Whoever of my generation remembers The Bee Gees’ Words song cannot but quiver with pleasurable memories or else.
Having introduced the issue, I intend to develop it further, in crossword puzzles: yes, the game that we all know and that we either love or hate.
Risk scholars would simply be abashed at reading about crosswords on a risk-dedicated magazine. But without meaning any criticism to them, what kind of risk scholars are they, if they are not ready to incur into new, unexpected, unforeseeable risks including the risks of viewing risk from different perspective(s).
The connection between games and risks was not born yesterday. Crosswords – mainly on paper are an effective way to interpret game risks – and risk.
As an example or case study, I’ll take a simple x-y crosswords scheme without blackened cells, and I will ignore the more sophisticated, almost baroque games derived from it.
Let’s look at the following process (H = horizontal, or x axis; V = vertical, or y axis; H1/1 = first letter of first horizontal line; V1/1 = first letter of first vertical column; and so on: V 20/8 = 8th letter of 20th vertical column):
One:
Does H1/1 match with V1/1? If not, use your cognitive processes – imagination and experience / knowledge – to find a match.
Warning when beginning a crossword game/puzzle, exactly like in risk assessment, things seem to be very logical. Everything seems to flow smoothly. But, be careful, the grand rapids are there, waiting for you …
You start looking for the easiest, most obvious crosses, usually made of two or more letters like personalities initials, acronyms. And you, little by little, build the crosswords frame: two lines above, two lines below; two columns on the left, two columns on the right. And, you start solving the puzzle.
Wow!
But once you’ve wowed you’re trapped in self-enclosing definitions, like a boa-constrictor snake enclosing itself.
Two:
And what about the center? The bull’s eye?
Who’s ever going to surrender to a definition asking for Queen Nefertiti’s daughter’s nephew’s niece’s name?
I think sometimes that Google and the like search engines have solely been developed to solve crossword puzzles.
So, here we are. Google may give us Nefertiti’s descendant’s name, but it cannot tell us where it has to be filled in our x-y coordinates game. Or in risk terms, how to manage the risk(s) we are aware or afraid of.
Or that we want to run into to win one of our battles – when we positively want to address risk.
Three:
Then come the trickiest of all definitions, made on purpose by the crosswords’ author to drive us crazy. Specifically, the (apparently!) non-sense definitions to which you get by creative, lateral, non-logical , almost irrational, thinking. One of my preferred examples is “you can’t leave it on foot”, four letters, and you have no clue, so far. The answer is “isle”. Not fair!
Four:
Then again, a kind of self-satisfied boredom drops in. You think you’ve crossed the border but the crosswords game isn’t finished yet. Some cells are still blank and it does not seem that making them black will close the game.
You review the game once more, looking for holes but even you don’t find any. There’s something that tells you that you’ve been cheated, that it couldn’t have been so easy.
My intent is to hint how a rather simple, pastime, quiet game like crosswords has its own rules to overcome – its intrinsic risks. And we are talking of a simple game, the creator of which is a human as ourselves. What about the intricacies of tremendously complex “games” that, though created by humans, include so many interactions, that the x-y crosswords interactions are almost not worth mentioning?
And we have in mind only yes/no interactions, so far, therefore quantitative interactions. If we go further and think of qualitative interactions, that is how, how much, where, when, we may come up discovering that risk – every morning we look at it, before breakfast – is like our little bonsai, that has branched a new tiny leaf.
BIGGEST RISK
The biggest risks that risk managers incur are not to leave from their ivory tower and fight on the battlefield.
Or, if we want to make it a slogan, “the biggest risk is not to risk”.
Based on Laplace’s and some subsequent studies, a fundamental question about risk should also be “how many times have I to throw dice to win?”.
A last thing about crosswords. I can’t allow myself to overlook Pythagoras. Mankind learned how to make two-dimensional numbers interact. With crosswords, mankind has learned how to make two-dimensional words interact.