Risk Management culture

Blogging from MetriCon. Yesterday, Dan Geer shared this table on risk management cultures: Pathologic, Bureaucratic, and Generative. Working as a consultant, I get to work with companies of all sorts...

Pathologic	Bureaucratic	Generative
Don’t want to know	May not find out	Actively seek
Messengers “shot”	Heard if they arrive	Messengers rewarded
Responsibility shirked	Compartmentalized	Responsibility shared
Failure punished	Local repairs only	Failures beget reforms
Ideas discouraged	Ideas beget problems	Ideas welcomed

from: Reason J: _Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents_, Ashgate Publishing Limited,
1997.

Comments

[joat]

That table worries me a bit in that it strikes me as a if-you're-not-part-of-the-solution-you're-part-of-the-problem kind of generalization. The majority of organizations do not fall into just one of the categories listed. Rather, they live in two or more of those cells/categories/columns.