Top 7 Risk Management Articles from 2017

By Lowers & Associates,

High reliability organizations, active assailant risk management, and healthcare security are just a few of the topics that dominated the Lowers & Associates Risk Management Blog in 2017.

Here we provide a summary of our 7 most-read articles from 2017.

1. 5 Principles of High Reliability Organizations

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are anomalies. They exist in the kind of very complex, fast-evolving environments where you would expect chaos to prevail. But it doesn’t. HROs are able to cope successfully with unexpected conditions. That’s what makes these unusual organizations so attractive to researchers. What can we learn from them?

Read the full post >

2. When Active Assailant Situations Become Known-Unknowns

Not long ago, most Americans regarded active assailant incidents as black swan events, unpredictable and largely indefensible. However, with the increasing frequency of these events, the time is at hand when venue owners, employers, and operators of gathering places need to evaluate and mitigate the risk of these incidents, or potentially face legal consequences. And the number and type of venues at risk may increase.

Read the full post >

3. Test Your Fraud Knowledge

In case you’re thinking fraud is not an issue in your organization, you should know that extrapolating from actual fraud cases examined in 2016 and reported to ACFE, organizations worldwide lose 5% of topline revenue to fraud. Virtually every type of organization from business, government to non-profit sectors is vulnerable to fraud.

Read the full post >

4. Slideshow: What Makes a High Reliability Organization?

High reliability organizations (HROs) operate within challenging conditions. Think of air traffic control, aircraft carriers, and nuclear power plants for clear examples of such conditions. Mistakes in these settings often have catastrophic consequences. Yet they seldom fail.

Read the full post >

5. 7 Ways to Test the Reliability of Your Organization

If you are a manager in an organization, especially one that faces a complex, dynamic environment, you should be interested in learning how the principles of the High Reliability Organization (HRO) can help you. Your aim should be to develop an organization that moves continuously toward greater reliability of critical outcomes, using every failure as an opportunity for improvement.

Read the full post >

6. 18 Fraud Facts to Drive Your 2018 Fraud Prevention Plan

When it comes time to review your fraud risk management and prevention plan, it pays to have some hard statistics in front of you. This slideshow features 18 facts straight from the ACFE’s bi-annual Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse. The report can help you understand and respond to the threat of organizational fraud in your company, and the facts presented can serve as benchmarks for your organization while helping to uncover areas you may have failed to address.

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7. 3 Key Components of an Effective Healthcare Security Program

We make many assumptions about our healthcare. We assume our doctors and nurses are well trained and know what they are doing. We assume that the ER is open when we need it and the facility where we receive care is clean as well as safe and secure. While legitimate expectations, they are not always the case. When it comes to healthcare security, having an effective program requires planning, training and consistent implementation. Our latest whitepaper, 3 Key Components of an Effective Healthcare Security Program, walks through the most critical aspects of healthcare security and introduces some ways to ensure your program delivers.

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We look forward to continuing to deliver valuable content you can use to better protect your people, brands, and profits in 2018 and beyond. Happy new year!

 

  Category: Risk Management
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Is Your Organization Moving Toward High Reliability? [SlideShare]

By Lowers & Associates,

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) offer benchmarks for other organizations and systems whose missions are critical but operate in challenging high-risk environments. Successful HROs offer insights on operations, culture, performance, and evaluation that can be adapted to other organizations to improve the reliability of achieving objectives.

Early research on HROs attempted to understand how organizations such as aircraft carriers and the air traffic control system could continuously produce desired outcomes despite the high uncertainties of input conditions (environment) and the inherent interdependence of operations. Observing these unlikely success stories led to the distillation of 5 principles:

• A preoccupation with failure.
• Reluctance to simplify.
• Sensitivity to operations.
• Commitment to resilience.
• Deference to expertise.

Recently, managers in less fraught, but still complex, organizations and systems have begun to adapt these principles to deliver a similar high reliability in outcomes. Among others, good candidates for applying the lessons of HROs include the cash management system and healthcare organizations and systems.

The Joint Commission on healthcare accreditation is sponsoring work to develop a path for healthcare organizations of various sorts to move toward high reliability outcomes. A 2013 Joint Commission paper by Mark Chassin and Jerod Loeb titled “High Reliability Healthcare: Getting There from Here” summarizes a process to move toward the goal. An important point it emphasizes is that the improvement is continuous: HROs seek perfection, but never finally reach it.

Chassin and Loeb lay out stages healthcare organizations might follow on the journey toward becoming an HRO. Other types of organizations would have to adapt these to their own circumstances, but they do provide a template for moving forward.

Our latest SlideShare, What makes a High Reliability Organization? provides deeper information about the 5 principles, and illustrates how they might be applied in your organization.

Take a look here:

Slideshow: What Makes a High Reliability Organization?

By Lowers & Associates,

High reliability organizations (HROs) operate within challenging conditions. Think of air traffic control, aircraft carriers, and nuclear power plants for clear examples of such conditions. Mistakes in these settings often have catastrophic consequences.

Yet they seldom fail.

HROs have the unique ability to deliver stunning reliability in complex environments. How do they do it? What makes an HRO? Our latest slideshow provides a glimpse inside. Read through it here:

 

[Infographic] Recognizing and Managing the Unpredictable

By Lowers & Associates,

One of the most fascinating things about High Reliability Organizations (HROs) is their paradoxical nature. Despite existing in potentially hostile conditions where factors not under their control can emerge at any moment, they achieve the capability to absorb the unexpected and continue operating successfully.

… Continue reading

7 Ways to Test the Reliability of Your Organization

By Lowers & Associates,

If you are a manager in an organization, especially one that faces a complex, dynamic environment, you should be interested in learning how the principles of the High Reliability Organization (HRO) can help you. Your aim should be to develop an organization that moves continuously toward greater reliability of critical outcomes, using every failure as an opportunity for improvement. … Continue reading