What if the human was the key to successful risk management?
In 2007, a Greek liner, the SEA DIAMOND, struck a rock and was wrecked.
This disaster informs us of the means available to a ship's captain to avoid hitting a rock. The management of this risk is, in part, based on a system of maps automatically proposing so-called safe routes. But this system has a flaw, some maritime data are obsolete. It is therefore necessary for the ship commander, in order to manage the risk appropriately, to rely on the proposals of the system with a critical mind forged by his analysis of the situation and his experience.
In 2013, an industrial building, the RANA PLAZA, collapsed.
Several companies were quickly blamed for the outsourcing of their textile products there. It is obvious that all the companies involved had procedures, standards, specifications, labels, in short, a system, a budget and a willingness to manage this type of risk. But if this one happened is that also, as the previous example, the system has a flaw and probably the teams / auditors in charge of this system based their conclusions only on questions and answers that the system required, without addressing it with a critical mind forged by their analyzes of the situation and their experiences.
These two examples are very telling of this current drift to blindly trust a system, to let a "system" automatically decide without humanizing, intellectualize, reason the questions and the proposed results.
We need the human and his ability to understand the environment in which the system is deployed, to adapt it according to multiple criteria. A system can not be applied in the same way everywhere. He must be agile. The famous "Think Globally, Act Locally".
Agile does not mean setting up a different system for each situation, but rather setting up a system that is sufficiently open for the end user to adapt to its situation and go further on the analysis according to the situation found. .
The results from a system work the same way. They must be rich enough to be pondered, discussed, questioned, compared. In this approach, it is essential to avoid binary automatic responses (OK / NOK) as much as possible. The human must decide to take a risk not the system.