Your Single Most Important Tool for Managing the Uneven Downsides of Risk
Developer Tea

Your Single Most Important Tool for Managing the Uneven Downsides of Risk

B1IntermediateJuly 10, 202625 min

The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventually will. In this episode, I work through why our careers and lives are governed more by avoiding catastrophic downside than by chasing upside, and why the single best tool for surviving a bad event isn't testing, insurance, or money — it's genuine trust with the people around you. Here's a question to sit with: what is the most important tool you have as a software engineer and as a leader? Most of us reach for...

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One of the processes that a lot of teams use is a premortem. If you've never done this before,

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essentially very much like a postmortem. If you were to look at something that has happened and

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0:00

What is the most important tool that you have as a software engineer, as a leader? I want you to think about this question and keep in mind what your answer is. We'll come back to it in a minute. One of the processes that a lot of teams use is a premortem. If you've never done this before,

0:34

it's a pretty useful way to try to determine what your risks are. And the way it goes is essentially very much like a postmortem. If you were to look at something that has happened and try to describe what happened. And we've talked about premortems on the show plenty of times before, the interesting trick that a pre-mortem provides you is it presumes, it assumes that

1:03

something has gone wrong because our natural bias is to imagine that nothing will, that our plans, our best laid plans will not go to waste. And in fact, they'll come true. And this makes sense because most of the time, our optimism at least carries us forward.

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