Failure Analysis: How Banks Can Turn Adversity Into Advantage

Failure isn’t just something to avoid—it’s something to study. This episode of the ProSight Banking Strategies podcast dives into how banks can turn past adversity into a competitive edge through structured analysis, better decision-making, and a shift from reactive to proactive risk management.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Frank Devlin: In this episode, we’re exploring what banks can learn from failure, not just reacting to it, but systematically analyzing it to improve risk management. Our guest brings a unique perspective grounded in years of real estate investing and commercial real estate finance, where deals rarely fail for a single reason and outcomes often hinge on how risks interact over time. We’ll discuss the concept of failure analysis, what it is, how it works, and why it’s more than just a postmortem, and how techniques drawn from different fields can be applied to bank risk. From understanding shared patterns of breakdown across portfolios to better anticipating where things can go wrong, this conversation looks at how to move beyond hindsight to build stronger, more forward-looking risk practices, and ultimately make better decisions before problems surface.

I’m Frank Devlin, and this is the ProSight Banking Strategies Podcast. We’re here to inform you on the top trends, challenges, and opportunities in banking today. Formed from the merger of BAI and RMA, trusted organizations that have been supporting financial services leaders over 100 years, ProSight is a leading non-lobbying connector of people and information with deep expertise in risk, fraud, compliance, and retail and commercial banking. Our purpose is to empower financial services leaders to strengthen and advance our industry through training and insights, as well as tools and resources like this podcast. Now, I’d like to introduce our guest, Donald Sheets, a lecturer in real estate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Donald also has two dozen years of leadership experience on Wall Street across several investment management firms. Welcome, Donald. Perhaps we could get started with you sharing a bit more about your background in real estate and real estate investing before we tackle failure analysis.

Donald Sheets: Absolutely. And this might make mom proud. My background’s mostly been on the buy side in either private equity or hedge fund platforms and strategies. In a bit of an atypical area of commercial real estate, got my teeth cut on restructurings and turnarounds at the asset level and then eventually morphed that into versus playing defense playing offense and building a couple business strategies around the acquisition of discounted commercial mortgage debt. And so what these platforms would do is acquire loans at discounts from insurance companies or banks or special servicers or other investment funds. I had a team in-house that could work these loans out and ultimately resolve them.

The kind of lens that informed a lot of my career on Wall Street was being able to look at business plans that obviously didn’t quite work. I wouldn’t say fully failed, but certainly on the spectrum of failure didn’t hit the mark and still be able to go long on those situations. And what effectively emerged was the ability to do a fair amount of pattern analysis. And that really, when I think about the denominator of what my experience within CRE has been, has been able to identify patterns that either were mispriced or misunderstood by the market and afford our investment platforms the ability to find investment themes and ultimately resolve them profitably for our investors as a result of that.

Devlin: So it sounds like you’ve been doing something along the lines of failure analysis for a very long time, whether you classified it in that way.

Sheets: Or really even realized it. Yes, exactly.

Devlin: So now you’re teaching a course. Can you briefly define failure analysis, what it is, how it works, why it’s important at a very general level?

Sheets: Absolutely. The idea of there being some class around this at the graduate level had been percolating with me probably for nearly 10 years. And sometimes in the creative process, what can be powerful is to chew on something for a little while and then all of a sudden you probably have a bit of the aha of how it could crystallize into something. Despite two dozen plus years or so that I was working at these investment funds, I had been teaching on a clinical basis at Columbia NYU, distressed investing. And that elective at each university was at the graduate level. And we were looking at how to evaluate commercial mortgage and commercial real estate investing through the prism specifically of distress. And that was itself leading edge back in 2008, 2009 when I developed these classes and then taught them for about 13 years at each of those two schools.

And so that was the formulation point of how we could then potentially teach failure. So first for many years teaching distressed investing and then seeing credibly that we could develop some casework around failure analysis as an entire standalone course. And that’s exactly what we did. So the thinking here and the title of the course that we’re using at Harvard is learning from failure is to think about first, patterns and how to understand patterns. But importantly, and we’ll probably get to this in some of the conversation, is thinking about how the human mind works because we can’t just talk about patterns without understanding things like cognitive bias and actually how decision-making is done and how we as humans digest and see information and then potentially put some structure in place to take that information, analyze it, and then importantly, potentially learn from it. And so that’s kind of the genesis of the class.

Devlin: And so as you approach the way you teach this class and have taught the concept in the past, are there certain schools of thought that you’re tapping into best practices? There’s, I know Six Sigma looks like they have something at the FMEA. What are the background, the basis for how you teach failure analysis?

