Risk Management

Leading a ride comes with certain responsibilities. The main one is that you want to keep everyone safe. I try to plan my routes on less traveled roads and make sure I point out any hazards or trouble spots along the way. There are always things you can't control but you try to plan for all contingencies. I had schedule a ride for this past Saturday and my main concern was the weather. I try not to ride in the rain if possible but sometimes you have to push the limits a little in order to get a ride in. 

I will not ride if it is raining or I know that there is going to be significant rain during the ride. Of course weather forecasts are not 100% reliable and if you look at the different sites you can get wildly different forecasts. When I looked on Friday night it looked like the rain won't end before noon but when I woke up on Saturday morning although it was raining the forecasts that I used showed rain ending by 9am an hour before the ride would start. The question I asked myself at 7am was did I believe the forecast and are the roads too wet to ride. My first inclination is always to do the ride because I would rather do a crappy ride rather than sit at home and be pissed I didn't do a ride. However in order to make the decision you have to evaluate the risk. 

In my job I have to make a lot of decisions everyday about what is the best design for a piece of software, what technology to use, and who should do the work. Part of making these decisions is doing the analysis to understand what is the best choice that will achieve the goals. Sometimes after doing the analysis the best choice is obvious but most of the time there are so many factors involved that picking the best one is a guess. This is why it is always important to consider the risk associated with any choice. 

For example should I use some new technology to develop the software or stick with a technology that I know the developers could easily implement. The new technology offers some advantages that allow us to offer some useful features to our users BUT it could take a lot longer to develop and be harder to integrate in to our current system. Is the risk worth the reward and what happens if we fail, is the question you have to ask before making the decision. This is true not only in software development but in life in general. How to I invest my money do I buy stocks or put it in a CD. A CD is safe but may not generate enough return to overcome inflation but stocks have no guaranteed return although they usually outperform any other assets. There are similar questions you can ask about your career or your relationships. In all cases it is important to asset the risk of any situation and try to mitigate it as much as you can.

For Saturday's ride I decided to do it. I knew the roads would be really wet which meant it would be messy and that there would be a possibility slipping on the road lines and leaves but most of the people signed up for the rides had ridden in wet weather before and the route I planned should be relatively safe. A few people who signed up for the ride bailed and I don't blame then for doing it as it was not a great day to ride. 

When I got to the start of the ride it was a little chaotic because there was a Turkey Trot Run in Joseph Lawrence Park which meant we had to park in the school parking lot. There were even some roads blocked off but we managed to talk our way past the barriers. The first half of the ride was a little messy as the spay off the road coated us and our bikes. We did make it down through Robling and into Burlington, without any problems, to visit the Eagle statue by the Burlington Bristol bridge. Chris even got us to go a quarter mile down the road to see the fishing troll

 

After getting out of Burlington we had a quick stop at the Jacksonville Deli before working our way back to the start. By this point the roads had started to dry out. It was still cloudy and not much warmer than when we started but it was much better riding. So this time taking the risk was worth it as we got the ride in.