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Funston and Wagner have done an excellent job with their book “entitled surviving and thriving in uncertainty: Creating the risk intelligence enterprise”
I was led to this book while doing and environmental scan for a research project in higher education. It has a lot of insights that I want to summarize here and share because I think they are broadly applicable to all of our interests. A lot of the readings in typical management courses on strategic planning are concerned with creating grand visions of excellent futures and many are somewhat less helpful when it comes to implementing a strategy to get to those visions of future.
Regardless of the vision you’re striving for, one thing can be certain: you will experience risk and reward opportunities all along the way and be constantly faced with making judgments about which strategies to resource and which to terminate. One of the consistent failures of strategic planners is a failure to consider implementation and management along the way. That’s why this book on developing risk intelligence personally and within an organization is both timely and necessary.
The book comes in three parts. Part one describes the consequences of failure to conduct effective risk management. Part two describes 10 essential risk intelligence skills. Part three describes how to design risk intelligence into your organization.
I’m going to concentrate on part two: the 10 essential risk intelligence skills. The book devotes a full chapter to each of these skills beginning with the consequences of not having the skill and therefore why it’s important.
Briefly:
- identify your assumptions explicitly: assumptions based planning is a good way to start
- maintain constant vigilance on the risk boundary: deploy information gathering assets carefully
- factor in velocity and momentum: people are herd animals and may start to stampede
- manage key connections carefully: not all nodes in the network are created equal
- anticipate causes of failure: the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.
- verify sources and corroborate information: trust but verify
- maintain a margin of safety: Murphy is out there waiting!
- establish your time horizon: nothing lasts forever
- take enough of the right kinds of risks: fish or cut bait
- develop and sustain operational discipline: check yourself before you wreck yourself
Developing skills in each of these areas is going to be crucial in the future to compete successfully in a dynamic global environment. In later essays I’ll explore each one of these in greater detail.
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