One of my boys is often ill. He suffers whenever he gets even the mildest of respiratory illnesses, and so this time of year is always the hardest for us as a family. These days, we manage his illnesses better, but there is still a cost to the family as he has to take time off school to receive constant care. He has taken three days off school this week, so my partner and I have had to juggle our busy schedules to attend to his needs too.
We are fortunate that this week's situation allowed us to have maximum flexibility. Instead of doing personal care and housework outside of office hours, we did it during. Instead of delivering value for our employers while the children were awake, we did it while they were asleep. We also delivered extra value to our family by providing individual care to our sick child.
Our week had originally been planned a few days before, and this allowed us to be flexible. The risk of a child being ill and needing attention being fulfilled had little impact on the value we expected to deliver to ourselves and to our organisations. We found the capacity for more value to be delivered than originally planned. This is because we had only planned on delivering small pieces of value that could easily be moved around to accommodate the change in circumstances.
Imagine, though, that this illness had fallen during a week on holiday that we had planned a year ago. The realisation of this risk then would cause a decrease in the value delivered. We would be planning to have large amounts of family leisure time and unable to reorganise the delivery of that value. One adult would have to stay at the hotel with the sick child. Medical care would be more difficult to organise and receive. The well child would only have time with one parent at a time.
This kind of long-term planning has a far greater exposure to the exact same risk. However, long-term planning can also deliver a far higher amount of value. But if you’re not trying to deliver an abnormally high level of value, why would you want to expose your plan to the abnormally high level of risk, which is the cost of long-term planning?
By breaking down our value delivery as small as possible as often as possible, we reduce the potential impact of realising any risks and give ourselves enough flexibility to deliver more value in times of crisis.
But, high risk generates high rewards.
One isn’t better than the other until put into context.