Worst Disasters

Generally speaking, 5-6 things have to go wrong for an incident to occur. Furthermore, these events or failures have to occur in a certain sequence.

The characteristics of mega disasters is that 5-6 events with fairly low probabilities of occurrence line up.

Such rare incidents are referred to by many names within the risk management community – black swans, perfect storms, aligning of stars.

Why are these rare events difficult to identify? I would love to hear your comments.

Here is Jon Stewart on frequency of the perfect storms:

Reduce risks, Increase Uptime, Reduce costs

I did my first litigation support work in 2000.

Since then I have been obsessed with preventing future failures. Some of these failures can have catastrophic consequences.

Having tried various techniques, learning / unlearning “latest” paradigms, it is clear we have a long way to go!

But instead of thoughtful work, what I mostly see are platitudes and oversimplifications. No keen practical insights!

I want to change that.