A Reading Recommendation that Points Beyond Planning

There are some interesting thoughts on risk culture in an article posted by the folks from McKinsey & Company: Managing the people side of risk. Rather than addressing the planning perspective, the article focuses on the challenges uncertainty poses for a company’s organization and culture. That is interesting, considering that planning alone will not insure that a company is actually able to respond to uncertain developments. Three requirements for a company’s culture are pointed out:

  • The fact that uncertainty exists must be acknowledged
  • It must be possible and actively encouraged to talk about uncertainty
  • Uncertainty must be taken seriously, and respective guidelines must be followed

While the article stays mostly on the surface and never indicates that there also is a strategic perspective to the issue, it hints at some anonymized real-life cases and contains an important beyond-strategy viewpoint.

The authors use the term risk instead of uncertainty, following the colloquial sense of associating risk with a negative impact rather than a quantifiabe probability.

Dr. Holm Gero Hümmler
Uncertainty Managers Consulting GmbH