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far as it went. I might have come down the losers don’t. To quote another good

For each column I write, MREN has the mountain, but it turned out there was one: Don’t paint yourself into a corner agreed to make a small donation to a charity of my choice. For this column I really no one there. and that goes for small personal deci- nominate Gapminder.org , Hans and

So one day my son was being wild sions and for billion dollar Government

Ole Rosling’s brilliant decision making and I said: “Hey Bud, do yourself a fa- Shipbuilding projects.

tool.

vor only do one stupid thing at a time”.

He looked at me, paused and said “OK,” and dialed his wildness down to one stu- pid thing. Bizarrely that decision mak- ing tool stuck and my nieces and neph- ews and my kids’ friends tell me they use it too.

At ? rst glance “Only do one stupid thing at a time” has a weird indetermi- nate quality, but if you work with ex- amples, it becomes brilliant. Underage drinking by itself is probably no big deal, but don’t set off ? reworks at the same time.

The trick is to recognize you are en- gaging a risk, and since you are engaging a risk you do not want to compound the risk by adding another risk. Once I even heard a kid say it when he was ready to snowboard on a steep run. I asked him where he got it, and it turned out he got it through my son’s scout troop.

Weirdly the rule has worked its way back into my business and existed be- fore I even knew it. Before I developed my decalogue, as a young salvage Naval

Architect, I developed a salvage plan, and it involved many simultaneous steps to get it to work. The very experienced salvage master looked at it for a second and then said: “What the $%#@ do you think we are? The $%#@ing Navy? One step at a time.”

Since everything in salvage carries risk, it simply translates to: Only do one stupid thing at a time.

We have thousands of years of experi- ence that shows that, even with the fear of God, long lists of decision making rules are not that successful. We need to keep it short and whether one uses Allan

Berger’s rule or the “Only One Stupid

Thing at a Time” rule (OOSTT?), deci- sion making requires analysis of risks and sorting of risks. Risk in all of life is unavoidable, the winners manage risk, www.marinelink.com 13

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