When you search the internet you sometimes find information that is not worth the few moments you waste passing your eyes over it, but then there are some gems.
One of the blog sites I read quite often is Twigg Towers, which is a blog site of a fellow employee. It was with great interest today that I therefore saw a video posted on this site on the 25th February (and yes I am a bit slow to see this post!).
We can all think back to our pasts at things that we did and how much it has changed since that time. For me, I can remember the days of the dial-up bulletin boards where you logged in and chatted with others online. I even set up my own dial-in bulletin board or BBS when I was a teenager. This is PCP days (for those that don’t know this acronym it is “Pre-Cell Phone”). This was the earliest known time of online collaboration, chat and interaction. There was no twitter, facebook, myspace, wikis, blogs, or internet (well perhaps the internet was there but it was no where near the internet it is today). Back then, if you said the words “social media” people would have thought you were referring to a face-to-face advertising campaign, perhaps at the local pub! Social networking was the actual visit to the pub to interact with your mates.
Bulletin Board Services (BBS) were hosted by individuals from their local PCs running of around 64MB RAM with hard drivers of around 500MB or even less. Some were probably even run off PCs that were still using 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, I know mine was.
So, what is my point! Well it is simply this, the world is changing every second, and it amazes me still how some people cannot accept that. As someone in the risk management caper, you would think that all my peers or “co-riskies” would be the first to embrace change and new technology. It fits. We are always thinking about the potential adverse events and trying to work out how we can help avoid, transfer, manage or retain an acceptable risk exposure level. So surely to do this, we need to share information with other such “riskies” and the best way to do this is through social networking, collaboration and electronic technology tools.
The innovation of risk is not just plugging a new variable into a model, but identifying what are the newest variables, the newest risks, the newest controls or techniques to manage risk. How can you do this through sitting alone, in your office, staring at the wall?
It is therefore will puzzled bewilderment that I still seem to have conversations with people in risk about knowledge management, knowledge sharing and social networking. What is ironic though is that these same people, the same experts, use email, the telephone and mobile phones. I wonder, do they realise that not so long ago not one of these items even existed and they were considered change, and difficult and impractical and even unimportant to their jobs or life.
Perhaps we should all watch this video, and think just how much things have changed, and therefore it goes without saying that change will continue and therefore being at the front of change will only make your more prepared, more advanced and better able to deal with the risks of tomorrow, today.
Post GFC (Global Financial Crisis) we should all stop and consider this point seriously.
Being behind the eight-ball is the past, being in front of it is the future.
So, here is the video that made me start this post. Enjoy and feel free to argue, disagree, or just comment on my observations and opinions.
Cheers,