Sheets: So one of the first things I did when the percolation was happening a few years ago was almost like any business plan that someone might put together was what’s the competitive landscape? Maybe I’m thinking about how to potentially teach something like this, but is it taught somewhere else? And so I had a TA go out and survey a bunch of different graduate level programs primarily in graduate schools of business, if you will, to see if failure is taught, really, in any construct. What I found surprisingly was no. And if it was, it might be a session within an overall class or maybe a two to three session module at best, but there was nothing out there in the MBA programs and there are a lot of them that had any kind of offering that was talking about how to not just study failure, but how to learn from failure.

What I did see out there a little bit and the business press, whether it’s Harvard Business Review or Rotman or the Stanford Business Review, was that if people did speak about failure in the business context, it tended to be in venture capital which tends to skew toward technology. And it was that mindset of, “Oh, well, fail fast, find silver lining, pivot and move.” And I was like, well, okay, that’s helpful, but it felt like there was much more that could be thought about and done here. What then piqued the interest even further was realizing that, hey, look, in business, we’re not necessarily doing a lot of rigorous pattern analysis, but when I look at the rest of the world and other domains of where enterprises operate, there is a fair amount of regimented pattern analysis. And in that kind of percolation of thinking, I was like, well, the first thing that really comes to mind here is medicine.

There’s this concept of postmortem analysis. And for those of us that maybe studied Latin or the classics growing up, postmortem means obviously after death and what is an analysis effectively on a corpse that is done that is studyable on a structured methodical way to prevent potentially what caused this death? In medicine, there is a lot of structure around pattern analysis and let’s call it event analysis versus just failure analysis that happens there. So I was like, well, clearly in medicine, the almost second nature… Oh, and by the way, in engineering, there happens to be a lot of failure or event analysis.

At the risk of us keeping on this death theme is that every plane crash is methodically studied, as just an example. I mean, you would have the engine makers, you’d have the plane makers, you’d have the NTSB, you’d have the FAA, you’d have a host of organizations and stakeholders part of a rigorous structured formulaic pattern analysis. But what triggered me to get more interested here was realizing that this isn’t a foreign concept. It just isn’t happening in a business context in any formulaic way. And that’s where I started digging.

Devlin: And you started applying it to real estate. If we could just back up a little bit, the postmortem analysis, how much of that do you actually get into with your students? Are they just looking at everything through the prism of financial investing and real estate or are they learning how things happen in other industries in engineering in the military? Maybe even, I think you’ve in the past mentioned sports, there is a, kind of a [inaudible 00:09:25] failure analysis as well

Sheets: Indeed. Yeah. So what happens is I start the class with less of a lens on our industry specifically, whether that’s finance or real estate or even generally speaking, business, and step back a little bit and think about what is this aspect of failure analysis. And the first thing we do in the class is take the word, failure, away and that gets into this bias construct that I briefly touched on. When I use the word failure and you typically open our first class session asking people to define it, we get a broad spectrum of what people think the word means. And in its simplest sense, failure is effectively an event that was expected that didn’t happen as expected. That’s pretty neutral. And so what I first do is try to neutralize the word and rather than use failure, we begin using the word event for the rest of the course, but we clearly use failure as the hook.

And what that does, Frank, to the point that you’re talking about in terms of these other domains is it neutralizes how we talk about what we’re going to do here because typically people avoid failure and it has a lot of negative connotation, which means that it skews, for instance, what’s the motivation of why we would study it? When I take failure and turn it to event, subtly it can begin turning from stick to carrot. And what does that mean? Well, it means it might change incentives and rationale and intention of its study and not just its study, but its translation to learning and actually process improvement from compliance or risk management, the stick, if you will, and might turn it into the carrot, which is the incentive, which means that we actually can become quite better.

We can maximize profit, we can minimize loss, we can gain market share in doing this practice and it not becoming just a risk mitigant or a compliance function. And that’s where it can start really being quite interesting, not just in the realm of commercial real estate or even just generally finance or banking, but in business in general and no one is looking at it that way.

Devlin: And so I know that in risk management you would like the incentives to be to raise your hand if there is a problem, even it means it might reflect poorly on you. And like you’re saying, make that a carrot situation because there is that bias, that kind of human nature to not want to have one of your mistakes called out or your team’s mistakes called out. Making it neutral is good. Maybe even if it’s possible to make it a positive to talk about failure, but again, maybe that takes a culture shift.

