The Tipping Point – How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

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Author: Malcolm Gladwell

The idea behind “The Tipping Point” is that you should look at upward trends as an epidemic. Regardless of whether it is a kind of shoes, an illness, or children smoking, curbing crime or problem drug use and curbing it, or a wave of teen suicides in an environment where suicide in that age group did not originally occur, or awareness for safe behavior at work. The central idea is that ideas, products, messages and behavior spread like diseases do: exponentially or not.

Chapter one deals with the three rules of epidemics.

After all, there is more than one way to start an epidemic. It is a function of people who transfer infectious agents, the “agent” in itself and the environment in which the “agent” operates. When an epidemic “starts”, if the situation is out of balance, a social epidemic happens because something happened in at least one of those three areas. These three “agents” of change are called “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context.”

These three rules give an idea to get an understanding of the “social epidemic” phenomenon. It also indicates how we can reach a “tipping point”. The key element here is often that “the devil is in the details”. And often everything works in one situation and not in another. As a result, even testing is sometimes not a luxury. Gut feeling sometimes has to make a step aside.

Chapter two is about “The Law of the Few”.

Three types of personalities are discussed therein: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. These people are essential for so-called social epidemics but are often overlooked for recognizing their importance in our lives.

Connectors are usually the (connecting) central party in a social network, as at the top of a pyramid. You often find them in your network by thinking about people you know by constantly repeating the question: “… whom I know through …”. They often introduce you to their network, we use such people more often than we think.

But Connectors are not the only kind of people who are important / useful when starting a social epidemic. Connectors are “specialists in people.” We trust them to bring us (spontaneously) in contact with other people. In addition, there are people we rely on to bring us into contact with new information. Someone who provides this is a “Maven”. That word comes from Yiddish and means “someone who gathers / accumulates knowledge.” They use their knowledge to keep the market advertising fair, for example. A seller who displays “price reduction” but does not implement it is caught by them. After all, most of us hardly pay attention to the price. But they can be the fear of an unfair shopkeeper in that area. But they do not only exist in terms of market prices. They might as well notice errors in a professional trade magazine of their interest. Or correct a specialist in his own domain.

But they are not passive collectors of information. Once they have solved their case, they also want to tell about it. They want to use it to help others. They take you to make purchases in the best places, for example, or they make purchases for you. They usually solve other people’s problems by solving their own problem. But the opposite is also true: a Maven solves his own (emotional) problems by solving those of another.

What is the difference between a maven and a connector? A connector tells 10 friends about a good restaurant and 5 try it. A maven advises 5 people about the same restaurant and 5 try it. A maven lays much more empathy in his story, so that his advice is relatively more followed. They both have a different strategy, different motives, but both, each in its own way, can trigger a social epidemic.

But there is a third social select group of people: the salesmen. They understand the art of convincing those people who were not yet convinced of the message. They are just as important in tipping a social epidemic as the maven and the connector. Who are they and what makes them so good at what they do?

They love their customers. In conversations they sometimes ask rhetorical questions. They like to help people. They have energy and are enthusiastic. They have charm and likeability. They are happy and optimistic.

Chapter three is about “The Stickyness Factor.”

In the late 1960s, a TV producer, Joan Gantz Cooney, came up with the idea of ​​sesame street. This became a social epidemic in which the alphabet was taught to children. The goal was to spread literacy as a virus in children from disadvantaged families. For 30 minutes and 5 times a week.

The “law of the few” says that the nature of the messenger is a critical factor to “tip” a social epidemic. But the idea / product / message must also be good enough. Is it “memorable”? such that it can bring about a change? Being successful also depends on the stickiness factor. That sounds like it’s straightforward. If we want our words to impress, we often speak emphatically. We also speak louder than. We repeat our claims. Repeating 6x before one remembers it is the maxim of marketing. Coca Cola has hundreds of millions of dollars for that. Sesame Street does not have that. Are there other more subtle ways to make something stick?

