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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Course on Rational Risk and Crisis Management

We present our next endeavor: Course on Rational Risk and Crisis Management in Kuala Lumpur. This course is suitable for anyone who is involved in process hazards, risk quantification and preparation of 360 degrees, holistic, ISO 31000 compliant Risk Assessment for business, operations, projects. You can see the brochure and registration information here. Course on Rational Risk and Crisis Management in Kuala Lumpur The methodologies introduced in this course will greatly benefit money lenders, insurers in addition to corporate managers,…

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Two blasts have rocked saw mills in B.C. in recent times. One in January leveled the Babine Mill (Burns Lake), the other in April destroyed Lakeland Mills (Prince George).

Two blasts have rocked saw mills in B.C. In both cases, unfortunately, there were casualties. And in both cases, the blasts were apparently due to sawdust.   In both cases official inquiries are still ongoing In both cases official inquiries are still ongoing, but the media have been filled with hypotheses and discussions. Reportedly (Globe and Mail, April 27th) “the B.C. Government waited until the second catastrophe this week to issue province-wide guidelines, inspection regimes, deadlines and, possibly, new regulations”.…

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Resilience: A new buzzword? Discussing the differences between risk and resilience improvement studies.

Discussing the differences between risk and resilience improvement studies. Let’s start by asking ourselves if our book « Improving Sustainability through Reasonable Risk and Crisis Management (Oboni F., C. Oboni,, ISBN 978-0-9784462-0-8, 2007) could instead bear the title “Improving Resilience through Reasonable Risk and Crisis Management “? First of all let’s note that some authors rightly consider and explicitly state that Risk Assessment/ Risk Management are the first step towards a resilience improvement study, and remain at the heart of…

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Our judgements are clouded by prejudices and misconceptions.

Our judgements are clouded by prejudices and misconceptions. Indeed, we humans often assess the probability of an event by asking ourselves if there are “cognitively available” examples. Those are readily available through memory as Kahneman (Nobel Prize in Economics) and Tversky demonstrated in a series of papers published between 1971 and 1984. Among those papers the most popular is likely the one entitled “Prospect Theory”,1979 quoted at page 212 in our book. Availability heuristic The phenomenon highlighted by Kahneman and…

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On time, on budget, in control, showing your leadership with sustainable capital expenditure, even during recessions and economic, financial crises.

On time, on budget, in control, showing your leadership with sustainable capital expenditure, even during recessions and economic, financial crises. This is not just a motto!  Riskope can indeed help you solve numerous issues related to that statement. For example: insurance denial situations, add value to you existing risk assessments, enhance risk registers, develop ERM in an ingenious way. We could spell out as follows a subtitle. Let us take the best advantage of what you possibly have and deliver…

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What Fukushima (2010) nuclear accident, the Twin Towers (9/11) terror attack, deadly traffic accidents and Aquila earthquake (Italy), hurricanes have in common?

In this blogpost we attempt an update of Whitman’s and ANCOLD tolerance/acceptability curves. These link casualties from man-made or natural catastrophes, large dams failures to a “tolerable” annual probability. The attempt shows evidence for a G8-wide societal acceptability which has only slightly changed since the original studies by Whitman..   We have already discussed many times how well-balanced and sustainable decisions can only be taken if risks are compared to properly defined risk tolerance /acceptability criteria. Comparison of various risk…

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Results of our Poll on Cyber Warfare and Risk Based Decision Making Procedures.

We promised to publish the results of our Poll on Cyber Warfare and Risk Based Decision Making Procedures.  So here they are, for your information. Results of our Poll on Cyber Warfare and Risk Based Decision Making Procedures. Please note, all percentages are approximate, rounded up to the nearest 5%. 60% of the respondents use a well defined risk glossary. However, only 25% use well-defined risk assessment procedures and 40% expresses probabilities in non numeric ways (qualitative, indexes etc.). Almost…

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Black Swan Mania Part2

From the Black Swan list we can count 1 Political/social Black Swan (Unrest in the Middle East). Now if we look at the last 200 years of Human history we can easily count at least 16 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions) political/social major large scale events. Even without considering two World Wars, but only “a few additional wars since then“, we get, for the sake of simplicity, to a total of around 20. So, now, the question is: how can anyone try to argue that something…

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