Sheets: Absolutely. And to that point based on what you were getting at in terms of these other domains, a very good analogy to the carrot versus the stick is in sports. And I think it’s also a very understandable one for people outside of the few examples I was raising with in medicine, or let’s call it engineering, where we see, I just gave two limited examples within those realms, but call it 10, 15, 20 years ago within sports, there was no really structured way that people were looking at a pattern or failure analysis in this domain. But there were some curious coaches and some curious organizations that began experimenting with learning from failure, if you will, within elite athletics. And it wasn’t clearly for risk or for compliance because that was inapplicable in this context. If you are an Olympic training team group or you are a pro football team or a pro hockey team, you didn’t have risk and compliance actually motivating this pattern or failure analysis. It was, we need to win more, i.e. What’s the carrot?

Devlin: What’s the opportunity?

Sheets: Exactly. And might we be able to do this by more methodically studying what’s happening not just on the field, but what’s happening off the field. And this is still a nascent and developing area, which is why I like to use it, is that within this domain, let’s call it elite athletics, it’s all about the carrot and not at all about the stick of we are going to study failure and we’re going to study events purely out of greed to win, and that’s fine. And to do that, it’s studying nutrition, it’s studying what happened through game tapes, it’s studying a lot of data and having a rigorous framework to look at it. There were clearly some resisters early to mid-stage of how this was looking. And what became clear to those that were later in adoption was that they were losing edge to coaches or teams or groups that were not using this kind of framework on a post-game or post-season analysis.

And so a very understandable kind of use here is that to win more or to gain market share or to gain profitability or to mitigate loss is that there’s some real edge to happen here and not just be, again, purely a risk management function.

Devlin: Right. So I know teams and baseball metrics evolve to the point where they realize if you adjust the way you swing the bat and you get the launch angle, you hit more home runs and that’s better than singles. And so that changes everything, thinks get more granular, you study everything. Do you think that just an increase in data could help drive failure analysis and applying it in risk management or banking and really in other places as well?

Sheets: I think in some ways, yes. In some ways it could also falsely give impressions that there’s understanding when it’s just quantum of information. And the reason I say that is its funny because I’ve been making a couple remarks on an adjacent topic area around what I call process theater to the point that you’re asking, which is can data enable this? Sure, but data itself or the theater of having a lot of data at our fingertips many times can be misunderstood as actually understanding something when it’s just data at the end of the day.

And so the reason I’m trying not to be too cheeky about this, but I suspect many times when the natural point of inquiry here around technology implementation to be part of it, I would say yes, when done right and when it doesn’t necessarily obfuscate the root of what we’re trying to understand here, because sometimes it’s stepping back and seeing the world less through a lot of data and more through, well, what really are we taking away here and what is important in this vantage where we can get lost in aspects of artificial intelligence or data that’s coming in and it just being so much that we don’t, A, know really what to do with it, or we get skewed by just what’s available in data and therefore actually close doors of what is observable because perhaps we can’t have the type of data that’s replicable or the type of data that might be less quantifiable and therefore we’re actually missing part of our analysis because it’s not “data-able.” If that makes sense.

So I don’t know if that’s a heavy answer, but in some ways I’m a fan clearly of having information, but sometimes we confuse the presence of information with actual knowledge.

Devlin: If we could take some of the principles now of failure analysis and what you’re teaching your students and apply them to your lifelong interest in real estate and commercial real estate investing, and then a little bit later we’ll talk about bank risk management. What are some ways that you can see or you have used failure analysis to prevent repeating a mistake or optimize an opportunity to surface failure patterns that have happened and avoid those? Does anything come to mind there?

Sheets: Part of what we do in the class, many times at Harvard, what we use is the case method. So rather than try to teach something that would be in a traditional textbook sense or in a lecture-based sense, we try to give real-life examples to your point, Frank, of how is this relevant? So I developed casework from scratch because the program that I teach in is commercial real estate. These cases have an aspect of commercial real estate to them. However, that’s not the important part. They could be very relatable to other business types, business units, particularly banking. And so it’s a little less industry-specific, much more just commercial specific of, hey, within a profit-based enterprise, how might we do this? But it sets up and I provide tactically rather than talk about the merits of analyzing failure or event analysis here, we actually try to do it.

