Riskonomics: Reducing Risk By Killing Your Worst ideas

Distance Learning Workshop 6: Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas

Risk is something we live with everyday. It is part of our being alive. Every living thing has expectations. And when it acts on those expectations, it risks error, because nothing living is infallible. Any one of our expectations may be wrong at any time. None of us is so wise, or so favored, or so skilled, or so wealthy, or so lucky, that we can avoid error and the risk of it. Recent history is all about people taking risks they did not know they were taking, and losing out, indeed losing big. In business, risk assessment and risk management are more important than they have ever been. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has focused the anxiety about risk into a concern for compliance with Government regulations. But beyond this concern with SOX compliance, there's also a renewed concern, after the "go-go" days of the late '90s, about managing risk to avoid the fate of the Enrons and Andersens.

In business, all eyes are focused on risk, and that is why this workshop, is needed so badly right now. There are a lot of technical approaches in the market on risk and risk management emphasizing formal techniques and methods, but there are none that focus on the risk of error in decision models in simple, clear terms, presenting key issues in a form grasped quickly and easily. This workshop fills that need. In it you will learn:

How you and other decision makers can reduce risk;
How you can recognize when you have problems of unanticipated risks in your decision model;
How you can tell whether you've accurately assessed risk and whether decisions you are thinking about have high risks;
How you can prioritize risk areas;
How you can create processes and systems that will help you to reduce risk; and
How you can test for and measure relative risk intelligence of competing:

organizations entering a new business domain
workers in solving problems and reducing the risk of error in a particular problem area

job candidates in solving problems and reducing the risk of error in particular job-related situations

teams in solving problems and reducing the risk of error in a particular problem area

Communities of Practice in solving problems and reducing the risk of error in a particular problem area

The goal of Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas is to help you learn about managing risk in a simple, entertaining way that can be easily understood and acted on. It tells you how to reduce risk, particularly in business, by using both creative learning and critical thinking. But its general ideas and the risk intelligence test and measures can be applied to risk in organizations of all kinds, and to risk in individual decisions, as well.

Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas is for everyone who makes decisions and works in an organization of any sort.

The Workshop Syllabus is available here.

The Workshop is taught by Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. Dr. Firestone's credentials are available here.

The text for the workshop is:

Joseph M. Firestone's forthcoming book, Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas (.pdf file)
In addition, a set of extensive course notes will be provided, and a Certificate of Workshop Completion will be issued upon completion of this Workshop.

The Workshop is available weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can reserve it one week or earlier from the date you want to take it. After that time, you may still be able to enroll in the Workshop, if others have already scheduled it. But if it hasn't been scheduled, you still may not be able to enroll if another workshop has been scheduled for the same day. Register here for the Riskonomics Workshop.