In the summer of 1975, a young climber named David Breashears set his sights on a beautiful, unclimbed sheet of rock rising from the ground on a cliff south of Boulder. For years, no rock climber had given serious thought to climbing this section. The challenge lay not in the apparent difficulty of the climb, but in the absence of natural protection. Breashears saw no cracks where he might slot wired climbing nuts, and he was climbing in an era before it became acceptable to drill expansion bolts directly into the rock for protection. The wall rose vertically for about five stories, with little pebbles and sharp edges, then the angle kicked back to 85 degrees with holds that looked larger.
Breashears headed up the route, trailing a rope and carrying a small selection of wired nuts that he hoped to slot into one of the upper pockets after the hard climbing. At the 50-foot mark, he had a horrifying realization: the climb ahead would be more difficult than the opening moves, and there were still no places to slot nuts. The rock became water-polished from thousands of years of runoff from above, and the sloping handholds had no sharp edges to grip. If he fell, he would plummet 60 feet straight down onto the jumble of boulders strewn at the base. At 32 feet per second squared, he would slam into the boulder field at nearly 50 miles per hour at a force of 20 Gs. Ka-smack! One dead climber.
Was this a risky situation?
Well, it depends on what you mean by "risky."
For David Breashears, it was not a risky situation. Sure, the consequences of a fall were severe, but the probabilities of a fall were close to zero. David was such a gifted climber in his prime, that--to him--the route formed a puzzle to solve, but not a particularly difficult one. It would be like handing a world-class crossword-puzzle expert the Wednesday New York Times crossword (a challenging puzzle, but well within her capabilities) with the following instructions: If you don't get the puzzle right, we're going to drop you off a 60-foot cliff to your death.
If Breashears had allowed the 60-foot ground-fall potential to infect his brain, he might have died. But he didn't. He was able to separate the probabilities of falling from the consequences of falling, and he climbed with focused precision to the top, establishing a new route aptly named Perilous Journey.
Some of the most tragic accidents have come when climbers mismanaged this distinction, becoming blasé on easy terrain. On July 6, 2000, Cameron Tague made the approach to the Diamond Face on Long's Peak. To get to the midway point on the cliff, he decided to traverse in from the side, along a big sloping ledge called Broadway. For a climber as gifted as Tague, it would be an easy traverse, and to save time for the difficult climbing higher on the face, he didn't even bother to rope up. Then somehow, he lost his concentration, pulled on a loose piece of stone, and stumbled backward. Tague tried to recapture his balance, his hands grasping and waving about as he skittered toward the edge of the ledge. He disappeared over the edge of Broadway and fell 800 feet. The probabilities of falling were remote, but the consequences were lethal.
Separating probability from consequence applies not just to climbing but also to work, life, and business. In 1994, when Intel Corp. first discovered the floating decimal-point flaw in its Pentium microprocessor, engineers estimated it would cause a rounding error in division only once every 27,000 years for the average spreadsheet user. This infinitesimally small probability blinded Intel's leaders from worrying about the astronomically high consequences on the other side of the coin. When that one-in-a-billion event happened to a math professor, it ignited an explosion of Internet chat, which, in turn, caught the attention of the media. As then-Intel CEO Andy Grove described in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive (Random House, 1999)--a good title for climbers, by the way--the company found itself hounded by CNN, pilloried in the press, and jolted by unhappy customers. On December 12, 1994, Grove awoke to read the horrific headline, "IBM Stops All Shipments of Pentium-Based Computers." Ultimately, Intel took a $475 million write-off--an amount equal to half a year's R&D budget, or five years of Pentium advertising spending.
While Intel didn't die from the fall, it certainly crashed onto a ledge and shattered its leg. To Intel's credit, it changed its way of doing business to account for the consequences, not just the probabilities. To date, we have not seen another problematic Pentium event from Intel.
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