We go from merits and cognitive bias and understanding what biases into, well, how do you set up actually a process to do this? So let’s not talk about the process. Let’s actually run a process. How would we, just like post-mortem analysis is done with a medical and surgical team, for instance. How might we set up the process? Who runs it? How is it recorded? Is it not recorded? Who’s taking notes? Where are the notes saved? What’s the communication channel? Are meetings open to everyone? How are one-on-ones developed? How are five to ones developed? It’s literally kind of nuts and bolts of if we’re an enterprise that’s curious about doing this, one, how do we do it? And then two, the important translatable piece that is here is, well, this isn’t just going to be a history lesson or just a lessons learned retreat for the weekend.

If this is going to be part of our business process, then how do we actually take what we’re doing here and inform our processes and then come back and continue having a feedback loop around this information and so that we could even develop, and I know this is going to sound like a lot at once, but pre-mortem analysis rather than postmortem. And so instead of just looking backward at things, how can we begin looking forward at things? And that may sound a little esoteric, but that’s really where this develops.

Devlin: Because I know that in terms of geopolitical risk, a lot of practitioners like to map out what’s happened in the past, learn lessons, but then there’s also history might rhyme but doesn’t repeat itself and still need to take into account if you’re studying something from 30 years ago or three years ago, yes, some things apply, but some of the atmospherics and the environment are different. So you can’t just rerun something, “Oh, we learned not to do X, Y, and Z.” And then just do that same thing you did three years ago or 10 years ago.

Sheets: Clearly context changes and so nothing’s going to look exactly the same, but when you start seeing the rhyming or the patterns, it really enables a vocabulary also within the organization to be able to do this kind of pre-mortem mindset so that people are familiar with not just, “Hey, this is what we’ve observed in the past.” But we asked the questions correctly. Have we observed the data correctly? Have we neutralized the discussion around what risk factors might be? It just becomes a cultural thing more than just trying to directly relate pattern to pattern. It becomes the intellectual curiosity in part of the DNA of, for instance, an investment process or a credit process. It’s just one additional dimension of how this entity operates is using this kind of lens.

Devlin: You build that into the overall process. It doesn’t exclude everything else, it’s built in.

Sheets: Exactly.

Devlin: I believe you, of course, mentioned something about considering multiple stakeholders and their roles in causing and mitigating failures. And that really made me think about lending and how you have your deal with a borrower, but they also have other deals and other counterparties and there’s so many things that can happen. How do you think that multiple stakeholders and their role in either failure or success, how does that play into what you’re teaching in this course and how does that resonate with lenders?

Sheets: At the risk of this sounding like grandiose or overly ambitious is that if we were able, for instance, to translate event analysis into the banking sector, generally speaking, as just another facet of what is a complementary credit skill and not necessarily compliance skill, but a credit skill, i.e. carrot, not stick, is that this really could ripple, for instance, through other parts of quote-unquote  business market. If banking, for instance, becomes a bit of a thought leader, again, failure or event analysis, then it very well could trickle to other parts of the economy to their bankable clients.

And again, I know this sounds overly ambitious, but my objective here isn’t to go out and try to Six Sigma the broad economy, but there really is opportunity here for the banking sector to lead and not lead through the prism of we want to be good corporate citizens, but lead because we want to gain market share, we want to mitigate credit loss and we want to index ourselves into the best borrowers possible to deliver value to our shareholders because we are a for-profit enterprise. And there could really be first-mover and early-mover advantage to those that get it, if that makes sense.

Devlin: It does. So are you talking about things like making sure you’re using this failure analysis to do a maybe even better job of weeding out concentration risk of maybe everyone was affected by the pandemic, but maybe if you had though a little bit about, I’m not sure what other episodes or events would apply, you could get through a real bad patch, maybe not unscathed, but less scathed. I mean, are you talking about things like that?

Sheets: Absolutely. If it really becomes less of look back, what are our lessons learned and maybe we can not repeat those failures, that’s like first order. Beyond that, it goes really second and third order, which is getting that mindset of pre-mortem. Let’s talk about that. And really understanding and having a rigorous process of constant assessment along the way really becomes interesting when it’s less of, again, just static lookback or static look forward, but something that every quarter, every year, just like financial reporting, every quarter, every month, every year, banks are putting together financial reports for stockholders, for regulators, for internal constituents as part of that systematic financial reporting process could be a prism of how some event analysis can look and it would not be dissimilar than other parts of how on a basic level some risk analysis is done and translating that a little bit to some future thinking business activity.

