Risk Surprises And Black Swans

Risk, Surprises and Black Swans provides an in depth analysis of the risk concept with a focus on the critical link to knowledge; and the lack of knowledge, that risk and probability judgements are based on. Based on technical scientific research, this book presents a new perspective to help you understand how to assess and manage surprising, extreme events, known as ‘Black Swans’. This approach looks beyond the traditional probability-based principles to offer a broader insight into the important aspects of uncertain events and in doing so explores the ways to manage them. This book recognises the fundamental issues surrounding risk assessment and risk management to help you to understand and prepare for black swan events. Complete with international examples to illustrate ideas and concepts Integrates risk management and resilience based thinking Suitable for a variety of applications including engineering, finance and security.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores the implications of acknowledging uncertainty and black swans for regulation of high-hazard technologies, for stakeholder acceptability of potentially hazardous activities and for risk governance. The conventional approach to risk assessment, which combines the likelihood of an event and the severity of its consequences, is poorly suited to situations where uncertainty and ambiguity are prominent features of the risk landscape. The new definition of risk used by ISO, “the effect of uncertainty on [achievement of] one’s objectives”, recognizes this paradigm change. What lessons can we draw from the management of fire hazards in Edo-era Japan? Are there situations in which increasing uncertainty allows more effective safety management? How should society address the risk of potentially planet-destroying scientific experiments? This book presents insights from leading scholars in different disciplines to challenge current risk governance and safety management practice.

Enterprise Risk Management: Advances on its Foundation and Practice relates the fundamental enterprise risk management (ERM) concepts and current generic risk assessment and management principles that have been influential in redefining the risk field over the last decade. It defines ERM with a particular focus on understanding the nexus between risk, uncertainty, knowledge and performance. The book argues that there is critical need for ERM concepts, principles and methods to adapt to the latest and most influential risk management developments, as there are several issues with outdated ERM theories and practices; problems include the inability to effectively and systematically balance both opportunity and downside performance, or relying too much on narrow probability-based perspectives for risk assessment and decision-making. It expands traditional loss-based risk principles into new and innovative performance-risk frameworks, and presents fundamental risk principles that have recently been developed by the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). All relevant statistical and risk concepts are clearly explained and interpreted using minimal mathematical notation. The focus of the book is centered around ideas and principles, more than technicalities. The book is primarily intended for risk professionals, researchers and graduate students in the fields of engineering and business, and should also be of interest to executive managers and policy makers with some background in quantitative methods such as statistics.

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second. Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.

The #1 English-language bestseller in China--the book that is shaping China's planning and policy for the future. A "gray rhino" is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat: kin to both the elephant in the room and the improbable and unforeseeable black swan. Gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union...all were evident well in advance. Why do leaders and decision makers keep failing to address obvious dangers before they spiral out of control? Drawing on her extensive background in policy formation and crisis management, as well as in-depth interviews with leaders from around the world, Michele Wucker shows in The Gray Rhino how to recognize and strategically counter looming high impact threats. Filled with persuasive stories, real-world examples, and practical advice, The Gray Rhino is essential reading for managers, investors, planners, policy makers, and anyone who wants to understand how to profit by avoiding getting trampled.

Kenneth A. Posner spent close to two decades as a Wall Street analyst, tracking the so-called "specialty finance" sector, which included controversial companies such as Countrywide, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, CIT, and MasterCard many of which were caught in the subprime mortgage and capital markets crisis of 2007. While extreme volatility is nothing new in finance, the recent downturn caught many off guard, indicating that the traditional approach to decision making had let them down. Introducing a new framework for handling and evaluating extreme risk, Posner draws on years of experience to show how decision makers can best cope with the "Black Swans" of our time. Posner's shrewd assessment combines the classic fundamental research approach of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd with more recent developments in cognitive science, computational theory, and quantitative finance. He outlines a probabilistic approach to decision making that involves forecasting across a range of scenarios, and he explains how to balance confidence, react accurately to fast-breaking information, overcome information overload, zero in on the critical issues, penetrate the information asymmetry shielding corporate executives, and integrate the power of human intuition with sophisticated analytics. Emphasizing the computational resources we already have at our disposal our computers and our minds Posner offers a new track to decision making for analysts, investors, traders, corporate executives, risk managers, regulators, policymakers, journalists, and anyone who faces a world of extreme volatility.

In the author's point of view, a black swan is an improbable event with three principal characteristics - It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'.

It is over 40 years since we began to reflect upon risk in a more social than technological and economic fashion, firstly making sense of the gap between expert and public assessment of risks, such as to our health and environment. With fixed certainties of the past eroded and the technological leaps of ‘big data’, ours is truly an age of risk, uncertainty and probability - from Google’s algorithms to the daily management of personal lifestyle risks. Academic reflection and research has kept pace with these dizzying developments but remains an intellectually fragmented field, shaped by professional imperatives and disciplinary boundaries, from risk analysis to regulation and social research. This is the first attempt to draw together and define risk studies, through a definitive collection written by the leading scholars in the field. It will be an indispensable resource for the many scholars, students and professionals engaging with risk but lacking a resource to draw it all together.