The difficult thing is not reaching the customer. The hard thing is to make him stop at the message, read it, remember it and then act upon it. To see what works best, direct marketers do extensive testing. They sometimes work with a dozen variations on the same theme. Conventional marketers have predetermined fixed ideas of what makes their advertising work: humor, splashy graphics, celebrities who recommend the product. Direct marketers do not have these securities. They are the real students of stickiness. The most intriguing conclusions about how to reach the customer come from them.

There is something deeply counter-intuitive with the definition of stickiness that emerges from the book’s examples. We all want to believe that the key to making an impact lies in the inherent quality of the ideas presented. None of the examples in the book changed the content of what they said. They tipped the message each time by tinkering with its presentation. To the presentation of their ideas. A pause after a question a second longer than normal, a muppet behind the word to be read, a large speaking “big bird” next to a person in the street, a small “gold box” in the corner of an advertisement …

The lesson of stickiness is that there is a simple way to package information that can make it irresistible under the right circumstances. All you have to do is find it.

Chapter four is about “The Power of Context (Part One)”

The great example in this chapter is the rise and fall of crime in New York.

Viewing crime as an epidemic comparable to the success of sesame street is somewhat peculiar. Some epidemics need no more than a product and a message. Crime, however, is not about a situation, but an almost infinitely varied and difficult set of behaviors. Malicious behavior is contagious, as the New York case showed.

Epidemics are sensitive to conditions and circumstances of the time and place in which they happen. For example, there is more crime in dirty metros than in clean and tidy subways, both the vehicles and the subways. Crime happens more at night, protected by the dark, than during the day. This is relatively straightforward. The lesson of “the power of context” is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in the context. We are extremely sensitive to it. And the nature of the contextual changes that an epidemic can bring is very different from what we normally expect.

  • Grafitti cleaning up of metro sets and in metro stations. Potential victims are intimidated by it and criminals think they are less likely to be identified and caught.
  • Keep garbage off the streets
  • Replace broken windows (also: broken windows theory: crime is the result of disorder): a broken window leads to anarchy: crime is contagious.

The “broken windows theory” and “the power of context” are the same theory. It states that a criminal does not have fundamentally intrinsic reasons and does not live in his own world. It is someone who is acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all sorts of incentives, and who is persuaded to commit crimes based on his perception of the world.

A great success too: by checking for ‘petty crimes’ such as not paying the metro (‘fare beaters’) and responding to this with police intervention, fines and loss of time in police stations, other crimes with large percentages also went down, such as murder, etc. So there is indeed sensitivity in a complex system. Behavior is therefore a function of social context. Instead of solving big things such as tackling social injustice, structural economic inequality, unemployment, racism, social neglect…, to stop crime this theory says rather that what really matters are the small things.

People can show affection and transfer emotion. This suggests that what we think are internal states, preferences and emotions, is actually powerful and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly insignificant personal influences (“law of the few”). The same applies to our preferences, emotions and behavior from an environment instead of from a person.

Chapter five: “The Power of Context (Part Two)”: the magic number 150.

This is about the role that groups play in social epidemics.

E.g. the size of the group of people in a movie theater also determines how well the film scores in polls. Group decisions and evaluations also produce different results than individual ones. This is partly due to peer pressure and social norms and a number of other types of influences (see previous chapters) (and size of the group) that can play a role in tipping a social epidemic. For example, a connector can be a person with many ties with groups instead of individuals. Such a person realizes that if you want to make fundamental changes in behavior and thoughts, such a change of exemplary behavior needs a community around them (the exemplary ones), where their behavior and thoughts can thrive.

A lesson from “The Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (a book) and from (religious) connectors (e.g. John Wesley) is that small, close-knit groups have the power to increase an epidemic potential of a message, product or idea. A question is “what is a group”? And what are the most effective types of groups to start an epidemic? Is there a rule of thumb? “The rule of 150” provides an answer to this. It is a fascinating example of the peculiar and unexpected ways in which the context helps determine the course of social epidemics.