I would think it’s a little less of, “Oh, hey, that’s great. We’ve learned that banking in these three regions has led to outsized losses and therefore we’re going to migrate back from these areas.” A lot less of that or a lot less of, “Let’s avoid medical equipment, blah, blah, blah.” I’m just giving examples, but much more powerful of really deeper patterns and deeper analysis here. What’s brilliant out there is the FDIC who has a very vested interest in mitigating loss because obviously they absorb loss when banks fail, is they’re quite good at post-mortem analysis. And in fact, they publish it. Unfortunately, most of the world ignores it and a lot of the banking world actually ignores it. They did an incredible study a few years after the GFC, maybe it was like a five-year lookback and came out with some very key findings, which informed a little bit of their reconnaissance.

Devlin: Post SVB, the regulators did a pretty thorough job as well.

Sheets: Yeah, there was what I would’ve considered rigorous and transparent look back. I’m not saying that’s everything I’m talking about, but it’s a piece of it. So it kind of exists within, let’s just call it the banking universe. However, from a regulator, i.e. the stick, not necessarily the carrot. And they came out with, again, what were some interesting patterns that have been time held on concentrations, types of deposits, things like this. That’s first order. I really think there are second and third order applications for this outside of…

Devlin: So event analysis is the beginning and then you apply that, dig deeper and then you start to spin that into what your plan is and how you react to it. It sounds like react and more than react, kind of strategize.

Sheets: Yes.

Devlin: So clearly this is something that is not just about CRE, it can be applied to other kind of portfolios at the bank you’re saying could be business opportunities. Folks on Wall Street, how much have you socialized your ideas about, I’m going to try to call it event analysis, take away the stigma not value analysis. What are they saying about it? Have you heard from anyone in the industry they like this idea? How do they react to it?

Sheets: Yeah, it’s interesting in terms of how you frame it and who you frame it with. I would say that at this point it’s very early stage. And so what I love about this discussion that we’re having right now is that I first wanted to get enough meat on the bone and structure in, let’s call it the class setting, on so that I could also learn more about it. I mean, I’ll strip my ego down and say that it’s not like I’m coming at this with 25 years of PhD experience, but in many ways the clinical experience or i.e. the field experience that I had out there, not just observing it, but putting my own money alongside my investor’s money in pattern analysis has just given a different lens. And the reason I’m saying that is that I look at this less through an academic perspective and much more through a pragmatic and applied and tactical perspective.

And so I first wanted to see, hey, is this teachable/doable in some experimental way? I’m seeing, absolutely yes. And I’m now, Frank, to your question, just beginning to engage some entities with would there be an interest in studying yourself is what this is. And in a way that it requires a level of vulnerability, authenticity, some transparency. It doesn’t mean that you’re opening your entire organization up and you’ve got a McKinsey running around looking for problems. That is not at all what this would be. It would be a very narrow tailored experimentation that would be low-stakes, low-risk to get a couple reps of how might this look within this type of business unit . And so what I’d say, Frank, is frankly, I’m interested now in finding partners who would have an interest in exploring this and being an early mover on, hey, is there something here and it not becoming a big consulting project or a big bull in a China shop, but much more of an incremental case by case application.

So you’re kind of finding me, Frank, right now at the stage of now approaching organizations who would have an interest in doing something like this. I think the banking industry, frankly, is ripe for something like this in terms of it being intriguing and not being a thought exercise, but again, being something that can actually maximize outcomes.

Devlin: It definitely links up with a lot of what we learn about compliance and risk and the idea of raising your hand and surfacing things earlier and the proper culture where there’s more transparency and that sort of thing. But I’m wondering if you have a sort of elevator pitch to explain this or something that’s very easy to explain like we have the SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Is there something that’s sort of easy to remember or latch onto if you’re talking about event analysis, like you mentioned there are actually three steps, it’d be something along those lines. How do you explain it to someone quickly and so it’s really understandable?

Sheets: What’s intriguing about this is because of the stage of where we are, it’s not like I’m out there pitching. But if I had to actually do something that was, again, part cheeky but part actually real would be rather than saying, “Hey, would you have an interest in being a part of something leading here?” And rather than saying, “Let’s learn from failure,” I would actually reframe that to the point you’re talking about. Can we win from failure? It sounds like it’s, again, I said half cheeky, but it actually reframes it to, can we find a carrot here and a real reason for this to exist within our organization without it becoming overwhelming?

And I would say that at a minimum in terms of, “a pitch,” or a way to frame this is the more you know about yourself, whether you’re a person or an organization and what your patterns are, the absolute stronger you can be unless you really see the world through a different perspective is that there could be no downside to something like this. That is the simplest way to explain it and those leaders that have either had life experience or entity experience that can relate to this get it immediately. Early stage, I’m glad to have actually the stage here on this discussion together to share this, but we’re effectively cracking the egg here now on this area.

