Quantum Risk: a wicked problem that emerges at the boundaries of our data dependency

I am fighting bias and prejudice about risk perceptions; please read the next lines before you click off. We tend to be blind sighted to “risk” because we have all lived it, read it and listened to risk statements. The ones on the TV and radio for financial products, the ones at the beginning of investment statements, ones for health and safety for machinery, ones for medicine, ones on the packets of cigarettes, the one when you open that new app on your new mobile device. We are bombarded with endless risk statements that we assume we know the details of, or just ignore. There are more books on risk than on all other management and economics topics together. There is an entire field on the ontologies of risk; such is the significance of this field. This article is suggesting that all that body of knowledge and expertise has missed something. A bold statement, but quantum risk is new, big, ugly, and already here, it’s just that we are willingly blind to it.

At the end of the Board pack or PowerPoint deck for new investment, intervention case or for the adoption of the new model, there is a risk and assumptions list. We have seen these so many times we don’t read them. These statements are often copies, and the plagiarism of risk statements inaccurately copied is significant; no effort is put in as such statements have become a habit in the process methodology. The problem we all have with risk is that we know it all. Quite frankly, we see risk as the prime reason to stop something and occasionally manage it closer but never too understand something better. If you are operating a digital or data business you have new risks that are not in your risk statement, you have not focussed on them before, you are unlikely to have been exposed to them, and this article is to bring them to your attention. Is that worth 8 minutes?

Many thanks to Peadar Duffy whom I have been collaborating with on this thinking, and he has published a super article on the same topic (quantum risk) here

The purpose of business

We know that 3% of our data lake is finance data today; shockingly, 90% of our decisions are based on this sliver of data (Source Google). As we have to aim for a better ratio of “data: decisions” that includes non-financial data; we will make progress towards making better decisions that benefit more than a pure shareholder primacy view of the world. As leaders, we…