Risks are everywhere in professional life, even more so on an aircraft carrier. So when it comes to risk, just do what they do.

Risk is part of professional life. A big part. Rarely can they be engineered out, most times they have to be assessed and managed.

Of course, that assumes you've found them before they find you!

That's why identification is such an important part of the risk mitigation and management process.

While it's common knowledge that risk and reward are correlated in the financial and sporting worlds, in the engineering world, the correlation is actually with reliability but interestingly, it's an inverse relationship.

The higher the reliability, the more likely it is that the risk will be identified, properly assessed and appropriately mitigated and managed.

Now the good news is that High Reliability Organisations (HRO) with lessons for professional engineers actually exist.

They tend to be US Navy nuclear powered aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems like the one that belongs to the Federal Aviation Administration and the nuclear power industry.

They're complex, high-risk environments that should have lots of accidents and incidents - but generally don't. Or far less than their fair share.

Granted, they're not all that accessible to your average engineer but the way they identify and deal with risk adds a multiple factor of safety to traditional risk practices. Fortunately, that thinking is available and in the public domain through extensive academic research and distillation.

As it turns out, they share five (5) key characteristics that translate beautifully into a practical risk management framework and toolkit for any engineer:

a) Expertise is King - always ask the person with the subject matter expertise regardless of their organisational status

b) Operational sensitivity - be extremely sensitive to operations, looking for the weak or less obvious signals that something could, might – or is about to – go wrong

c) Fuss over failure - become obsessed with failure rather than just celebrate success, identifying everything that could go wrong and applying elimination, mitigation and control techniques

d) Establish root cause - go deep when looking for causality, don’t accept simple explanations

e) Stay the course - master resilience, the ability to persevere, overcome and remain committed to operational excellence.

Sure, you need to know and master formal risk frameworks and the likelihood and consequences associated with risks under investigation. You also need elimination, mitigation and management strategies to deal with residual risks after engineering controls have been designed and applied.

But the lessons from the HROs give you a powerful framework and practical tool to strengthen your approach to the identify-assess-manage cycle that keeps everyone safe.

Want more info and some Pro tips?

DOWNLOAD our Checklist below!