In small groups people are more closely involved with each other. This is important for the success of community life. Both for the individual and for the group. If your group becomes too large, you do not do enough together. Then you have too little in common and you grow apart. And then the group becomes less close and falls apart. Multiple clans then form within the group.

In a company, if the group becomes too large, it can happen that sales do not know the R&D, nor production, etc. It then becomes more difficult to (quickly) answer the customer’s question. There is no benefit of unity: the people in a complex company have no common relationship and no common knowledge / memory. In psychology, this is called a “transactive memory.” Much of what we know and remember is stored outside our brains. E.g. birthdays in a birthday calendar.

Due to the right group size, peer pressure is also optimal, which increases the liability of one’s own duties and increases the efficiency of the performances.

Chapter six: Case Study, “Rumors, sneakers, and the power of translation”.

With high-tech products, there are often two groups side by side in the word-of-mouth continuum, which communicate little with each other: the Innovators and the Early Adopters. They are visionary and want revolutionary change. They buy new technology before it is completely perfect. They have small businesses, they are just starting and they are willing to take huge risks. They are followed by the Early Majority, which are often large companies. The goal of visionaries is to make a “quantum leap forward”, which is from pragmatic to make a percentage improvement.

A lot of high-tech fails if the Early Adopters find no way to transform it into an idea for the Early Majority, to give it a better ‘Gestalt’, a better, simpler, more significant configuration. That is “translation.” What mavens, salesmen and connectors do with an idea to make it contagious is to change it so that strange details fall away and others become exaggerated so that the message acquires a deeper meaning. Translating the idea of ​​innovators into something that others can understand.

Chapter seven: Case Study, “Suicide, smoking, and the search for the unsticky cigarette”.

Suicide, it turns out, is contagious. It is not rational or even necessarily conscious. It doesn’t seem like a convincing argument that someone did it for you. It is more subtle than that. More like pedestrians crossing a red light. Someone took the lead. Like a kind of imitation. You get permission from the person who gave the example. It may be conscious or not. Suicide of a celebrity has the same effect. In the case of lots of publication through the media, this gives permission to do the same. That can cause suicide epidemics.

Mutatis mutandis: rebellious nature of youth, impulsiveness, risky behavior, indifference to others and precociousness: the cigarette-problem. This seems simple, but it is complex and essential why the war against smoking fails among young people: they want to get rid of a wrong image: they want to believe that smoking is not cool. Wrong ! Smokers are cool and are imitated, so anti-smoking campaigns fail because they are beside the question.

There is also a difference between “contagiousness” and “stickiness”. Contagiousness is a function of the person as a messenger. Stickiness is first and foremost a characteristic of the message, the product, itself.

A first way to fight smoking is to prevent the example functions: the “cool kids” who no longer smoke. A second possibility is that the followers no longer look at the examples, the cool kids, but that they redefine what is cool and look for their examples in adults who do not smoke. But parents often do not have such an influence on their children. So the second option is a lot harder.

Is it bad that teens are experimenting with cigarettes? Because the cool kids do it etc. but as long as they have limited smoking with nicotine levels below the addiction threshold, the use is not sticky. Smoking is then more like a fall than the flu: “easily caught but easily defeated.” Instead of fighting experimentation, we must ensure that there are no major consequences.

Chapter eight: Conclusion “Focus, Test and Believe”.

A first lesson from the Tipping Point is that starting a social epidemic requires that you concentrate the resources on a few key areas. If you want a word-of-mouth epidemic, you have to focus on mavens, connectors and salesmen.

Second lesson: The world does not match our intuition. People who succeed in setting up a social epidemic don’t just do what they believe is the right thing. They voluntarily test the accuracy of their intuitions. To prevent errors on a large scale.

Communication between people has its own set of very unusual and counter-intuitive rules.

