The Risk Management Continuum
I’d been in the room for about five minutes and had already heard Brian (not his real name) tell me at least three times in a variety of...
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JULIAN TALBOT
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4 min read
Peter Drucker was wrong
"What gets measured gets managed." - Peter Drucker [1] Like many cliches, "what gets measured gets managed" is correct enough to be...
6 min read
Risk BowTie Method
Bow-Tie is one of the simplest but most helpful risk management tools in the risk management arsenal. And it's highly visual.
3 min read
How to measure ALARP
ALARP (As Low As Reasonably Practicable) is a fundamental concept in risk management, as it should be in life in general. It expresses...
6 min read
Likelihood versus consequence management...
It often seems that as a species; at least in most societies; that we spend most of our efforts on managing risks after they occur,...
3 min read
Swiss Cheese Theory
I love Swiss cheese. And I’m not talking about the dairy comestible. In my view, there are better cheeses out there – but few better risk...
6 min read
Why are dangerous places safe? Lessons from HROs
"I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by...
4 min read
Risk Semantics - aka Terms and definitions
“I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.” Bob Dylan It...
4 min read
What gets measured is NOT what gets managed
"What gets measured, gets managed." Peter Drucker is often attributed with this quote but he probably wasn't the first to say it and the...
4 min read
Risk management should create and protect value
*It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." – Roy Disney ISO31000 (Section 3, Part A) says that risk management...
3 min read
Three fundamentals of Key Performance Indicators
Figure 1: Mockup of a KPI reporting dashboard Measuring performance seems complex (and it is) but let's not lose sight of the basics. The...
5 min read
As High or Low As Reasonably Practicable (AHLARP)
The traditional view of managing risk to be as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) is fine for negative risk. Unfortunately for ALARP,...
18 min read
Believe half of what you see and a quarter of what you read ...
I've worked on five continents, in dozens of industries, in the government, private sector and not-for-profit arena and wherever I went,...
3 min read
Certainty for sale ...
“In this world there is nothing certain but death and taxes.” Benjamin Franklin Certainty, or at least the illusion of it, has become a...
7 min read
Understanding Organizational Risk
My friend Stewart Hayes has been working in risk management for longer than I have (which is longer than either of us remember). As well...
4 min read
(The Actual) Threat Advisory Levels
It seems like we've been at war for a long time. World War II drifted into the Cold War and, more recently, War on Terror, War on Drugs,...
3 min read
Why benchmark?
Every year, we spend billions of dollars on risk management initiatives, often without any subsequent assessment of the effectiveness of...
4 min read
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Fred R. Barnyard
I’m a visual person, and like most of us in the 21st century, I never seem to have a lot of spare time. Perhaps you are also short of...
2 min read
As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP)
As Low As Reasonably Practicable, or ALARP, is one of the fundamental principles of risk management. We neither need nor want, to manage...
5 min read
FAQ 2: Some more questions for ISO31000 doubters...
Following on from last weeks article about ISO31000 ... Is ISO31000 a good risk management approach for me? Chances are good that it is....
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