Broadleaf Capital International is a specialist risk management consultancy. Our expert team brings decades of experience, leading methods and a deep understanding of uncertainty and how it can be understood and managed. We operate around the world.
We facilitated a risk assessment for a small biotechnology start-up company, using an expanded risk analysis process. The outcomes allowed the company to set priorities for dealing with the risks it faced, improving controls and implementing assurance activities. Significantly, half of the most important risks had beneficial consequences.
A condensed version of Dr Dale Cooper's resource paper 'Headline risks: seeing the big picture' was published in the November issue of Risk Management Today, volume 27, number 9, page 140, 2017.
Complexity is mentioned in professional discussions from astrophysics to zoology. There is a sense that previous generations led a simpler existence and did not have to deal with it. Understanding whether this is true or not can help to put into perspective present day efforts to handle complexity. A complete history of complexity and efforts to cope with it would be an enormous undertaking but useful insights can be gained from an interesting paper written almost sixty years ago. In language that would not seem out of place today, Charles E. Lindblom described the dilemma of addressing systems with no ordered cause-effect relationships using methods based on systems that do have ordered cause-effect relationships. The challenges he described still exist but there are now ways to address complexity directly rather than try to fight against it or pretend it does not exist.