Devlin: Perhaps part of it is just establishing a bit more that ethic, that culture of looking back and being more comfortable with, like you’re saying, a postmortem, talking about things that have not gone well, whereas in industries energy as well and transportation, that’s almost second nature. They know they’re going to dig into that and it’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s got to be done, otherwise you’re not going to improve and fix it for the next time. I think I heard you say earlier that this is the event analysis, failure analysis, it’s built in, you’re going to do it as a matter of course. So you don’t see this as just something after a particularly bad quarter or a particularly bad loss or an investment that goes awry. What’s the level where you build this up and create the analysis?

Sheets: I think first it feels like it would be getting an organization comfortable with how is look back or what we call retrospective analysis, which is basically the postmortem, if you will, in a static basis where the event is concluded or is substantially concluded and now we’re going to in an organized fashion, look back and do a structured analysis. That would be foundational base one, level one and do several reps of that just so you can get framework, process, vocabulary down. And then it morphs into, okay, well, we’re not going to do retrospective. Let’s actually think of prospective. Oh, wow. So we’re going to effectively take what is the methodology and rather than look back, look forward. And so before we’re making credit decisions, before we’re making allocation decisions or strategy pivots or whatever, we’re going to apply the methodology through what is effectively pre-mortem analysis in a very structured way.

And you really can’t do pre-mortem intelligently unless you really know how to do post and that’s the next Lego building block. It’s very different. The first reaction people have is, “Oh, that’s just like investment committee when you come with risks and mitigants.” I’m like, “Yeah, it touches a little bit of pre-mortem, but this is much more thoughtful.” And then what happens, I think, Frank, that this becomes part of the DNA where on an ongoing basis through the life of a borrower relationship or the life of an entire vertical of a business line is that you are looking back, looking forward constantly at that P&L and that organization at the entity level, you’re looking at things and then down at the deal level or the credit level or the loan level, you’re also doing it.

And again, this may sound like multidimensional chess happening here, but this analysis is done organizationally, like at the organization, kind of a level up, and then down in the field at, let’s call it again, the investment level, the individual loan level, the market level. And so it’s kind of happening twice and they inform each other in some ways, but what this becomes is less just episodic and really becomes just cultural is kind of how this looks. So that’s a bit of the thinking.

Devlin: I was wondering if we could wrap up with you thinking a little bit about maybe since you’ve taught this class, anything new that you’ve realized or learned or maybe your students have shared with you that they’ve learned, never thought about before about this overarching concept of how we learn from failure and how we should embrace that despite the discomfort that comes from analyzing that.

Sheets: Yeah, maybe two things I would share. One is what’s great now is it’s a year or two sometimes after the class, they’ll come back and be like, they’re like, “I’ve never been able to stop thinking about failure in a way that this also applies to my life.” I’m not trying to make this grandiose, but what happens is when it becomes actually powerful, we talk about it for entities, but many people who go through the class, because I introduce a real segment here of applying it to self, not just applying it to organization, because if one can apply it to self, then you become enabled to actually see it in other dimensions, is that they found it to be incredibly powerful as just a life tool, either as a manager, as a citizen, as a leader, as a spouse, as a parent, as a whomever, it kind of lit something. I would say, again, I’m not looking to go out and change the world, but that has been a very gratifying piece of this.

And that’s why I’m saying it becomes a cultural thing sometimes, not just a single episodic. And the last I would leave it with is that it comes back to a classic Hemingway sentence in The Sun Also Rises, which is, it kind of asks the question, “How did you become bankrupt?” As part of the dialogue and the quick back was “Gradually, then suddenly.” And the reason I say that is that what we find consistently through event analysis and particularly failure analysis, and it’s not just bankruptcy, but this has a broader application, is that there’s gradual things that transpire and it’s very quickly or very suddenly typically is when they illuminate. And that’s very much the case when we start looking at pattern analysis.

Devlin: Great. Wow. Ending on a Hemingway quote, I can’t top that. I’m just going to sign off and say goodbye. So thanks so much, Donald, for sharing your perspectives with our ProSight Banking Strategies podcast. And to our listeners, thanks for spending your valuable time with us. If you like this, please spread the word. I’m Frank Devlin.

The views expressed by the speakers are the speakers’ own and do not reflect the views of ProSight Financial Association, BAI, or RMA. The views expressed and information shared are of a general nature and are not intended to address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. No one should act upon any such views or information shared during this podcast without appropriate professional advice after a thorough examination of the particular situation.