Risk management or risk aversion?
Managers who are under pressure from the media choose risk aversion rather than risk management.
Every time a vague new threat is identified, journalists write two questions in their notebooks before confronting those “responsible”: “Can you rule out that anything can go wrong?” and “Can you guarantee everyone’s safety?” The decision-maker knows that the answer will be stored forever and that nothing in the air, on shore or at sea can either be ruled out or guaranteed and thus chooses the most extreme of the possible safety regimes.
This means that our public safety practice has large, random anomalies. We have declared a “zero risk” target for the airline industry while being at times willing to take considerable risks when transporting school pupils by bus on icy, narrow and very steep roads. We are constantly establishing more expensive and time-consuming airport safety controls that are hardly in proportion to the actual terrorist threat. At the same time, we do not assign a lot of police, border and customs resources to combat a threat that actually takes the lives of thousands of young people: the international narcotics industry. The World Health Organisation similarly felt pressured into an obvious over-reaction to swine flu. Those fighting illnesses that we know kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, from malaria and tuberculosis to diarrhoea and measles, can only dream about being given the resources that the “zero risk” regime to fight the mild swine flu received.
“The war against terror”
Following the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad by terrorists in August 2003, an irrational hunt for internal scapegoats was initiated and resulted in the UN changing from weak risk management to pure risk aversion. We had had a naive belief that our impartial profile and blue protective emblem would protect us from all parties in the “war against terror”. After 2003, it became the practice in many locations to remove international personnel from contact with ordinary people in the areas of conflict to which they had come to help. It thus became almost impossible to carry out meaningful work for the totally unprotected civilian population. Now, the UN is trying to learn from the International Red Cross Committee’s long tradition of risk management on innumerable battlefields since 1864.
Good decisions in emergency situations must avoid both being foolhardy and total risk aversion. Systematic risk management is becoming more and more difficult because expectations and the rate at which decisions are made are increasing. Ministers, health directors and aviation managers, as well as pilots, bus drivers, physicians and aid workers, must weigh the risks up against the benefits when dangers threaten. Transport and medical work and military and humanitarian assignments can be very dangerous at times. Risk cannot be eliminated but it must be limited through measures that are based on experience, expertise and sound common sense.
Reprint from the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
日付: 11 June 2010