Tag: risk
🔗 Decision making matrix for alpine climbing May 13th, 2025
Great example of a simple risk framework in action.
Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #4: Quantitative Risk Revisited January 28th, 2025
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.
Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk January 17th, 2025
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!
Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model January 16th, 2025
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.
Thinking About Risk: Sidebar #1: "Exposure" January 15th, 2025
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?
Thinking About Risk: Mitigation December 10th, 2024
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.
Thinking About Risk: An introduction to thinking about risk December 4th, 2024
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.
🔗 Hierarchy of Controls | NIOSH | CDC March 20th, 2024
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.