Third: The basis must be a firm belief that change is possible. That people can radically change their behavior and beliefs under the influence of the right approach. Because nobody is only inner-directed. Peers are very important.

However, by working on the size of the group, we can get new ideas into effect. Even by tinkering with the presentation of information, it can become more sticky. By finding the right people with social power, we can shape the course of a social epidemic.

Often only a small push is needed to start an epidemic.

Psychology of Risk Taking Behavior

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Author: Rüdiger M. Trimpop

The topic – how the psychology of risk-taking behavior works – is split into questions.

Research implications of a motivation for risks

Is there a Personality Factor when taking risks?

The sample of people does not exist out of professional risk takers (soldiers, fire brigade, police, civil protection, stuntmen, race car drivers, …) but mainly of young white men and university students from a medium-sized Canadian city.

Evidence for a general risk-taking personality trait, statistically significant, was not as strong as some theories predicted. This may be due to the sample, but most theories had comparable samples, resulting in doubt that the level of influence that personality traits may have on risk taking.

The conclusion is that risk factors of personality traits play an important role in the risk-taking behavior, but that their role is less important than that of situational factors. The results have important implications for risk-taking research and for safety measures (eg Task-specific selection and risk training).

What is our motive for looking for risks?

Most theories of expected utility considered no emotional, nor physiological components, of the positive aspects of risk taking, nor the importance of non-materialistic rewards. The RHT (Risk Homeostasis Theory) also does not regard risk (taking) as something one can desire or a pleasant undertaking, but as a purely extrinsically motivated activity with risk tolerance. However, people look for intrinsic as well as extrinsic rewards. E.g. therefore also pleasant emotions and pleasant excitement. The literature on emotion, motivation and the interpretation of such studies suggest that these factors are more effective for adressing of motivations for risky or safe behavior than important rewards, which (the latter: rewards) one obtains with more focused behavior.

The tests also postulated that the subjects generally test their limits, try their luck and risk their chances by taking risks. Nobody took a completely safe course, everyone followed some too risky reactions. This explains the intrinsic need, desire and motivation of the subjects to take risks. However, the differences between where, how and how much risk they want are large.

The conclusion is that people feel intrinsic reward for taking risks, such as hormonal pleasure experiences, stimulation of a physiological pleasure center, emotional pleasure, the experience of small differences between the desired – and the target level of risk, of the unity of action-oriented – and targeted risk-taking behavior. We therefore take risks for both the intrinsic pleasure and the extrinsically favorable benefits.

The power of incentives

Risk motivation theory (RMT) and Risk Homeostasis Theory (RHT) both state that incentives for safe behavior are a powerful motive for reducing risk-taking trends. Changes in the risk content of a situation will lead to a higher involved control and therefore to compensation behavior. Externally introduced safety benefits are virtually canceled out. External incentives for safety also manipulate the intrinsic motivation of subjects by changing the desired target level of a risk. The target level of a risk is influenced by a higher advantage of safe behavior and higher cost of risky behavior, so the subject chooses a less risky strategy.

An additional finding is that target levels are constantly adjusted according to the perception of the risk level of the subjects.

This suggests that incentives should be used for safer behavior. Social rewards are stronger than financial ones. Social incentives are more likely to trigger intrinsic motivation. The data also suggests that incentives work better than punishments to stimulate safe behavior. So “Fame” works stronger than “Fortune” or “Pain”.

This also applies to phobias: people with a phobia keep their behavior until an alternative behavior is realized that is more rewarding than the avoidance behavior with regard to feelings such as fear.

Whether incentives work most effectively on a physical, economic or social level, or if being presented as conditional for good performance or rather as opportunities in a lottery, can depend on the individual, the situation, or the culture and is worth further investigation.

How can we master and control our risk motivation?

People strive for increasing control and we adjust our behavior according to the situation / needs, even when the perception of that control is an illusion. When a situation or an illusion of a situation with more uncertainty and unfamiliarity presents itself, we become more careful, until a less risky situation presents itself.

