Comments on: Tara: The bodhisattva of risk management

By: Homeland Security Watch » Food security: Do economies of scale suppress risk resilience?

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:11:58 +0000

[...] Note: Last week John Comiskey encouraged me to apply Cynefin and/or Tara to a prospective problem. He suggested a cyber threat. I decided to focus on a network — [...]

By: Philip J. Palin

Philip J. Palin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:07:41 +0000

I like John’s suggestion that we become more prospective in the application of our thinking. We look to the past primarily to increase our wisdom for today and tomorrow.

Cyber is not a particular expertise of mine, but I agree it deserves whatever attention we can give.

Pending some externality, Thursday I will work to apply Tara to what the Cynefin framework describes as chaos. Despite my lack of expertise, I will try to do this with a cyber scenario as part of the mix.

By: dan o'connor

dan o'connor — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:21:05 +0000

Perhaps a bit of irony here, but TARA (transfer, avoid, reduce, accept) has similar themes as the grief cycle; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

By: John Comiskey

John Comiskey — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:57:25 +0000

Phil,

TARA is great stuff and should be used elsewhere.

I accept Mark’s observation that we delude ourselves with our desires. In this instance, we as a society want cheap energy and it happens that fossil fuel provide a great deal of it. What to do? Didn’t we as a government and international community know much of this i.e. the risks, prior to the Great Spill of 2010. Deepwater Horizon is not a lesson not learned ….it is a lesson ignored. Maybe it was simply business pragmatism; low risk venture with high returns. It remains pragmatic until something “big” goes wrong. It seems too easy to blame the risk takers now without accepting part of the blame ourselves. (Much of the blame remains with BP).

It is likely that another major commission will be impaneled that will make numerous recommendations that will hastily be legislated in whole or part. The off shore oil industry will be regulated and things will get a little better. Exxon Valdez and the subsequent Oil Pollution Act of 1990 worked out well.

I’m ready to move on from DWH. What I would like to see is TARA used for future homeland security challenges and particularly cyber threats. Maybe we as a government and international community can prevent some bad things from happening.

We should start today!

Better that then a blog some time from now that details the failure of a major network and catastrophic consequences.

By: Mark Chubb

Mark Chubb — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:25:54 +0000

The TARA risk management prescription bears a strong resemblance to the sort of religious practices that predominate in the west. We express our faith by following a prescribed set of rituals in the expectation that they will bestow grace upon us. As illustrated by your analogy with Hindu and Buddhist religious practices associated with devotions to the Goddess Tara, eastern cultures have a different understanding of human-beings’ relationships with the divine and the benefits these bestow.

Last week, we discussed the importance of combining and balancing faith and reason. This discussion extends this discussion and characterizes this combination as mindfulness rather than the sorts of mindless practices that accompany much of what passes for risk management practice.

Risk management seeks to understand and control the impact of the uncertain. But as you point out, the uncertain is not the same as the unknowable. Appreciating the difference requires us to reconcile ourselves with the ways in which we mislead and delude ourselves when our desires (including faith, insofar as it represents an attachment to a deity or a particular conception of the divine) overwhelm our appreciation of the limitations of our models and methods.

By: William R. Cumming

William R. Cumming — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:28:43 +0000

Perhaps the Hindu God Ganeesh more appropriate. BP the elephant standing precariousy on top of US rats. Or is it different all together-perhaps the difference between science and engineering. Science constantly being forced to recognize it lack of understanding by the scientific method. Engineers driven by the “good enough” philosophy! Add the BP catastrophe to the top 20 engineering failures of all time.