Real-Life Decision Making -- Solution
You go to the meeting and tell the truth.
After a lot of thought, you can't in good conscience tell the investors that it's safe to drill at all of the locations that your company is proposing to drill at. Instead, you go to the meeting and tell them most of the locations are good, but that there are some that you can't honestly tell them will be safe.
Working with the investors, you plan to drill at the locations where you can be certain no harm will be caused. Then together, you decide on other locations to explore. These are locations that will replace those that you can't drill at because of the uncertainty.
When you return to your office, your bosses are not thrilled. In fact, for a while you're sure that you're going to lose your job. But after sitting down with your superiors and discussing the options that you have open, you find that maybe one of the proposed alternate sites would be more lucrative.
Once your superiors calm down enough to see the potential hazards of drilling near the fault lines, they are more open to trying alternate locations. You don't lose your job, but it's likely that you'll never be given the opportunity to face the investors again.
"Not all of the decisions I've had to make over the course of my career are clear-cut," says Susanna Gross. She is a seismologist. "Sometimes it's very complicated."