ABSTRACT
Risk managers use human and financial assets to achieve societal, organizational, and individual goals. In this book, the goals are protecting human health and safety, the environment and human assets. The three risk management questions identified in Chapter 1 are a terse reminder of what needs to be accomplished by risk managers:
1. How can consequences be prevented or reduced? (Prevention) 2. How can recovery be enhanced, if the event occurs? (Resilience) 3. How can key local officials, expert staff, and the public organize and be informed to reduce risk and concern and increase trust and confidence? (Organization)
I begin with a small example of the interaction of these three. Suppose I am owner of an organization that houses and cares for senior citizens. We want to build a new assisted living facility in a coastal area that has seen substantial growth in numbers of seniors. My risk prevention goal is to build it in a safe location. At a minimum, I should look for a site out of the 100-year floodplain and away from areas that have experienced storm surge. I want the site to be far enough away from forestfire prone areas and other natural hazard events or human ones. The bottom line is that I want to avoid having to evacuate my clients. But bad things do happen, even in seemingly safe locations. Hence, I must
consider investing to reduce the probability of needing to evacuate and rebuild the structure. I will invest in water and wind resistant materials, add drains, pumps, the best roof possible, water absorbent plants, and a generator(s) that will immediately activate, if electricity goes off. If the facility is damaged, but I have invested in these
kinds of assets, then painters, carpenters, and others who repair after the event should have less wet furniture and rugs to remove, and fewer walls with mold to replace. All of these investments should speed recovery back to normal operations. The organization question, the last of the three risk management ones, is critical
because investments in structures are necessary but not sufficient to protect people and assets. The organization must be sure that personnel understand their role in managing risk. Who communicates with the fire and police departments? Who removes the medications so that they are available to the residents? Who maintains the assets? Who communicates with the residents, and who does other essential tasks? When I visited some assisted living facilities, I was impressed by the ability of the staff to explain exactly what they would do if an event occurred, including who they would replace in the event another staff member could not come to the facility. Factors that influence organizations and individual risk management decisions
are listed in Table 3.1. Human health and safety would be at the top of the list for an assisted living facility. Legal mandates, budgets, politics, and technical assets would be other major considerations. Some individuals and organizations that manage senior facilities are more attuned to hazards than are others, and have organizational protocols to guide on-site managers (Greenberg 2014). Individual risk-related decisions are associated with personal attributes, such as
sex, race/ethnicity/nationality, income, and education. Perceptions, trust, values and other experiential-based factors add to these. People create mental heuristics, which are rules of thumb, that guide them to decisions. This chapter illustrates how these risk management influences play out in real
cases. The reader will see how optimization and heuristic tools, public surveys, and comparative risk analysis have been used to better understand how to manage riskinformed priorities. In general, I tried to focus on the topics in Chapter 2. A final preliminary contextual point is that each sub-section ends by identifying a point of tension for risk managers.
