Friday 30th March 2012 - Risk analysis

I first met risk analysis when I was, for three years, head of the Department of Economics.  It had been decided that all departments should analyse the risks they faced in delivering their strategies and should rate the likelihood of these risks happening, and the effect they would had if they did, by plotting a point on a graph with likelihood and effect as the axes.  I wasn't very used to graphs with conceptual (rather than numerical) axes, and made a series of stabs in the dark.  It turned out that I had gone further in plotting our risks than had several other Heads.

I am much more familiar now with risk analysis, and today we had a meeting of the University's Risk Review Group.  It takes a certain sort of mind set to be able to envisage how things could go wrong, and then to think through the overall effects, including secondary knock-on issues, that would be troubling if they did.  I now find this sort of exercise intellectually interesting.  And then there is the further activity of seeking how to mitigate the risk - in other words how to reduce the chance of the risk occurring.  Beyond that there is the possibility of mitigating the outcome - seeking to find ways of reducing the adverse effects of the risk if it were to come to pass.

For example, we could fear that the loss of key staff would be a significant risk to aspects of a department's operations, and that the effect would be severe.  But we could seek to mitigate the risk of those staff leaving by valuing them more highly and rewarding them better or improving their work patterns.  And we could seek to mitigate the problems if they were nevertheless to leave by starting to train up others to understudy them.

Over the years a strong element of my research has been on migration.  And I have come to see how risk analysis methods can be brought to bear on the study of migration decision-making.  Potentially migrants are taking a chance if they decide to move, and weigh up the possible consequences of doing so.  They can reduce the risk of moving by, for example, not moving the whole family at one time, or by undertaking temporary moves prior to taking the plunge and moving permanently.  And they can reduce the severity of the things they fear by, for example, grouping with others.

So I have taken something that I was introduced to through administrative duties, and suggested it to postgraduate students as a useful approach to their own conceptualisation of a significant research problem.   We often talk about research-led teaching, and sometimes about teaching-led research. I think I've ben describing an example of administrative-led research.