Next week, I’ll be giving a webinar as part of the Lab Manager Leadership Digital Summit.  This will be my first real foray back into a formal “business” setting in over four years.  Oh, it won’t be a difficult webinar to give.  After all, I’ll be pontificating live on a number of the topics that have ended up in these essays and, as my friends are probably thinking right now, “When did you ever stop pontificating live?”  But as I’ve worked on preparing this talk, I keep coming back to one topic that actually won’t be a specific item I discuss there:  Risk.  You see, I’m taking a bit of risk by dipping my toe back into a formal setting and, in particular, advertising this blog at the end of that talk.  I do indeed want more people to read the blog.  But I also realize that with broader exposure comes the risk of trolls and negative feedback.  It also brings the risk that there might be some people who want me to write more.  So, before accepting the kind invitation from my friend and colleague to present, I did a very rapid (like 30 second) risk analysis in my head and decided to plow forward.

Those who know me know that I’m a “no regrets” kind of girl.  I make a decision and take an action and own the outcome, good or bad.  It means that results are sometimes cringe-worthy and embarrassing or even harmful but that I’ve decided that whatever the outcome, I will learn something that will make me a better person.  That doesn’t mean, though, that I make decisions on actions without a risk analysis and attempts at risk mitigation.  We all do.  Multiple times a day, usually without realizing that we do it.  As I’ve been thinking about risk and risk mitigation, a number of thoughts have crossed my brain.  And, as I’m wont to do, I will now get them out of my mind and foist them upon you.

Our ability to control a risk plays a large role in acceptance.  According to the START American Terrorism Deaths fact sheet, in 2016 (the most recent year that stats are available) there were 61 terror attacks in the US (most perpetrated by US residents and citizens) and 68 deaths.  In that same year, there were 10 fatal accidents in the commercial airline industry within the US that resulted in 216 deaths.  Also in 2016, there were an estimated 7,277,000 police-reported traffic crashes, in which 37,461 people were killed and an estimated 3,144,000 people were injured. An average of 102 people died each day in motor vehicle crashes in 2016, one fatality every 14 minutes.  Yet, fear of terrorist attacks is at a feverish level (and focused on the wrong nationalities) and many people are too afraid to get on an airplane for fear of a crash, yet we hop in our cars without a second thought multiple times a day.  Clearly, we accept a much greater risk on the roads, yet we rarely give that risk a second thought.  Why?  Well, part of it is that most of us drive regularly without incident so we feel “safe”.  And a good part of that feeling “safe” is that we feel we control the risk associated with driving.  Plus, we need driving more often to do what we want to do during a day so we gladly accept that higher risk.  We don’t, though, usually consciously think about that calculation until we or someone we know is in an accident.  The illusion of control give us the illusion of safety.  Conversely, feeling you can’t control a risk makes that risk less acceptable, even if probability is really low.

Lack of data on risk does not mean lack of risk.  Several years ago, I attended a large meeting of businesses and government groups associated with the safety of consumer products.  One of the major topics that year was Bisphenol-A, a plasticizer that has been used for decades in all manner of plastic products from the lining inside soda cans to plastic plates and toys.  In the previous number of years, scientific data indicated that there was evidence that BPA is an endocrine disrupter, meaning that your body could confuse it for certain reproductive hormones causing a range of problems.  Endocrine disrupters are particularly dangerous for growing children and pregnant women.  The level of BPA in the blood that could cause problems was under debate, along with how to properly test if BPA in a given product might leach out under normal use and thereby be consumed.  However, “out of an abundance of caution”, governments and product safety groups recommended removing BPA from formulations.  In a rush to do so, consumer product companies tried a variety of substitutes that could provide the same performance properties as BPA (it was in there for a reason) and many landed on a similar compound called Bisphenol-S.  BPS was not burdened by similar data as an endocrine disrupter.  However, there were not similar data because no one had ever needed to TEST BPS for this property!  Well, once we started to use BPS, people started to test it and guess what?  It’s even WORSE than BPA!  The industry referred to this as “a regrettable substitute”.  Regrettable, indeed!  Lack of data does not mean lack of risk.  Remember when I wrote about understanding that there is much “we don’t know we don’t know”? Ignorance may be bliss, but it may also cause you to take on risk you would not normally accept.  This is why scientists can be very paranoid people.

Lack of immediate impact can lead to assuming greater risk.  Tons of examples on this one.  Such as all the highly carcinogenic chemicals I handled very cavalierly in grad school.  If I was careless with a strong acid or base, I’d get burned and would be more careful next time.  If I got careless with alkyl phosphines, I wouldn’t find out for several decades.  I should not know what methyl phosphine smells like, but I do.  I try not to think about that.

And, of course, there is wearing a mask, social distancing and avoiding crowds during this pandemic.  Early on, when we knew nothing about this disease, many of us were scared into isolation while others thought this was just a bad flu.  Nine months in, we know this is not “just a bad flu”—that’s like saying a heart attack is just bad heart burn because they both have chest pain as a symptom—but our calculus on risk has changed.  I was talking with my cousin the other day and we were discussing “decision fatigue”—you have to make all these risk calculations that you never had to make before about exposure doing everyday things.  It’s exhausting!  So, you either don’t do things you’d like to do, which is frustrating, or you take a risk that you normally wouldn’t take.  There are some obvious things most of us adhere to:  avoid big crowds that come together and disperse, like sporting events and bars and big parties; wear a mask when you go into stores and keep your distance; don’t ask a lady in Costco to pull up her mask from her chin (OK, that last one was just me.  She was VERY nasty!).  But what about when you have friends over for dinner and you have 10 maskless people milling around your house for several hours?  Or when you go to the Y, even though there are just a few people lifting weights and they are being careful (for the most part)?  Or you go away for a long weekend to rural areas because you need to get out of the house, but you are still crossing paths with strangers?  We all have pandemic fatigue and associated decision fatigue and it’s probably causing all of us to take greater risk than we would have six months ago.  Look at how I qualified my statements to justify my choices just in this paragraph!

We can’t live risk-free lives.  I written before about the need for balance.  The trouble is we’ll never have enough data to have full confidence in our risk decisions.  I wish you all safety in these difficult times; as much protection from risk as you need to feel comfortable; and, enough coping energy to avoid decision fatigue!