Farley Mowat

*/By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc/*

*/Follow us on Twitter/* [1]

Celebrated Canadian author and environmentalist Farley Mowat died last
week.  Perhaps his best known work was "Never Cry Wolf" which was made
into a popular movie.

Farley Mowat is credited with saying that he "never let the facts get in
the way of the truth".  In risk management, a lot of the time we focus too
much on the quantitative facts when in reality they are obscuring the
truth.  We naively and too frequently incorrectly assume that because the
numbers are objective that they "tell the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth".  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Numbers don't always give context, nor do they always reflect the
context.  Numbers don't prevision the future, they just tell the past. 
Numbers cannot assess if they are measuring the right variable, at the right
time.  Numbers just tell, they do not interpret.

Farley Mowat was a fantastic storyteller, and while he may not have stuck to
the facts, or the numbers, he always told the truth.


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