February, 2014 | Environmental Debt

On steroids and quarterly reports: short-term fixes can screw up the system

First published in the Guardian, February 17th, 2014

Something – maybe a bat, although nobody was certain – recently bit my good friend Arnie. What happened next is an allegory for how short-term fixes can really screw up a system, whether it’s an ecosystem or an immune system or, while we’re at it, a financial system.

Erring on the side of caution, Arnie (not his real name) got the rabies vaccine, which consists of five shots. Shot number one went fine. But after shot number two, he immediately started feeling sick – his symptoms resembled the flu, but with some weird neurological symptoms – and he ended up in the emergency room.

A Benadryl drip seemed to relieve him somewhat, and he went home, still feeling pretty bad and non-functional, but not feeling like he would crumple into a ball on the floor. Then Arnie got the third shot, and got even sicker. I wanted to know why Arnie was so sick … scary sick. So I took to the internet and learned about adverse responses to rabies shots, how rare they are and, also, how serious they can be – kind of like a black swan event for business.

Twelve days after the initial shot, Arnie asked me to meet him at the emergency room because he thought he would pass out. He could barely move or keep his eyes open. At the hospital ER, the doctors seemed perplexed and checked for the “emergent” problems. Did he need to be intubated, coded, operated on? None of the above.

The doctors hydrated him and offered more Benadryl. Then they brought him steroids, which they explained would make him feel much better. I intervened directly – in fact, I stepped

Human error: how business can learn from past mistakes

First published in the Guardian on February 7th, 2014

There are at least two areas where I agree with most major religions. First, we must treat one another with compassion and kindness – the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you applies. Second, humans are inherently imperfect. We make terrible mistakes and we are capable of incredible negligence and cruelty in addition to our numerous finer qualities such as valor, graciousness and creativity.

Somehow, in our use of technology and chemicals, we presume that this second maxim of imperfection and moral failings doesn’t hold. That’s why we think it’s OK to have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons globally despite the launch codes being in the hands of the imperfect humans who have manufactured them. No surprise, then, that 92 US air force officers who hold these codes are in the middle of a scandal involving cheating and drug use. Errors could obviously be catastrophic – blackmail and impaired judgment do not mix well with nuclear capabilities.

We continue to deploy technology with the running assumption that humans won’t make mistakes or behave badly. That is genuinely stupid; history continues to show us so on every continent and in every culture. These kinds of disasters are not black swan events: they should be anticipated if we just presume that humans will err. As Mark Twain noted, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

With this in mind, one of the most important guidelines for 21st century business, where technological prowess is unbelievable, is theprecautionary principle. First adopted by the United Nations in 1982 as part of the World Charter for Nature, the precautionary