I would like to thank all the like-minded people around the world who agree “risk management is about people and processes and not about models and technology” …
SIPOC: How my wife likes her tea
The term SIPOC is an acronym for supplier, input, process, output and customer. It is a process documentation tool that complements a process diagram (boxes and arrows) and helps drive out the important and seemingly nebulous details of a process. Here’s an…
Operational Risk: The Truth Is Out There
With new episodes of 1990s hit series The X-Files airing in January, it got me thinking about the show’s tagline “The Truth Is Out There” and how it applies to the cloak and dagger world of operational risk. The X-Files…
The winding rivers of risk management
In the novel Time and Again by Jack Finney, he writes about Einstein’s theory of time travel this way: “we’re mistaken in our conception of what the past, present, and future really are. We think the past is gone, the…
Confessions of a risk manager
My 14-year old son recently bought himself a not-so-inexpensive bike with his own money. On the Monday after the purchase he wanted to take the bike to school. I advised against this as he had a pretty lousy bike lock.…
The Night’s Watch and the Wall of risk management
In the series A Song of Ice and Fire which begins with the book A Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin, we are introduced to the Wall and the Night’s Watch. The Wall is an immense fortification on…
Tips on writing a zombie evacuation memo
One of the biggest risks about evacuating your office in the event of an emergency is getting people to actually evacuate safely. You can send all the emails you want about procedures but like the boy who cried were(wolf)…
Physical Security and Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door
Physical security (graffiti?) is something that many risk professionals and auditors take seriously. Most organizations issue access cards to their employees, often configured differently to various floors or parts of the office. It’s well known that thieves will sometimes piggy…
My appetite for risk and cheesecake
On a trip to Portugal and Spain last month, my brother elected to take a minor detour and visited Morocco in the midst of “a revolution sweeping the Arab world” as he wrote on his blog. He was monitoring the…
What Israel can teach us about managing risk
This article appeared in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2009. While we are holding people up at airports and making them throw out bottles of mouthwash and shampoo, the Israelis seem to have figured out how to manage their…