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Risk tolerance thresholds

Everyone has a different pain threshold and likewise, everyone has different risk tolerance thresholds. We use the plural because each one of us has various thresholds, for example, a perceived one and a financial one. Your risk and risk tolerance thresholds made simple Anyone of us, every-day decides to undertake some activities and consciously or unconsciously assumes risks we consider acceptable/tolerable or sometimes intolerable.Think about various activities: Hunting, fishing, driving a heavy vehicle, and finally cooking in one’s house. They…

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Tailings Dams Review Boards and Inspection Reports

Tailings dams review boards and inspection Reports exist because of a voluntary effort by the mining industry to improve and mitigate dams “issues”. In addition, mining companies are under pressure to be more transparent on their “issues”. We discuss below the term “issue”.   UNEP 2017 report and more recently Church of England initiative and ICMM “global code” are all expressions of this growing pressure. Thus, mining companies are requesting the publication of Tailings dams review boards and inspection Reports. Publication…

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Slope Failure Definition

Slope Failure definition is the second step of a slope risk assessment. The first step is, of course, system definition. It is indeed paramount to clearly state what is considered the success of the slope under consideration. Indeed, unless one clearly defines success, failure remains an ambiguous term (Adams, 2015). Generally we define the success of a slope as the fact that: it stands as built and does not afflict operations (traffic, ore recovery, business interruption, H&S). it features slow…

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Deception of Credible scenario

Personal human experience, bounded rationality and deception of credible scenario are important in the context of risk identification.   Risk identification is a fundamental phase of a risk assessment. It intervenes after system and objectives definition. Oftentimes we hear that practitioners consider only credible scenarios in a risk identification exercise. Today we explore why only considering credible scenario is a deception and could lead you to disaster. Incidentally, this might be one of the reasons leading numerous unrealistic risk assessment…

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Antifragile resilient solutions for tactical and strategic planning

We recently discussed with a client Antifragile resilient solutions for tactical and strategic planning. The theme is interesting and warrants publication this week as it raises a number of interesting issues. We use Rx to indicate our client’s Remarks, and Ax to indicate the our related Answers. Fragile – Robust – Antifragile systems R1) I think there is value in characterizing systems into the three groupings that Taleb presented. That is, Fragile – Robust – Antifragile. Because it gets engineering…

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