More Likely Than…?

 

According to The Daily Beast, there are a whole lot of things that are more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery, specifically, the American lottery MegaMillions (Note to my readers: I’m not shilling for MegaMillions, I’m just using them to point out the folly of Gaussian Curve aficionados). How these odds are calculated is not provided, but the following are supposedly more likely than winning a jackpot:

• Death by vending machine
• Airline-related terrorist attack
• Having identical quadruplets
• Becoming President of the United States
• Dying in an asteroid apocalypse[i]

…among others. Keeping with my deep-seated skepticism about anything statisticians assert, I did a little digging on my own. Consider:

• Since MegaMillions began in 2002, there have been an average of 14.7 jackpot winners per year.
• Death by vending machine: 2 -3 per year[ii]. This appears to be less likely.
• Airline-related terrorist attack: none in the United States since 11 September 2001. Ditto.
• Having identical quadruplets: I couldn’t find definitive numbers for the United States, but experts estimate there are currently 50 sets worldwide[iii]. In order for this to be more likely than winning the lottery, the sample set would have to be only 3.57 years long, and that’s worldwide. I’m calling this less likely, as well.
• Becoming President of the United States: 1 every 4 years, at most. I mean, seriously, how does anybody conclude that something that happens .25 times per year is more likely than something that happens more than 14 times per year?
• Dying in an asteroid apocalypse: zero incidents in recorded history. Compared to 219 MegaMillions winners total, I’m thinking that the whole asteroid apocalypse thing is just a bit less likely than winning the lottery.

Again, I have no idea how these odds were computed, but verifiable performance reveals that these computations were, well, wrong. I mean, seriously – death due to asteroid apocalypse is more likely than something that’s happened 219 times since 2002? Do these people even read what they’re asserting?

I think the reason that The Daily Beast’s published assertions were wrong has to do with the nature of calculating possible future outcomes. A “fair” coin – one that’s perfectly balanced, I guess – when flipped, will come up heads half the time, and tails the other half. Even here, though, causes me to wonder: how hard could it be for a patient person to learn to flip a coin in such a way as to lead to a result where the flipped coin would land the same side up as when it was positioned for flipping? I imagine it wouldn’t be easy, but it probably isn’t impossible. And, if this, the ultimate in binary-outcome randomness, can be influenced, what scenario can’t?

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

As I’ve maintained for years now, the future cannot be quantified, therefore the optimal project management strategy for any given situation cannot be calculated. The projected outcome from individual decisions may (or, realistically, may not) be estimable, but that’s not the same thing as calculating an optimal strategy. Even within the confines of game theory, the strategies that lead to maximizing a given participant’s payoff rarely translate to supposedly analogous real-life situations. But that doesn’t stop risk management experts from claiming that they can do so, no siree. If you think about it, though, there’s really nothing to stop them. When they are transparently wrong, they can always point to the occurrence that upended their “analysis” as being from the realm of the “unknown unknowns.” Convenient, huh?

Now, I am aware that no risk management specialist worth the title claims to be able to predict the future with usable certainty. They will maintain that they are simply identifying risks that may negatively impact their organizations – until they aren’t, and insist that “opportunity management,” or “upside risk,” is part and parcel of risk management, even though those aspects of the word “risk” appear nowhere in any reputable dictionary.

So, to the two or three remaining risk management specialists who read this blog, I have some advice for you. When generating an estimate of the things that are, say, more likely to happen to a person than winning the lottery, you might want to start with one critical data point: how many people tend to win the lottery? And, if it averages out to 14.7 people per year, seek out statistics on things that happen more often than that. Does this sound like common sense? Well, it is. Does it also sound simple? It most certainly is not, for it represents a paradigm shift in the way risk management is conducted. The implication is that the future, to the extent that it can be grasped in any meaningful way, is best projected based on past performance. Project-ruining occurrences tend to happen to project teams that historically perform poorly, no matter the identified and “quantified” cause. No amount of hyper-ventilating analysis based on Gaussian curves can change that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I'll go buy a lottery ticket.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/15-things-more-likely-to-happen-than-winning-mega-millions, 11 November 2017, 13:46 MST.

[ii] Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/Fact-Vending-machines-kill-4-times-as-many-people-as-sharks-per-year-How-can-that-be on 13 November 2017, 18:45 MST.

[iii] Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/52613-identical-triplets-quadruplets-science.html on 13 November 2017, 18:46 MST.