Some thoughts on Risk and Resilience
(By Joseph Arhavbarien, MBA)
This subject gives me moments to laugh at times. I remember when for the first time my son was to start swimming lessons.
He stood by the pool side and would not even allow his swim school instructor to convince him to make an attempt to even just 'touch' the pool with the tip of his toes! It was all cries with outburst "dad, I want to go home...not swimming”.
I paid a whole year with no result or enthusiasm to swim!
I was at the verge of giving up.
Two years on, a lot has happened. To amend McDonalds' catch phrase my son is now "loving it"
How does the above relate to risk and resilience?
Risk is the potential for unwanted negatives consequences from some event. In the case of my son (fear of drowning).
Resilience is the ability to prevent, withstand and recover from an event.
Today, he loves swimming and has won some awards.
Risk and Resilience as a subject area embraces virtually every facet of life. Hence, this article is more of an introduction to a subject with a much greater scope to be explored.
Be it in the domestic environment or work settings, things happen in life or in business operations, that have negative consequences, this is failure.
A common operations principle state:
"Failure will always occur in operations; recognising this does not imply accepting or ignoring it"
We must ensure processes are well designed to minimize risk of failure.
Have you identified what could lead to failure in your domestic, work or business environment?
In industrial settings, a prerequisite to achieving operations and process resilience is to understand where failure might occur and what the consequences of failure might be by reviewing all possible causes of failure.
Often it is the 'failure to understand failure' that leads to excessive disruption.
Each cause of failure for example loss of product shelf life, cross contamination, failed delivery just to highlight a few also needs to be assessed in terms of the impact it may have.
Only then can measures be taken to prevent or minimise the effect of the more important potential failures.
I am available to explore more on this with interested readers.
Have a great week as you consider this subject.