Paul Allen Quotes

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

We're hoping for the best, but we need to prepare for the worst.

Before going into a room, make sure you can get out again.

You can’t prepare for the best case; you have to prepare for the worst case.

Don’t ignore planning for unlikely events. Over long periods of time the highly improbable gets more probable to occur at least once.

Don't wait until you're in a crisis to come up with a crisis plan.

No, but you've got to be here in case something does happen.

Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do.

Finding out exactly what went wrong is key toward preventing future debacles.

No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time - but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.

Sometimes we have to think very clearly about the unthinkable because the unthinkable sometimes happens.

The military has to think in terms of worst case scenarios. In a sense, they have to play the pessimist.

The challenge of our times is to leave nothing to chance.

Processes break in two ways. They break because they don't have the right checks and balances and because they don't have the right execution.

I am someone who hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.

Trust, but look for the exits.

It pays to be prepared.

Almost everything I do when I approach an operational problem comes from the time I've been in space. It's a way of organizing your thoughts. We use problem-solving; what we call "what-if-ing." What if this happened? What would we do? We go over plan B, C, D, E, F, and whatever else, depending on the criticality of what we're doing. This kind of thing can be applied almost everywhere, even at home.

We hope all danger may be overcome; but to conclude that no danger may ever arise would itself be extremely dangerous.

It is better to have a bad plan than no plan.

Then you realize that the preparation and the planning of this small army of people trying to head to the single aim of creating a work that's going to excite people is very risky. Of course, the odds are that it's not going to work out because there are too many possibilities of it going wrong.

Always think, 'what's the worst that can happen' and have some kind of strategy to deal with it

I'm like a monkey. You don't let go of one branch until you get a hold of the other.

Never depend on those luck moments – they are gifts – but instead always build your own back-up plan.