Roadmaps of Risk Analysis

Many things happened this week, but I think the biggest was the creation of a roadmap for me to determine where I want to go. The idea came from a Harvard Business School (HBS) article about deciding how to take risks.

Many people make choices that on the surface seem without a plan. We hear stories about people jumping over their bosses to get at a project or fighting against director supervisor order. When these turn out badly, everyone in the room does the, “I told you so.” However, we rarely understand how those few success comes into play.

In the HBS article, the key point was understanding risk. Sometimes, taking calculated risks is part of the process. For an individual, that involves building a personal understanding of the type of risk associated with the action.

Now, what does all this have to do with my roadmap? I realized to get to where I want to go involved some risk taking. Just like the guy who wants to start his own business, there are risks involved.

So I devised a way to articulate my risks by first listing out the situation I’m currently in. This included both the positive and negative ask. Realizing that I was new to the company, possessing little knowledge and almost no corporate experience, you can imagine my list for negatives far outweigh the positive.

But the whole point of this exercise was to pinpoint what the negatives exactly were. I could then create a plan to mitigate or change those negatives into positives. In my case, one negative was the lack of knowledge in what area of consulting therefore limited my ability to articulate and control my career growth. I learned that simply saying I don’t like doing X doesn’t really tell people what I like to do. To mitigate this problem, I created an action plan listing several specific actions I could take to change the situation.

They included:
Networking with other individuals to get an understanding of the type of projects they do, both the positive and negative aspects
Articulate my desire to Senior Executives work on a range of projects to experience first hand what they are
Determine the type of skills necessary to move from one area into another

Having this roadmap, I realized that at the moment, if I were to attempt my choice right now, I would have a high probability of failure with no contingence plan. But if I stick to my road map, in a year, I hope to change the risk/positive/negative ratio to a level where I am comfortable in making that jump.

We’ll see how this pans out in some time.