In gambling, such as throwing a die with a 50% chance of the outcome of three or less versus a result of four or more, many engaged in some form of superstitious behavior, such as throwing harder for higher numbers, or e.g. systematically gambling for low numbers after a few times high numbers. Or assigning their success to the previous course of the day, their happiness in love, the moment of the day, etc.

Most people do not realistically perceive their own situation, but have a positively colored illusion about themselves, their skills, and their ability to control the environment. Such findings confirm the importance of involving individual perceptions of personal control, even illusory, when analyzing risk-taking behavior. They show that the perception of control, or lack of control, leads to corresponding risky or safe behavior. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it all under control” is a famous final phrase just before an accident. Giving the feeling of control with seat belts, ABS, four-wheel drive and helmets, etc., therefore leads people to riskier, ill-considered, or even careless behavior.

How do we compensate for perceived risks?

An important underlying assumption of Risk Homeostasis Theory (RHT) and Risk Motivation Theory (RMT) is the behavioral compensation for observed changes in risk content. People show compensation behavior to reduce a difference between their perceived and their desired level of risk. The risk-taking strategy variable DFO (Deviation from Optimal Response Pattern) also showed these behavioral shifts as a result of changes in the probability of punishment. This was predicted by the RMT, which states that each change results in a new perception and the target level of risk reset.

What distinguishes RMT from RHT?

RMT is based on RHT with its compensation behavior feedback loop for perceived difference between desired level and target level of risk. RHT, on the other hand, does not take into account the frequent, continuously shifting target levels of risk nor the risk-seeking tendency of people.

RMT is an extension of RHT by stating that physiological and emotional processes undergo the same compensation functions as the rational cognitive processes on which the RHT primarily focuses.

RMT states that people take risks for intrinsic rewards associated with performing risky activities, and that this process also has a compensation feedback loop.

All in all, the RMT extends the RHT with the following:

  1. a) Postulating multi-target levels of risk that require constant compensation and may never achieve a homeostatic controlled risk optimum.
  2. b) The strong emphasis on individual motivation processes, rather than collective behavior of a larger population.
  3. c) The importance of emotional and physiological aspects in the assessment and evaluation of risk-taking behavior.
  4. d) The addition of action-oriented rewards (desire for risk) to the goal-oriented rewards (risk tolerance).

Can we describe risk-taking behavior holistically?

The big difference between the RMT and other theories is that it combines many facets of risk taking in a single holistic model. It takes into account the desire to take risks, as well as the desire to control it. It involves processes that do not consciously take place, such as physiological and basic emotional processes. RMT emphasizes emotional, physiological and cognitive aspects of risk-taking, and a behavioral compensation feedback loop, designed and developed to optimize the overarching benefits of risk-taking.

The components of the ‘Risk Motivation Theory’ (RMT)

Implications of a Risk Motivation for the “Real Life”

Although it seems obvious that people are more cautious when there is great danger, this theory also implies that people voluntarily increase their exposure to danger when the perceived risk is low. This has implications for industry, traffic, health issues, and personal life. The findings teach us that if we make the environment safer, people will compensate for this increased safety by taking more risks.

Implications for reducing accidents

This is important for the design of the workplace for the reason of reducing accidents. The less active input an employee has when working with machines, the higher the chance of boredom, too little excitement and therefore compensation with risky behavior. E.g. duels with oil barrels, or races with fork lifts.

That is why it seems important to involve the employees in the design and execution of their job. The amount of responsibility that one experiences is probably proportional to the amount of risk that one experiences. Risk-seeking behavior must therefore be considered if accidents are to be avoided.

Although programs for encouraging safe behavior have some long-term effect, habituation can be expected that people simply get from the (increased) rewards, and after a while they take more risks. It can help to periodically change the nature of the rewards, and make them flexible, tailored to the person’s needs, individual needs and differences, and by using non-material incentives in addition to material ones. Praise and fame often have a greater effect on intrinsic motivation than material rewards.

