… variety in risk management

They say variety is the spice of life, and some days uncertainty plays its part and you get some totally unexpected variety.

It seems Trevor Levine (Riskczar) had one of those days this week – at least it looks that way from looking at his tweets and blog posts for a single day.

It certainly brought some interest to risk management on a wintery Friday morning here.

• The risk of watching porn and masturbating at work
  • Trevor, as always, has a firm grip on the big issues in risk management.
  • Just when I thought that the big problem was smokers ducking out of the office several times a day,  we are warned about a new area of employee risk to plan for.
    • Although I do not know of any smokers who feel the need 47 times a day.
  • How would this go down in your Audit & Risk Committee if it suddenly appeared in your Risk Register?
  • That’s the thing about uncertainty, you don’t know what it is going to hand you next!
• Reputation risk at Delta Airlines
  • Still on the job after his earlier post, Trevor highlights a significant story of the day
    • “When a soldier is coming back from war, nothing says thank you and God Bless America like charging him an extra $200 for a fourth bag (containing his weapon no less).”
    • Well said Trevor.
  • However, perhaps we should label this as the risk of sticking to procedures?
    • This is certainly a case where we would expect that the check-in person was able to exercise some discretion and waive the excess baggage fee.
    • But then, how many of us work in (or know) of companies who aim to eliminate deviation from the procedure?
    • Isn’t that why we have BCMS and the rest modeled on ISO9000 – repeatable process?
      • Damn those humans and their desire to introduce uncertainty.
• Despite the fact that he actually has a day job, Trevor then goes on to highlight another shocking reputation issue, this time via Twitter.
  • He draws our attention to the end of  Oprah Winfrey‘s TV show, and this stunning expose.
  • Reputation risk never sleeps.

You can see why I am looking forward to catching up with this intrepid and Extraordinary Risk Gentleman when I am in Toronto later this month.

I believe the appropriate sign off this week is – Go Canucks!