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Risky Business: Weighing Threats Versus Opportunities Is Key
Ever since I moved into the resilience world to work on all-things-pandemic, I’ve been dusting off all of my old crisis management books.
But perhaps the pandemic has made me lazy, because instead of buying more books I’ve started watching YouTube videos. I’ve especially enjoyed looking at Dr. David Hillson’s videos to extract key lessons from his career in risk management. He boils it down to three questions:
- What are your objectives?
- What events in the future might positively or negatively impact your goals?
- Which event scenarios are most likely and most important to you?
These questions enable you to craft a strategy for how you’ve chosen to manage your objectives and their associated positive and negative risks in a prioritized manner. It’s traditionally impossible to plan for every, and any, thing that can happen to you, so having a strategy for certain situations will let you place your bets accordingly.
When something unexpected happens, our so-called “fight or flight” response makes it awfully hard to think straight.
