RE: Reasons for Risk Workshops failing to deliver accurate quantitative information
From:David Harris
Date:December 2, 2008
To: Gavin Lawrence
Group:Risk Economics
Status:Pending
My post may appear critical and I have never been to the UK or used the risk groups there, but the failures are the failures to engineer a poorly controlled and undesigned device (humans and human groups) into the process. No one would design humans as we really exist. Human groups and humans as individuals would be, if we had been engineered, an embarrasment to the designer and never make it to market. Rather than fail at an exponential rate, like all intelligently designed systems, we experience "bath-tub" curve failures. Groups do not like to design around the "bath-tub" curve because we are all intelligent, caring, ethical and well meaning. Such a thing would imply something might be wrong with "us," and that is very threatening. If something is wrong with "us" we might lose our jobs. Being human is very difficult as it is, failing to design around our in built failures is process failure. Facillitators and managers, being human, share these faults. Process should work around this unforgivable fault in managers and facillitators so that the process is better than human, even if the defective machines implementing it are human.

____________________________________________________