Hi Frank & all

Frank, thanks for revealing nostalgic music as a legal way to get ‘high’ – will try it out tonight

My work has a slightly different take  on this – many of my clients in government and not-for-profits work within a broadly consistent frame, although the process varies:   

A preferred state or a set of preferred actions are analysed for risk by 1) identifying risk and 2) assessing both likeli hood and impact of that risk

As a guide to priority effort, these can be plotted in a simple quadrant (there had to be a quadrant!) e.g. likelihood on vertical axis, impact on horizontal axis:

The priority effort needs to be focused on upper right risks – this involves strategies and actions to mitigate the impact and/or to reduce the likelihood of that risk biting

Little effort is warranted in lower left, and the others need case-by-case thought (although most will retain some focus on high impact risks, regardless of perceived likelihood)

Compared with ToP, there are lots of helpful consistencies e.g.:

-  generating the preferred state (desired future, practical vision) or initial set of actions or actions to mitigate and avoid risk can be done by focused conversation or  workshop (depending on scale and context)

- addressing ̵ 6;risk’ requires people to layer down to causal factors (I am avoiding ‘root cause analysis’ here because it has become tainted with controversy) –  essentially, to work out what is driving what (what begets what) because if we target risk mitigation & avoidance actions further down the chain of causality, we have can have an effect on multiple identified risks – we sap the strength from ‘below’ - not much different from the approach commonly taken for contradictions (underlying obstacles, underlying reality)

- in explaining this to participants beforehand, I like to have a conversation about road safety, work safety or health to illustrate how a range of factors for both avoidance of likelihood and mitigation of impact might be considered (personal protective equipment is a common one – sometimes we can’t or don’t want to avoid a situation but we can reduce its impact with forethought about having protective apparatus available)

- plotting into the quadrant is a case of using ‘given categories’ (often a workshop) – this is a very useful dialogue for participants about the interaction between the nature of their business, the way they do business, and their working context(s)  

- after this analysis, a set of (targeted) mitigating or avoiding actions is generated (generally a workshop)

All of that is consistent with what Charles has said more precisely – I hope it helps

Best wishes

Mark

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