What is risk schema?

Example: Two engineers at the same company evaluate a proposal to rewrite the core billing system in a new language. One sees catastrophic risk — months of downtime, cascading bugs, career damage if it fails. The other sees asymmetric upside — the current system is a ticking time bomb, the rewrite eliminates a class of bugs permanently, and even a failed attempt produces valuable architectural knowledge. Same project, same data, same engineers. Different risk schemas. The first engineer's schema weighs losses more heavily than gains, anchors on worst-case scenarios, and treats uncertainty as danger. The second engineer's schema distinguishes reversible from irreversible decisions, evaluates the cost of inaction alongside the cost of action, and treats bounded failure as information. Neither schema is objectively correct. But only one of them is visible to its owner.

This concept is part of Meta-Schemas in the How to Think curriculum.