Security measures, controlled and imposed by the government, may best be used in family circumstances. By learning from childhood safe behavior and rewarding them for displaying risk-conscious behavior, one could be much more effective than changing adult behavior. The same is true for forming the desired behavior of an employee from the start of employment.

Another important factor in risk-taking is risk perception. If a risk is not seen as such as a threat, one cannot respond to it as such. So recognizing danger must be learned and trained, otherwise accidents will happen anyway. An example is the difference in the handbrake-wheel combination in a bicycle compared to a motorcycle. With a bicycle, the right hand brake belongs to the rear wheel. With a motor, it is the front wheel. If this is not known, this will lead to accidents.

The insurmountable desire for challenges in our daily lives

However, one must also realize that no matter how high the reward or punishment may be, most people still take risks. After all, taking risks is important for survival, and is intrinsically and socially rewarded. Instead of eliminating all risks, one should therefore channel into equally risky actions for the individual, but which are less risky for society. E.g. taking risks with a race car are more tolerated than taking the same risks with a truck with toxic waste.

We must therefore try to let people actively choose which risks they take, and limit the situations in which they take them, as well as look for other situations or locations where and when they want to take risks. People must learn to estimate the costs and benefits of this action.

Anticipation of having fun, and the actual experience of emotions and physiological arousal are very intense under risky circumstances. The increased pleasure provides a powerful incentive to sort out situations that can give us that feeling back.

However, how much risk and intensity is still felt by someone as pleasure is subject to situational and personal differences. Testimonials show that the higher the perceived risk, the higher the pleasant excitement, and the higher the amount of energy spent on controlling the hazard. E.g. how much people think, test, buy protection and spend money to control the dangers for public figures on a race track is probably proportional to the danger for the individuals involved.

The effects of illusion of control has potentially important implications. Most of us have the illusion of control, optimism and skills. We may all be at risk to the level that we feel comfortable with. As we overestimate this level, we may all take too high risks. This has consequences for our survival as a species. Namely, if no other factor compensates for this phenomenon, we should have died out already, or this will happen soon.

A personal conclusion from the author

Given the insatiable motivation of people to do more, he hopes that our drive for more risks will be accompanied by a proportionately strong drive to master and control risks and the environment, so that one does not have to take the ultimate risk, just to to know what happens in the hereafter. Perhaps the consequences of taking that risk would ignore the optimum level of the challenge.

Agile Project Management with Kanban

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Authors: Eric Brechner; James Waletzky (contributes to a chapter)

The objective of Kanban is to add value to the product or service for the benefit of the customer at all times during the operation of the employees. It is therefore a sort of optimization of the efforts of the team members, for the benefit of basically all parties.
The author (Eric Bechner) writes from his experience as a pioneer of Kanban at Microsoft in the “Xbox engineering team”. From his experience he shows how it could work for other teams.

In the first chapter, the author indicates a hands-on way to convince management that Kanban is a way of managing that fits in well with the way of working in the present time. These arguments are packaged as a letter to management, which can be used almost instantaneously copy-paste, provided that adjustments are made for your organization.

In the second chapter “Kanban quick-start guide” you can get started with Kanban right away. The simple principles of Kanban are explained, so that the learning curve to get started with it is minimal. Of course, as with all management methods, sometimes problems need to be solved, such as bottlenecks or slow progress of things, or things that have an impact on the entire team. To address this, the most common problems are included in the “Troubleshooting” section where the reader can draw on the experience of the authors.

In chapter three, the reader learns Kanban’s management techniques to make time estimates, including how long the project will last. Concepts such as MVP (Minimum Viable Product), Number of tasks required to complete a product, “Task Completion Rate”, “Expected completion date”, “Current Task Estimate”, “Task Add Rate” are introduced … Unfortunately, formulas are always described textually and are not included in formula form, which would benefit some programming.

