Preventing Catastrophe
To grasp the extraordinary and hold on you must have vision, ambition and a slate of skills, including the management of risk. It is possible to over-reach and in doing so trigger catastrophe. When this happens you lose hold of your objective and are forced to deal with extraordinary problems.
We are exploring how some of the best practitioners and organizations succeed at preventing catastrophe in situations where the apparent risk is high. Some of these people work in refineries, high speed transportation, deep water drilling, large scale construction and other sectors with the potential for physically destructive catastrophe. Others work on critical projects and operations where failure could be catastrophic to the organization’s strategy, reputation or business development. All these people have found ways to produce results in exceptionally trying situations.
We are focused on the prevention of catastrophe, not on minimizing its effects. This requires building organizations that respect and value preventive action so that the signals of potential catastrophe are identified and acted on before the problem occurs. Preventive action is difficult for organizations because it requires long term thinking and when you succeed, nothing happens. Your projects and operations move forward smoothly but it is hard to know if that is because of the preventive actions or some other cause.
When there is potential for catastrophe—any serious incident where you can’t control the effects of a problem—prevention is vital. Of course, in these situations you must also have well developed contingency plans but we are focused on the prevention challenge. A quick scan of the news in any week makes clear the prevention of catastrophe is sometimes easier said than done.
Fall Line Systems is implementing two initiatives to strengthen our clients’ ability to prevent catastrophe: