Case Study: Gary R. Miller / Taming Chaos: A Parable on Decision Making

Gary Miller is a highly successful insurance professional running a third-generation family firm in Spring House, Pennsylvania. He didn’t want a book to drive business—he had all the business he could handle—but instead, he wanted to get a passion project across. He wanted to teach teenagers how to assess risk.

Teenagers, Gary believes, minimize risks because their brains aren’t fully formed, and, well, they are teenagers, so they do stupid, reckless things. Mostly, they get away with those insane choices. Sometimes, however, they don’t.

Conversely, Gary points out, teens can be overly risk-averse and miss out on opportunities for growth or happiness. Maybe they won’t try out for the school play or the football team or ask that girl or boy to prom. And then they have to live with the disappointment and frustration over “what could have been.”

Measuring risk is what Gary, and his father and grandfather, spent their careers doing. That is what insurance is all about – making good bets based on the likelihood of success. But teenagers are different animals, and I suggested to Gary that instead of doing a nonfiction book that presented risk assessment in a series of modules or anything else kids might find boring, we tell a story.

Everybody loves stories, or fables, if you will because fables empower the reader to pull out the moral of the story for themselves. Nobody likes to be told “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not.” On the other hand, if there is a story, and you can see the consequences that occurred to the person in the story, you and you alone have the power to decide what the lesson is and whether you should apply it to yourself. That is why people like stories. On top of that, they are easier to remember. Tony Robbins spends about an hour in his Business Mastery seminars teaching three simple points – “It is out there, it is worth it, and I’m gonna go get it.” It sounds easy to remember, right? It is also really easy to forget. So instead, Tony tells the story of an individual who was convinced that he had identified the location of a Spanish galleon that had sunk centuries earlier and had been lying on the ocean floor ever since with its cargo holds bulging with gold. Tony takes his audience through this individual’s years of trying to put a crew together, test dives, finally finding it, bringing it to the surface, and enjoying the bounty – even though it took him 16 years. When you learn the concept of “it’s out there, it is worth it, and I’m gonna go get it” in the
context of this story, you are not likely to forget that lesson.

Back to Gary. I suggested that we have a story about a brother and sister who are walking to school. It is the first day of the new school year, always fraught for kids, and they come across a German Shepherd that has been hit by a car. Of course, the kids want to take the dog home and nurture him and have a pet they can care for and love. So, here comes the risk assessment part: Is the dog likely to live? Was he tame or wild before the accident? How will he be if he recovers? Is that a dog you want in the house with children?

Gary loved the idea, and we wrote a fable called Taming Chaos, with Chaos being the name of the dog in the story. Spoiler alert: the kids brought the dog home, and everything worked out. Gary has used this book for years to go into high schools and teach kids about proper risk assessment. Would it have been as successful if he had been teaching four modules or six chapters or anything grownup and boring like that? This is a story, albeit a true story, so instead of telling you the moral of the story, I will assume that you will have figured it out for yourself.