Pattern 308

Notes for assembly

Notes for assembly:

Don’t ignore areas of extremely high risk to the enterprise just because they're hard to think about. Instead, come up with novel ways to think about them. The problem today is that “orphan risks” are, at best, treated as high-impact/low-probability scenarios. When in fact they are *not* low probability. Just hard. The definition of an “orphan risk” is “risks that are perceived as being too ill-defined, too complex, or too irrelevant to be worth paying attention to, yet have the power to derail entire enterprises down the line if they’re not paid attention to.” They come up repeatedly in, e.g., powerful new technologies like artificial intelligence, gene editing, advanced manufacturing and others, that are rewriting the rule book on what is possible. And when combined with an increasingly interconnected global society, they are transforming the risk landscape that lies between new ideas and their successful implementation. This is a landscape that conventional risk thinking — and the tools that go along with it — can only get businesses so far.

See:

It’s time for tech startups and their funders to take “orphan risks” seriously: Technology companies need to stop ignoring hard-to-grapple-with risks that could potentially blindside them in the future

By Andrew Maynard