Pursuit 06
Twenty miles out, the mistakes you made at the dock become the only thing that matters. It is the best risk management education money can buy.
Offshore fishing is the pursuit that taught me risk management. Everything that keeps the day safe and productive is decided at the dock, hours before anything goes wrong.
Offshore is a logistics exercise that happens to end in fish. Fuel, ice, bait, safety gear, radio, weather window, float plan, and a crew that knows what they are doing. Twenty miles out there is no store, no shoulder to pull onto, and no rescheduling because the forecast turned.
That forces a discipline most people never develop on land: front loading the decisions. On a boat you cannot solve problems as they arrive because the environment gets a vote and the environment is bigger than you. You solve them before you leave.
It also teaches redundancy in a way that spreadsheets never will. Two ways to navigate. Two ways to communicate. More fuel than the plan requires. Redundancy always looks like waste right up until the moment it is the only reason the day did not become a story.
The weather window is the other lesson. You do not get to pick the day you want. You get to pick from the days the ocean offers, and the operator skill is being ready enough that when a window opens you can actually take it. I have watched more opportunities lost to unreadiness than to bad luck.
And the ocean is a very effective ego correction. There is no version of this where you are in charge. You are a guest, operating inside conditions you did not set, and the entire job is respecting that while still going out and doing the work.
What it taught me
Solve it at the dock. In a real environment you rarely get to solve problems while they are happening.
Two ways to navigate, two ways to communicate, margin on the fuel. It looks like overhead until the day it is the whole business.
You do not choose the conditions. You choose whether you are prepared enough to move when they open.
How I run a day
Questions
That the decisions which keep you safe are made before you leave the dock. Offshore you cannot improvise your way out of a fuel or weather mistake because the environment is larger than you are. It builds the habit of front loading decisions rather than solving problems as they arrive.
Because offshore makes the value of redundancy physical. Two navigation methods, two communication methods, and fuel margin all look like waste until one of them is the only reason the day ended well. The same argument applies to revenue concentration and single points of failure in a company.
You rarely choose your conditions. Markets, funding climates, and buying cycles open and close on their own schedule. The controllable variable is whether you are prepared enough to move when a window opens, which is why readiness beats forecasting.
More pursuits
Four hours, seventy-something decisions, no defense, no clock, and nobody to blame. I have never found a.
One motion, repeated exactly, into conditions that change underneath you without telling you. That is.
The arrow goes exactly where the form sent it. There is no luck in the flight, only in the.