Have you ever noticed that when someone slips on something¹Physically or Mentally somehow the response the body and the mind wants to make is the exact opposite of what will keep a person safe?

I was thinking about that this week when I was once again in another country²France. Again. for work. This was my third trip in three months, and I admit, I am a little tired of traveling. The hotel I stayed at this time was nice, but the rooms were very small. The bathroom was better this time than my last stay there because it had a tub. The layout was still weird for me. It felt like I was doing advanced yoga poses to get into the shower and turn on the water. I couldn’t turn on the water to let it warm up before being in the bath. Luckily, I didn’t fall. On the other hand, I didn’t find it very enjoyable.

The hotel was made up of two buildings, and there was a marble courtyard between the two buildings with tables and benches and chairs for you to enjoy the space when it was nice weather³It was cold and raining, but what can you expect from Paris in January?. At one point, I almost started to slip, and I felt my body twist and turn to prevent the fall. I could feel that my body wanted to prevent a crash, and I realized I could do more damage to myself by not falling than I would by falling. Maybe.

I was thinking about the different ways we can fall, and fail, in life, and how hard it seems sometimes to make the calculation to prevent the fall and not be damaged. While I am not a big fan of controls engineers, I do find controls engineering fascinating. What I was taught was that you try to define a system to have a deterministic outcome in a stable way. This introduces the concept of margins. Margins help because if I put a little too much or a little too little into my control system, but I am within the margins, I still get the same result⁴I’ll save hysteresis for another letter.. 

Margins aren’t always the answer. If my margins are too big, I waste resources. If my margins are too small, I introduce risk that the system will not stay stable.

Falling, or failing, is what happens when you are not stable. The control system of my walk across a slippery marble courtyard or the way I enter a bath attempting to avoid being splashed by cold water is an internal control system. I realize that sometimes I am not thinking about how to prevent a fall or designing a plan which will protect me from damage. I have seen this lead to a worse outcome than a bruise on my hip from a fall⁵For example, a twisted muscle in my back..

Perhaps the missing piece of information, as I project all kinds of tumbles or failures or attempts not to fall and hurting myself worse, is that I am afraid of heights. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of physical heights and yet attracted to them at the same time. I remember when I was about five years old, I climbed up into the hayloft on our farm. It was not a working hayloft. It had not been maintained. When I got up there, I could not come back down on my own. My mind wouldn’t let my body turn around and go down the ladder against the wall of the barn backwards. No matter how much our babysitter, Sonia, yelled at me to come down, I could not bring myself to even try.

There is something that doesn’t seem logical about having a worse result from preventing a fall than taking a fall. The five year old inside me understands that choosing not to try was a much safer choice that failing and falling or trying to prevent the fall as it happened⁶I am not still in the hayloft. Somehow, when Dad got home from work, he got me down. He was tall, but I have blocked out the experience. I don’t remember any damage other than being in BIG trouble for climbing into the hayloft..

I wonder if I have lived my life afraid of emotional heights too. Have I avoided taking risks in order to play it safe? Do I err on the side of having enough margin to cushion my fall or avoid taking a risk? And do I do this with friendships, relationships, and in the working world?

Back when I was engineering for a living, there were a group of guys⁷Coincidentally mainly controls engineers who went indoor cliff climbing a lot⁸They also took vacations together to climb high and dangle above the earth.. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to do it but also kind of sad they never asked me along. Only now do I realize that their attitude towards a fall was so different than mine. Maybe exerting too much control on when you lose control is the problem.

Control loops are tricky things. They are one of the theories I really believe everyone should study because they don’t always appear like they will work until you do the math and are amazed that they do.

For the record, I didn’t have a near fall or a fall in the marble courtyard or anywhere else on this recent trip. Thinking about it probably didn’t prevent me from taking a fall, but it did give me something to ponder if there is a right way or a wrong way to figure out how high to go and what the acceptable consequence is when a bumble doesn’t bounce⁹An obscure reference to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. If you didn’t know..