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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Croesus" data-source="post: 5925815" data-attributes="member: 35019">There's a reason why we talk about risk vs. reward. Doing something has risk. Doing nothing has risk. If a business has a negative event, that doesn't mean management made a mistake.Let's flip this around. Say you were late for work because of a traffic jam. But wait - traffic jams happen, so why don't you leave for work an hour early every day, just in case? That would likely (though not 100%) avoid traffic jams. But then you have to consider the cost. Are you really going to waste an extra hour every day just to avoid a potential traffic jam making you late for work?Quoting from a column published several years ago:To manage risk you can Avoid, Insure, or Mitigate (Max supplied the acronym, AIM).Avoidance means reducing the likelihood that the risk will become an event. Preventive maintenance is one of the most important ways to avoid risk. Staff training, to increase competence, is another.Insurance includes all tactics that deflect the consequences of risk to someone else. Insurance is the label because that's the best-known way to deflect the consequences of risk...snip...Mitigation means reducing the impact should the risk turn into actual events. Fault-tolerant system design and business recovery planning are well-known risk mitigation tactics. So are cross-training and succession planning.There is, of course, a fourth risk management tactic. It's probably the most popular of them all. It's called hoping. Synonyms are keeping your fingers crossed and denial. Theoretically, you can also accept the risk -- consciously choose to do nothing. Usually, though, acceptance is just another synonym for hoping.To the extent that a negative event is due to tactic four, I agree that you should blame management. But all the other methods of managing risk are appropriate, at one time or another, because they acknowledge the fundamental truth that no one controls everything that happens.</blockquote>

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