risk being realized, and its probably way higher than anyone realizes.

Look, I’m not trying to argue that you use financials to justify bad behavior. Quite the opposite: I’m trying to give you tools to back up your assertion to do the right thing. Because ultimately the negative outcomes of some of these decisions go beyond cost, especially when it impacts people’s lives in significant ways.