Tag: Risk

📝 What if We Thought About Risk Decisions Differently?

Risk professionals often operate from the assumption that people are inherently bad at assessing risk, especially when it comes to low-probability, high-consequence scenarios. But what if this foundational belief is wrong? What if people are actually pretty good at understanding their own risks? What are some of the implications of approaching risk this way?

July 22nd, 2025 • risk security

📝 Potential causes of accidents in outdoor pursuits (the Meyer/Williamson matrix)

The Meyer/Williamson matrix is a framework enumerating pretty much all potential causes of accidents in outdoor activities. I first ran across it in Deb Ajango’s Lessons Learned II, but I’ve had a really hard time finding an original source to cite. It appears to be taken from various presentations that Dan Meyer and Jed Williamson have given over several decades. There are various PDF versions floating around the web, but they tend to linkrot and I’ve never found a good HTML version. I’m reproducing it here so that I’ve got a good stable HTML version to link to in the future.

June 17th, 2025 • accidents outdoor risk

🔗 Decision making matrix for alpine climbing (#)

Great example of a simple risk framework in action.

May 13th, 2025 • climbing decisions risk

📝 Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #4: Quantitative Risk Revisited

In part 1 of this series, I briefly covered quantitative risk measuring – assigning a numeric value to risk, like “$3,500”, rather than a qualitative label like “medium” – only to quickly recommend against trying it. In this final sidebar, I want to come back to this topic. I’ll spend a bit more time explaining what I see as the pros and cons of quantitative risk measurement – why you might or might not want to use numeric values over more simple risk matrixes.

January 28th, 2025 • risk security

📝 Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk

When you look at a likelihood/impact risk matrix, you might notice that “medium” appears twice – once as high-likelihood/low-impact, and once as low-likelihood/high-impact. These two “mediums” aren’t at all the same!

January 17th, 2025 • risk security

📝 Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model

In the real world, accidents happen when a series of small missteps align to create severe consequences. This is something we call the “Swiss Cheese Model”: imagining a systems failure as a set of “holes” in our layers of defense that all line up to create a series accident.

January 16th, 2025 • risk security

📝 Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #1: "Exposure"

Risk is usually defined as the product of two factors: Likelihood and Impact. However, some disciplines include a third factor: Exposure. What’s that about, and when is it useful?

January 15th, 2025 • risk security

📝 Thinking About Risk: Mitigation

So you’ve identified a risk — now what do you do about it? Here’s a simple framework to help frame discussions about risk mitigation. It’s intentionally very simple, a basic starting point. I’ll present a more complex framework later in this series, but I want to lay more of a foundation before I get there, so we’ll start here.

December 10th, 2024 • risk security

📝 Thinking About Risk: An introduction to thinking about risk

Welcome to a new series about how to think about risk. This series is a crash course, a high-level introduction to the most important concepts and risk frameworks. It’s intended for people who encounter risk from time to time and need some basic tools, but don’t want to make a deep study of it. My hope is that it’ll help you better analyze risk when it comes up for you, and also make it easier to navigate conversations with risk professionals.

December 4th, 2024 • risk security

🔗 Hierarchy of Controls | NIOSH | CDC (#)

Interesting framework for thinking about risk mitigation. Designed for workplace protection, but could be applied to lots of different risk scenarios. Compare with Magoo’s Five Factors, there are some similarities here.

March 20th, 2024 • framework models risk security