Chapters four and five respectively deal with the necessary adjustments when switching from the waterfall method or the Scrumm method to Kanban. Since it is generally human to resist change, each chapter at the end provides a “direct” Q&A section for answers to difficult questions from employees.

Chapter six deals with typical things for IT teams, such as “continuous integration”, “continuous publishing” and “continuous deployment” when developing components, apps and services. In addition, the dependence of a team on other teams can determine its own performance.

Chapter seven is about how you use Kanban in large organizations, with hundreds of engineers or more. In addition, interdependencies are even more determining factors for team collaboration.

Chapter eight is about sustained engineering. It has to do with the use of Kanban once the project has been delivered, but aftercare is still needed such as additional bug fixes or stabilization of the application.

The final chapter, chapter nine, looks at other sources and further: what can you improve once you have adopted Kanban? It tells about the use of Kanban in combination with Agile and Lean. It tells about the principles that Kanban uses such as visualization, minimization, “Little’s Law”, “Single Piece Flow”, and “Theory of constraints” and “Drum, Buffer Rope”. In this chapter the author gives tips for further literature on each topic for the reader that is interested in learning more about it.

Natech Risk Assessment and Management – Reducing the risk of Natural-hazard Impact on Hazardous Installations

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Authors: Elisabeth Krausmann; Ana Maria Cruz; Ernesto Salzano
The problem that is currently on the rise is that of technical disasters triggered by previous natural disasters or natural events. Examples include frost, heat, drought, rainfall, floods, earthquakes, whether or not combined in tsunamis, lightning strikes, etc.
In an extensive introduction, the authors give a number of examples of what these natural phenomena can do. And that is quite something: ranging from power cuts and pipe breaks, to destruction of storage tanks and explosions. These in turn give rise to an evacuation of the employees of the company, the environment, with or without death toll, as well as a possible enormous economic damage and the stagnation of (parts of) the economic activity in the affected area. It is therefore not for nothing that people want to arm themselves against the even worse domino effects of such events. To this end, these so-called Natech events are studied. To make the world a little safer.
Unfortunately, no two Natech disasters are the same. Although performing risk assessments makes progress in this regard, according to the authors, it remains (for the time being) an impossible task to compare the results of risk assessments. That makes it difficult to prioritize. Yet there are some standard works that the authors regularly refer to, among many other things in their detailed literature lists. Namely the so-called purple book, red book, green book and yellow book from TNO. But perhaps more important for their discussion are the software packages RAPID-N, PANR, the methods of TRAS 310 and TRAS 320, risk curves and ARIPAR-GIS. These contain qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative risk assessment modules.
After a number of chapters in which RAPID-N, ARIPAR-GIS and RISKCURVES are illustrated with discussion of the results, two chapters deal respectively with structural (technical) measures and organizational (more administrative) measures.
An innovative framework, which the authors say is worthwhile, was proposed by IRGC and consists of the following five elements:

  1. Risk preassessment: an early warning and “framing” of the risk to provide the problem with a structured definition. Or how it is framed by the various stakeholders and interested parties, and how best to deal with it.
  2. Risk assessment. By combining a scientific risk assessment (of the hazard and the probability of it) combined with a systematic ‘concern’ assessment (of public concerns and perceptions) to form the basis of knowledge for taking subsequent decisions.
  3. Characterization and evaluation: making use of scientific data and a thorough understanding of the societal values ​​affected by the risk to determine whether the risk is acceptable, tolerable (with or without mitigation of the risk as a requirement) or intolerable (unacceptable).
  4. Risk management: all actions and remedies that are necessary to avoid, reduce, share or retain a risk.
  5. Risk communication: how stakeholders and interested parties and society understand the risk and participate in the risk governance process.

