Many great advances in human history started like this – how did anyone know we needed a smartphone?
TCFP wasn’t planned, in a fit of pique I applied to the FCA for a licence. Once granted, I had to work out what I was going to do and how.
Since then there have been any number of adjustments made to how we do our work.
Did we “need” a portal? Not really. Did we have a hunch that it might be appreciated and help us do our work better? Yes.
So, we just got on with it. The possibility of a portal blowing up in our faces appeared minimal and the decision easily reversible. It turns out to have been hugely successful.
Did we want a Summer intern? No, not at all, it had never been discussed before. When the bright and breezy Lisa rang up and asked for an intern role I thought “Why not? Let’s see what happens.” It was an inspired decision.
This approach is not always appropriate; our move to discretionary investment permissions or from funds to ETFs in our investment portfolios needed a different approach.
Moving to ETFs took many months. I had to satisfy myself we could achieve the same investment spread and broadly the same cost.
Then we needed to road test it, so I put all my money into ETFs and watched, carefully, for several months. When nothing untoward happened, we decided to make the change.
The decision to engage “Let’s see what happens” or not hinges on answering “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
In that respect the difference, for example, between asking someone out and asking them to marry you are galaxies apart. As is changing a wheel with changing the clutch on your car.
“What’s the worst that could happen” is a matter of risk management. And in many ways risk management is simply the acknowledgement that more things might happen than actually happen.