Planning Management: Risk and how we manage to manage it.
Planning by its nature seeks to anticipate changes and provide a means to react to them. Thus, one of the greatest challenges facing planners is uncertainty and the risks it causes. Perhaps more at home within financial circles, or business management, planners nevertheless can stand to gain much from the adoption of such practices (and perhaps they already do).
In context, I see risk management as a core part of the planning stage (as in pre-implementation, rather than as in planning planning). Kniting together with other management skills, risk analysis helps to identify things that can get in the way (hopefully) before they occur. Examples given of the types of risks include:
- New Risks: energy security, economic security
- Enduring Risks: volcanic activities
- Challenging Risks: Climate Change
- Dying Risks: asbestos
- Dead Risks: Mercury
- Re-emerging Risks: Environmental Migrants
Given the context planners operate in, the politics presents perhaps one of the most visible risk. Politics, all things being equal, represents a means for active democratic involvement. However, this usually translates to politicians, to stay in office, need to address the current concerns for their constituents. Now this isn’t to say it is a bad thing, far from it, community participation is important. Problems occur when there is insufficient information available. Populist policies can compromise long term strategic integrity of a plan, changes in the political economy ca influence the scope of future programmes. Closely tied is the economic risks. No one (well very few) when planning their 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 year structure plans anticipated the current economic downturn, how can a council meet its goals if there just isn’t the money? Where can it cut down spending when demands are continually rising?
Of course, risk management doesn’t necessarily equate to thousand page documents with erudite and arcane inputs and outputs. I guess, that all of us, intuitively carry out risk analysis. We know for one, not to cross the road when there is a car heading towards us, we gauge the speed and the distance and deduct the risks involved in crossing or not. What follows is a brief table highlighting a very basic and brief response to possible risks.
As a brief excercise, I took a stab at doing a brief risk analysis on this portfolio work for my Planning Management paper. It needn’t be terribly sophisticated, but it nevertheless helps a bunch.
However, risks by the very definition of the term is uncertain. How then can we quantify chances and possibilities? I think it would be naive to assume that any risk analysis is ever complete. Do we always need to know everything before we act? Information is desirable as it produces a much more robust solution, but I do not think we can move only from certainty to certainty, sometimes, heading forwards to the unknown can just as be exciting.
