Oddly enough, though it is often said that imagination – or fiction – can never match reality.
Arts – generally speaking, such as literature, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and so on – often anticipate real risks or thoroughly analyze them.
Why is it so?
Artists, be they writers or musicians or painters, etc., are not trained risk assessors, let alone risk managers. However, if not all but certainly some of them have a – let me say -‘sense of risk’ that’s uncommon, and often superior even to risk’s experts.
RISK IN LITERATURE
The field I’m walking on is that of Literature, which is the most familiar to me. M y preferred writers, most of them from USA, write books that make the public aware of risks the media will never even think to bring to their audience’s attention.
These days, I’m contemporarily reading John Grisham’s The Appeal and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. These are works of fiction, of course; but who-else has had the idea to make the laymen aware of what’s really behind environmental management for example?
Frank Schaetzing, the German writer, has done a good job, too, writing The Swarm, but he went a bit too far by making it too transcendent, for my taste.
I don’t mean any criticism of risk experts, technicians and managers. A few days ago, I watched on NatGeo Adventure a documentary recording a safety audit on board the cruise ship Costa Serena, the biggest of the Costa fleet. It was interesting, of course, but it all seemed ‘pre-cooked’, that is as if any emergency occurrence was planned before – fiction versus reality score was one to null.
BLACK SWAN RISKS
We’re getting so used to ‘black swans’ that we don’t care for them anymore. But just think of coming home late at night – especially if you are a lady – and to look for the home key – which is statistically the last to be found – while hearing heavy, menacing steps behind you.
This is no unpredictable event, it happens all the time.
So, Is a black swan only fictional or is it real?
My feeling is such that – though not always at the same level. Fiction has something to teach us. We still cherish Leonardo ad Vinci’s drawn ideas, Jules Verne’s novels of future, just to name a very, very few.
Erich von Daeniken’s Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memoirs of the Future) adds to the list.
Risk assessment practices should also address “the unpredictable”: all too often risk prevention drills are based on previously established procedures and check-lists.
A friend of mine told me an illuminating story. W hen officially testing an aircraft evacuation procedure, the auditor confirmed conformance to regulations; but he was not satisfied. Therefore he asked for the dummy passengers to go back on board and wait for his emergency signal. When all were seated, he said “the first to get out will get a 500 euros prize” then he sounded the alarm. The auditor said he’d never seen such a carnage – and it was a test …
Just as the quality concept sometimes has been warped to benefit commercial budgets, I’m afraid the risk concept will be bent to that aim, too. I obviously don’t wish it’ll be, and I’ll therefore keep insisting that, unless ‘commercials’ demonstrate a proper awareness of risk, they should be left out of the risk business.
Risk-minding, it would be better Fiction than Reality.