“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a
man can rest his head.”

            —
Michel de Montaigne

It is good to be
back in the classroom again – a seminar of bright graduate students in Risk
Management, searching for wisdom among the host of examples where business, the
professions and policy-makers have botched up in large and highly
consequential ways. 

Relevant to the
current news cycle is this syllabus topic: among the shared lessons from such
disasters as the Costa Concordia, MF Global and H-P/Autonomy, is the
realization that harm and damage increase exponentially as events “scale” in
size.

That is, a huge
hurricane is more than ten times as destructive as ten small windstorms; a car
crash at 100 mph is far more deadly than twenty fender-benders; urban pathology
in a city of a million people is more than ten times as complex as in ten towns
of one hundred thousand. 

Of immediate
relevance: no number of over-heated personal computer batteries in the internet
cafes could match the potential for incendiary catastrophe of a single lithium-ion
meltdown in a Boeing 787 (here).

Nor could all the
saloon fist-fights and domestic arguments in a whole police precinct generate
the grief of a fatal drive-by shooting. And however impactful to the victims
and their families, all the dispersed one-off weekend homicides lack the
societal impact of the 26 deaths in the Newtown massacre.

What follows, by
way of lessons?

First, there is no
“average” harm among a set of events – whether natural disasters or vehicular
accidents or civil violence – that are distributed for frequency and impact not
on a bell curve but on a graph shaped like a hockey stick.

And for the same
reason, the very rare, front-page events are inherently beyond precise prediction, identification or prevention
on a “top-down” advance basis.

Instead, risk
identification and mitigation of potential catastrophes can only occur at the
lower levels of the “pyramid of close calls,” where symptoms of potentially
deadly problems can be teased out and nipped in the bud.

As Boeing may be
learning — under whatever belated enlightenment emerges from the realization
that its Dreamliner quality program apparently came “batteries not included” –
the weakness in its deficient design approach escalated exponentially. By
separately outsourcing the lithium-ion batteries and their chargers to
different suppliers (here), Boeing forfeited the “bottom-up” quality testing needed to
reveal battery flaws far back at the pre-assembly stage.

Other examples
abound. The standard commoditized auditors’ report, widely derided for its
obsolete and limited message that financial information is “mostly right, most
of the time,” proves less and less valuable either to identify, warn of or
avoid the large, rare but too-common outbreaks of global-scale corporate chicanery
and abuse.

Likewise, providing
weapons to every school teacher can be no more effective against the threat of
an unidentifiable deranged shooter – but would be just as wastefully costly and
fraught with unintended consequences – as the mandating of universal mammograms
or colonoscopies above age forty, or the construction at public cost of an
individual apartment for every single member of the urban homeless.

As for the
challenge of reducing gun violence in America – it cannot reside with the
futile attempt to isolate or disarm specifically dangerous individuals – who,
like the potentially harmful white-collar criminals or breast cancers or faulty
batteries, are too dispersed and lurking beneath detection in the general
population.

It is, rather, to
act on as many of the “close-call” factors as possible, across the entire
spectrum of contributing factors: bans on non-recreational assault weapons and
high-capacity magazines, registered transfers with universal background checks
for issues of criminality or mental health, mandatory licensing and training as
with automobiles, buy-backs and turn-ins, and required insurance and liability
for manufacturers, sellers and users.   

To achieve the
elusive next “massacre that doesn’t happen,” none of these alone is a certainty.
Nor can they all add up to perfect elimination of risk. As with the catalog of
other examples, that is impossible in a complex and humanly fallible
environment. The achievable goal instead is the accretion of incremental opportunities
to interrupt the chain.

Just as it took an
iceberg to “failure test” the complacency of the Titanic’s design flaws, the
slaughter at Newtown illuminates society’s obligation to re-engineer its
approach to gun violence, from the ground up.

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