The Cost of Inaction

Risk aversion can be a crippling barrier to extraordinary experiences, innovation, or growth. 

You’ve heard these mantras many times before:  What’s on your bucket list? Dance like nobody is watching. Do something that scares you. Life’s a journey so enjoy the ride.  Think outside the box.  Clearly this is something we value in our culture.  And yet, for many people, risk aversion can be a crippling barrier to extraordinary experiences, innovation, or growth. 

Whether at work, business, or in your personal life, you are in a constant state of risk-benefit analysis.  Most of those assessments take place in milliseconds or beneath your consciousness. But some business choices or life decisions demand a more structured, multi-faceted determination of investment and intended outcomes.  For people in business, those decisions typically take the form, “What is my likelihood of success and what is my estimated return if I invest a certain amount?”  Unfortunately, many of those people actually also have a formidable inner voice that is simultaneously saying, “How much am I willing to lose if this idea doesn’t work?”  Inasmuch as many want to believe they are visionary and future-thinking, their decisions are driven by an underlying sentiment of “We can’t lose what we don’t invest.” 

But is that necessarily true?  Can you still lose when you don’t invest?  Ultimately, what is the cost and risk of inaction?  With competitors constantly innovating, improving, and entering unexplored areas, the cost of falling behind or losing your ability to differentiate can be your entire business.  For many, the fear of making a mistake is far greater than the willingness to accept stagnation.  Some businesses seem to pride themselves on “doing more with less” when in fact, they are actually doing “less with less.”

But there is an alternative.

Now, those of you who are familiar with me and my work know that I am driven by possibility and the unknown while being simultaneously obsessed with methodical planning to eliminate unnecessary risks.   I believe in striving toward limitless potential personally and for the businesses I support – turning the seemingly impossible into the absolutely attainable, but not without a systematic dissection and contingency plan for the risks along the way.  By minimizing or gaining full control of the variables in a process, and fully supporting (rather than avoiding) the riskiest points in that process, the ultimate outcome is more predictable.  It is unfortunate when businesses choose the path of fear, status quo, or avoidance when they can instead achieve so much more by thinking big but building the risk-mitigated plan to achieve it.

So continue to dream. Be drawn to possibility.  Invest in yourself.  Don’t be shackled by a fear of failure.  Take bold steps but don’t take them blindly.  And remember, the route of inaction may ultimately be the more perilous one.

Note:  If you are interested in leap-frogging competitors with visionary yet attainable ideas, contact us and let's brainstorm together.