When risk management is the hazard to prevent rather than hasten

The danger in stopping short by organizing around probabilities and consequences of large infrastructure failure is the notion that the two are independent of each other. You don’t realize what you have before you may well be little more than unforeseen contingencies associated with a chaotic afterwards. Its causality is the last thing you understand and your risk management framework misleads you in thinking otherwise. In reality, to equate system uncertainties and unknown-unknowns with systemic risk is the disaster to forestall rather than hasten unintentionally.

Or to put the point in positive terms. When an experienced county emergency manager told us, “Floods are complex events, they have many variables,” it wasn’t helpful to tell him, as some did, that he’d be better off first simplifying those events for the purpose of risk modeling. To assume he needed to first understand the flooding better ignored that he was already managing the complexity there. The complexity sands away any shield of photo-clarity and reveals the contingencies and exigencies in action underneath.

So what? Infrastructure reliability managers are in an important sense like that top-most weathervane made to take lightning strikes outside so to protect the house underneath. More, such protection against dangers is a public good, and is what we expect from leaders, regulators and policymakers.