The work is, in particular, a piece of “compulsory” reading material for continuity managers and risk managers of large companies that are important for the economic motor of a region or country with large industrial installations. It requires a healthy portion of common sense, but also a sufficient knowledge of process engineering to grasp the storylines. In addition, an open view of a wide range of sciences, technical and non-technical, and of society, is necessary to correctly assess the importance of this work.

Adaptive Business Continuity – A New Approach

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Authors: David Lindstedt; Mark Armor
Adaptive Business Continuity wants to blow a new wind through the BCM world. To this end, they throw, among other things, the BIA and the risk assessment overboard. When I read the arguments why they do this, it’s not clear why. After all, if I read the authors’ arguments in Appendix B (the manifesto), then there is the following in B.5.1 page 154:
“Adaptive BC discourses a sequential approach. Continuous value, coupled with the core mission of continuous improvements in response and recovery capabilities, leads to the adoption or a non-linear approach that adjusts to ongoing feedback from all participants. … “.
The manifesto in https://www.adaptivebcp.org/manifesto.php also states that things are becoming increasingly complex:
“How long can an organization without a particular service almost always depend on an integrated combination of factors too numerous to identify and too complex to quantify. Moreover, the changes that result from the exact timing and actual impact of a disaster on a service will dictate different judgments about applicable recovery strategies, priorities, and time. Definitive changes to a service’s holistic “ecosystem” cannot be foreknown. ”

Nobody can deny that the problems are becoming increasingly complex. However, it can be denied that linear problems no longer occur can be denied. That is why I would like to look back at the picture of the full spectrum of possible disasters. I tried to discuss this in a previous blog, at http://www.emannuel.eu/en/artikels/resilience-strikt-genomen-disaster-management-red-ants-gray-rhinos-black-swans-de-verhouding-van-bcm-risico-management-rm-en-crisis-management-cm/ in question 6:

However, when I get the idea of linear issues, difficult or complicated issues and complex issues from the article of http://www.emannuel.eu/en/artikels/herhaalt-de-geschiedenis-zich-of-niet/# then I come to the next figure:

I believe that Traditional BCM has a linear approach. This is extremely suitable for linear issues and systems with a (well) known impact and linearisable systems from the complicated part of the spectrum. The question that remains is whether the arguments of the authors are clear enough to put this linear approach aside. This I deny: the objectives of Adaptive BC are not clearly defined enough to throw traditional BCM overboard here. After all, no arguments are given. The BIA simply refers to an article by Rainer Hübert, the authors of which do not reflect the line of thought.
Mutatis mutandis, I think the argument to drop the risk assessment is a non-argument.
After all, they write:
“Administering a proper risk assessment and implementing the resulting action items may necessitate deep knowledge of actuarial tables, information security, insurance and fraud, state and federal regulations, seismological and meteorological data, and the law. Typical continuity practitioners do not possess such deep kn owledge; those who do are most likely specifically trained as risk managers. Adaptive BC practitioners as such should eliminate the risk assessment from their scope of responsibility. ”
I do not agree with this: a BC manager does not need to be an expert in all these matters. Rather, he / she must be able to know the right experts within the company, gain their trust, facilitate and coach them in order to achieve results. Then making a risk assessment is not hopeless and not unusable. I leave the criticism of the readers to judge a lot of other claims to the detriment of traditional BCM: it is clear that the authors are trying to declare the traditional BCM dead for reasons they unclearly articulate.
Has the Adaptive BC depreciated for me? No, not at all. Because they offer an answer to issues from a different part of the disaster spectrum: possibly, provided that they have a solid foundation, a solution can be distilled here for complicated and complex systems where I think traditional BCM has a harder time answering as follows:

So in my opinion, the time of traditional BCM is not over as long as there are linear issues. In addition, Adaptive BC will have to develop further into a more mature activity, which can claim its own part of the spectrum of disasters, together with monitoring, building scenarios and future scanning. But next to Traditional BCM. Not instead of.
So there is still work to be done.