Risk Awareness & The Bear

Take a look at the awareness test here, before you read the rest of this post.

Have you looked at this?

OK . . .  you get the point . . .

This is an interesting phenomenon . . . .

. . . . in cognitive psychology known as 'change blindness', which we all experience in one way or another. There have been a number of fascinating and entertaining experiments on the topic, not least the one above which was famously used in a TV commercial in 2008.

The phenomenon centres on the fact that when we concentrate on certain topics, very significant changes can occur in our field of vision to which we can remain completely oblivious.

The brain has a tendency to block out events it is not expecting. This has big implications for general management, leadership, strategy, risk management and regulation, but also for those involved in finding and managing exceptions in continuous improvement initiatives or audit roles, for example.

There are some interesting sites that tell you more about the science (for example this and  that) and the experiments themselves.

The run up to the sub-prime mortgage crisis was an example. Perhaps the Barclays LIBOR furore is one too. At a more prosaic end of things, we see organizations that focussed on their financial and operational controls, for good reason. Often, however, this focussed attention to the state of their controls, implementing them, testing them, reviewing them, blinds them to sight of the 'moonwalking bear', the very risk itself.

Perhaps we need to remember to both manage the detail AND maintain a good clear view of the context.

Thanks for reading . . .