You Are Entering … The PM Zone

 

Over the long New Year’s Day holiday weekend, the SyFy® channel was airing a Twilight Zone marathon, and one of the episodes caught my attention. It was entitled “Nick of Time,” and it was written by Richard Matheson. This episode dealt with a newlywed couple whose car had broken down in a small Midwestern town, and were waiting in a diner while it was being repaired. The diner’s tables had fortune-telling machines, which would push out a slip of paper with cryptic words designed to answer yes-or-no questions for a penny. 

(Spoiler Alert!) The newlywed husband (played by William Shatner) quickly realizes that the answers he is receiving are improbably accurate, and becomes fixated on the notion that the machine can predict the future. His wife (played by Patricia Breslin) pleads with him to stop; in response, he challenges her to ask the machine some yes-or-no questions, to demonstrate that it’s not just the husband’s choice of questions that is causing the phenomena of the seemingly 100% accurate penny fortune-teller. Sure enough, each of the questions that she asks where she already knows the answer is answered correctly. 

When Shatner’s character begins to almost frantically feed the machine pennies and ask questions about where the couple will live, the wife pleads with him to recognize what’s happening. She points out that they can leave the diner any time they wish (their car was repaired earlier than had been estimated, and, yes, the penny fortune-teller “foresaw” it), go wherever they want to go, and write the story of their future themselves, rather than allow the machine to do so. The husband realizes the wisdom of her words, and they leave the diner, only to have another couple immediately sit at that particular table, and, with frightened looks on their faces, begin to ask the machine questions and feed it pennies. Rod Serling’s voice over at the end is “Counterbalance in the little town of Ridgeview, Ohio. Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence - having escaped one of the darker places of the Twilight Zone.” (1)

Besides the reference to “one of the darker places of the Twilight Zone,” much in this episode reminded me of current risk management theory. Oh, sure, there are some differences (risk managers don’t work for pennies), but, epistemologically speaking, the similarities are striking. Consider:
•    Both the penny fortune-telling machine and the risk manager purport to predict future events,
•    For money.
•    Their predictions are always somewhat cryptic (“The answer should be obvious” or “There is an 85% confidence interval”).
•    On top of each of the machines was a little bobble-head that looked like a devil, whereas the appearance of risk managers is…
Ha, ha! Just kidding there.  I’m sure the appearance of typical risk management-types is perfectly normal. However, their results are chillingly similar, with (at least) one major difference. In the show, the machine’s answers were improbably accurate, with a 100% confidence interval (get it?), which is why its answers were so compelling. Conversely, should a so-called risk event happen to a project that was not predicted nor pseudo-quantified in the risk analysis, their “out” is to simply assert that the event was an “unknown unknown,” which is somehow different from a “known unknown,” in that the latter was mentioned in the risk analysis. And, should the event be captured in the risk analysis, the analysts can claim that they had actually predicted it, using their Gaussian Curve-based, jargon-filled processes. Convenient, no?

So, the question I will leave my readers is this: Will you be one of the managers permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread, or will you be among those PMs facing the future with confidence, having escaped one of the darker places of… the PM Zone?

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(1)   Nick of Time (The Twilight Zone). (2016, January 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:46, January 2, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nick_of_Time_(The_Twilight_Zone)&oldid=697844470