Clouds of Vagueness
Andy Garlick
Risk workshops
I was talking to a colleague the other day who dismissed risk workshops in a rather peremptory way. He painted a picture of a pompous facilitator locked up in a room with 20 or so bored people with better things to do. “In any case we know all the risks and we can always review […]
Fools and liars
My ears are burning (metaphorically). I’ve just read Bent Flyvbjerg’s paper on quality control and due diligence in project management. His theme is the inaccuracy in forecast project costs and benefits. Specifically, the tendency to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits is attributed to the ‘planning fallacy’, a creation of our old friends Tversky, Kahneman and co. The source of […]
Just saying
Well, my 15 minutes didn’t arrive. After all the excitement and taking time to prepare, my interviewers stood me up. I was left to do a Tweet-in on risk with a crowd of project management enthusiasts. I guess it was roughly what I expected: volleys of tweets on a range of subjects with very hard-to-follow […]
#PMChat
I’m looking forward right now to an interesting experience: getting interviewed on the radio. I’ve been asked to talk about my book Estimating Risk. The interviewers are from a US-based internet radio channel, PMChat, who do an interview once a week on Fridays and follow it up with a Twitter chat between their followers. Apart […]
Risk registers, bloody risk registers
It all sounds so simple. Just make a list of all the risks. Then you can start figuring out how to prioritise them and manage them in a comprehensive and visible way. Job done. This was how it seemed back in the early 90s when we took some tools that had proven quite effective for the management of […]
5%
One of my previous Wanderings mused on the power of soundbites, and specifically the encomium, “nothing between men is 3 to 1.” Turned into more mathematical language we get the Harry the Horse Theorem: in a two point sample space where the outcome is affected by the action of humans, managers, or anyone else who thinks […]
What’s the use of risk?
This week the the IRM held its Annual Lecture at the Willis Building. This is a longstanding sponsored breakfast event which used to be held at the old Willis building at Ten Trinity Square. It’s usually a thought-provoking occasion though since Willis’s move to Lime Street health and safety considerations have somehow stopped them dishing up bacon and sausage sandwiches. Such […]
Three to one
The power of a nice soundbite … The title of this site is based on a quotation that I, personally, find a very evocative expression of the risk in business problem. I was reminded of another elegant problem framer whilst getting stuck into Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s final volume of his trilogy on risk. This, like […]
The profession that knows it all
The theme which underpins Clouds of Vagueness is the inherent difficulty of mastering an uncertain future and the inadequacy of our standard risk management techniques to help with this. So I was delighted to see the paper by Michael Power of the LSE in the journal Accounting, Organisations and Society, with the provocative title The risk management of […]
Risk appetite – a bad idea
It’s a truism that you can’t do anything – or even nothing – without taking risk. This is an important issue for all organisations, but the discussion of what risk to take has become unnecessarily obscured. Specifically it has become bogged down in the unhelpful concept of ‘risk appetite’ and this has added to the […]
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