JULIAN TALBOT

In 30 years of crisis management I can distill the success factors down to three things. Scenarios, lead indicators, and Plan Bs.

One of the big problems with risk matrices starts when you design the matrix. But there are ways to fix that.

I used to believe in climate change. Growing up in the 1960s, our backyard abutted the grounds of one of the largest sugar mills in Australia. My brother and...

Imagine a system that monitors inputs, processes and outputs, tracking culture, and organizational behaviors.

If you have been thinking about writing a non-fiction book, here is the process I use: 1. Block out a few weekends to write the book. How hard can it be? Rig...

Job interviews are just a skill. Like any other, but more important than many because they can influence your whole life.

Bow-Tie is one of the simplest but most helpful risk management tools in the risk management arsenal. And it's highly visual.

ALARP (As Low As Reasonably Practicable) is a fundamental concept in risk management, as it should be in life in general. It expresses the idea that we shoul...

In case you haven't gathered, I'm a fan of straightforward documents. This is especially true of when you want people to take action. Fifty page procedures r...

It often seems that as a species; at least in most societies; that we spend most of our efforts on managing risks after they occur, rather than preventing th...

I love Swiss cheese. And I’m not talking about the dairy comestible. In my view, there are better cheeses out there – but few better risk management concepts...

"I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder o...

“I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.” Bob Dylan It might be tempting to sk...

"What gets measured, gets managed." Peter Drucker is often attributed with this quote but he probably wasn't the first to say it and the origin of this expre...

*It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." – Roy Disney ISO31000 (Section 3, Part A) says that risk management should create and p...

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker Leadership, although largely talked about, has been described as on...

Figure 1: Mockup of a KPI reporting dashboard Measuring performance seems complex (and it is) but let's not lose sight of the basics. The trick with key perf...

The traditional view of managing risk to be as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) is fine for negative risk. Unfortunately for ALARP, the ISO31000 definit...

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” - Hunter S. Thompson A lot of people spend a lot of time in life preparing corporate documents that never get r...

Marie Curie knew something about success. The first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, the first woman to win a Nobel prize, and the fir...