(Really) Risky Business

It was in the Yucatan's Grand Cenote cave system that underwater explorer Wes Skiles, 42, a veteran of more than 3,000 descents into water-filled caverns, made his greatest escape from the gods of risk and chance. It went something like this.

Looking as if he's prepped for a long day's journey into inner space -- with a pair of scuba tanks strapped to his sides and an assemblage of regulator hoses, lights, and guidelines hooked to his harness -- Skiles plunges 60 feet down into Cenote's Web of underwater caves. He swims 1,000 feet into the system, intent on wrapping up a mapping survey of Cenote's aqueous labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. On this day, he intends to check out the last of the system's unexplored side tunnels.

Skiles swims up to a restriction -- a chimneylike shaft that's not much wider than a Subaru tire. He hesitates, knowing that he could get trapped like a bug between the cave's ceiling and floor. But he decides to push on. He has come upon many such passageways before and discovered that they often open up into virgin caves where no explorer's light has ever shone. But not this time.

He unclips his scuba tanks from their side mounts. Dragging one tank between his legs, he pushes the other tank ahead of him like a battering ram and squeezes into the shaft. Digging his fingertips into the tunnel's limestone floor, he pulls himself forward an inch at a time. With great effort, he muscles through the restriction -- only to jam himself into a dead-end hole that's no larger than a coffin. His face is pressed hard against a wall of rock; his feet are crunched above him at a 45-degree angle. He can barely move, and he has only a finite number of breaths left to find his way out.

"I'll die in here," he thinks, "and no one will ever find me."

Trying to remain calm, he realizes that his only hope is to make himself smaller -- to strip off gear so that he can turn around and push himself back through the tight passageway. He struggles out of his side-mount harness, works free from his fins, and gains a foothold. In a Houdini-like maneuver, he manages to find a little slack. He wriggles around until finally, he's facing the way out. He collects himself and formulates an escape plan: Squeeze back through the restriction and then swim like hell. One tank is almost spent; the other is half-empty. He must make it to the cave's opening before he runs out of air.

He struggles back into his gear and jams himself through the restriction. He's ready to make a run for it, but he can't. Horror-struck, he realizes that the tank containing most of his air has slipped away from him and rolled back into the restriction. "I'm so screwed," he thinks. He plummets back into the passageway, gropes desperately in the dark for the tank -- and finds it. If the tank had dropped into the hole, he would have run out of air and drowned. Even now, with both tanks clipped to his sides, he has just minutes of air remaining as he makes it out of the system. Like Prometheus, who stole that ball of fire from Zeus, Skiles has defied the gods and survived.

Cave diving is arguably the world's most hazardous sport. There is no injury rate -- only a mortality rate. In northern Florida alone, more than 300 people have drowned in underwater caves. With each dive into the belly of the earth, skilled aquanauts such as Skiles make the ultimate bet, putting up their very lives as collateral as they push to illuminate new discoveries. Make a bad bet in business -- on an ill-conceived strategy or on a poorly designed investment -- and you might lose your job or your company. But in the world of cave diving, the downside is 6 feet under. It is absurdly easy to take on too much risk, panic, and drown.

"If you take average, experienced divers and put them in an underwater cave environment, you expose them to all sorts of risks that they don't understand and that they're not prepared to deal with," says Skiles. "They would certainly die. And it would be a hard, terrifying death."

In his much-acclaimed book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (John Wiley & Sons, 1996), economist Peter L. Bernstein writes that the word "risk" derives from the early-Italian risicare, which means "to dare." Thought of this way, risk is not a fate but a choice -- something that we choose to assume in our work, in our careers, and in our companies. That is why we have tracked down Wes Skiles and his diving partner, Peter Butt: They have dared to make fresh discoveries about the nature of risk and the art and science of choice. In caves such as Cueva de Fuego, Devil's Eye, Grand Cenote, and No Way, Skiles and Butt have learned how to read risk, evaluate it, weigh its consequences -- and get out alive when things go terribly wrong.