The Untoward Event Matrix

 

In organizational life, bad things don't just happen. They tend to follow a pattern, especially over time. In seeking a means of categorizing these events on the path to doing something meaningful about managing them, it may avail to look at them through the prism of what I call the Untoward Event Matrix.

What It Is

This matrix represents a rough ordering of undesired events according to their impact and frequency of occurrence. Using this tool is akin to plotting things on a piece of graph paper to show their relative position. The exercise necessarily involves artificiality; yet it may prove illuminating in showing how the items plotted relate to each other. It may even offer visibility into where to invest energy and resources to reduce loss.

As a starting point, divide the matrix into quadrants, like this:

Now there are only four boxes to fill, going from the bottom up and then to the right:

LOW FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which seldom occur but hardly matter in terms of hurting the organization. A brief, occasional power outage or random, minor accident could fall into this category. 

HIGH FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which occur more often, to the point of becoming predictable. While their impact is also relatively low, such untoward events tend to raise eyebrows if they cause cumulative losses or disruptions whose impact could cross over from low to something more severe. Think of recurring graffiti, vandalism, and accidents or mugging that, over time, flag a given site as unsafe.

LOW FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

These are game-changers that are focusing events because, although statistically rare, their severe impact makes a devastating mark on the organization. Think in terms of a 9/11 attack or massacre at the workplace.

HIGH FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

Such events represent a theoretical worst case scenario, because they combine the severity of the previous category with a high incidence of occurrence. If, instead of being rare, such events become commonplace, they create an unsurvivable situation. Consequently, in the real world of corporate life, such conditions are more abstract than realistic. Why? The people in charge realize that they face a simple dilemma: fix or die. In other words, if they cannot drive down the frequency of high impact events to being rare, hence low frequency, they cease to remain in business.

Depiction

This is how the situation looks in practice, after consulting the organization's own incident reports to see how untoward events tend to array across this matrix over time:

Whence the Data?

In the corporate world, as in large public sector and nonprofit organizations, it behooves management to monitor untoward events, the better to limit losses and to gauge what insurance to seek out as a means of transferring risk. Accordingly, some office in the organization takes on the responsibility of tracking incidents, typically with the aid of an incident reporting system. Data from such incident reports, in turn, inform the distribution of events (aka incidents) captured broadly in the foregoing matrix.

What Happens Next?

Once management discerns the emerging pattern showing the frequency and impact of untoward events, competent managers begin to do what they do best: prioritize.

First, they attack the biggest, most immediate challenge, the big X representing the high impact/low frequency event that just befell the organization or threatens to surface in the near future. Certain possibilities soon confront them: 

(A) This event has reached catastrophic proportions and is requiring a no-holds-barred, all-hands-on-deck response; 

(B) The worst impact of the event is over, leaving management to clean up, restore operations, and learn lessons to apply in reducing future impacts of a similar event; or 

(C) The likelihood or severity of the event taking place has diminished to the point of making it a non-issue, leaving no budget or executive support for pursuing it further.

Shifting Focus

Under the circumstances, once the most urgent priority, the big X, goes away, lesser priorities get a promotion. Accordingly, those resources once tasked with resolving the big X now shift, as shown here:

Why? 

It is the nature of humans and their organizations to harness their capabilities to those challenges deemed important, or perhaps urgent. Failing that, they default to tackling the challenges at hand. Consequently, organizational focus now turns to untoward events that may be of lesser impact yet remain of sufficiently high frequency to open the door to the possibility that, if neglected, they could eventually cross over into one of the two high impact quadrants of the matrix.

Defender Predicament

It now becomes the defender's dilemma to at once address the high frequency/low impact events while keeping in reserve some capacity to handle potential high impact events that will most likely be rare. Why? The unchecked arrival of those high impact events, especially if allowed to also become high frequency, might be fatal to the organization.

Conclusion

This is only one way of using the untoward event matrix to apprehend ambient risk and contrive plans for where to focus resources available for mitigation and prevention. A seasoned manager with corporate experience will no doubt find more. Why? Because bad things don't just happen, and good managers don't wait to be surprised by them.

Beware the Reformatted Expert

 

Reformatted experts are mediocre at best, otherwise inept.

Two forces conspire to saturate any given field with drive-thru pretenders who hasten to recast their past experience and dubious credentials as just the particular expertise your dilemma demands. Those forces are commoditization and desperation. Like most fields, security is as vulnerable to these reformatted experts as any other endeavor that pays.

Case in Point

Take nuclear surety, for example. Before the sudden end of the Cold War, the nuclear surety field provided steady employment for specialists at Sandia National Laboratories and wherever else there was a robust market for such expertise. How did these experts react to the prospect of being made redundant as the early 1990s ushered in a so-called peace dividend? They reformatted. Many shifted gears and reformatted as experts in critical infrastructure protection.

As critical infrastructure protection lost traction and the promise of indefinite funding, what other reformatting oppportunities arose? One of them was Y2K, which offered the failed promise of years of employment in unraveling knots in anticipated computing catastrophes that never quite came to pass. Other, more promising reformatting targets, however, eventually surfaced.

Cyber security became a safe landing zone for reformatters in need of a cachet and a paycheck. Business continuity also availed for those who needed to transfer their erstwhile employment in business resumption or continuity of government into a province that showed better potential as a salary continuation plan.

Where Else

School and workplace violence proved equally popular reformatting targets for run-of-the-mill generalists, particularly for those whose trumpeted expertise extended no further than repackaging conventional wisdom. After all, this field regenerates popular interest with every school shooting or rampage killing. Practitioners eking out a modest living dispensing security platitudes can hardly pass up the chance to garner free publicity and new clients if they reformat as experts who know just how to address such threats. Never mind that their nostrums tend to be borrowed, unoriginal, and unburdened by success. If they reformat as experts and surface at an hour of need, someone, somewhere will be willing to engage them.

Insider Arena

Another field to now experience saturation by reformatted experts is insider threat defense. The cyber security crowd, in particular, finds this arena particularly attractive as a platform for selling its wares. So do vendors of security products and services who can manage to recast whatever they have to sell as uniquely tailored to addressing insider threats. Whether it is an invasive technology or a training program, reformatted, drive-thru insider threat experts lose no time promoting their wares and assuring the market that it cannot survive without them. Yesterday, they were auditors, guard force services, or computer security specialists. Today they reformat as insider threat experts.

Emerging Pattern

The pattern evident from these foregoing examples is clear. An old market fades or fails to sustain the mouths it was expected to feed indefinitely, hence desperation beginning to surface. Meanwhile, genuine experts in an emerging field begin to attract notice and to command an innovator's profit. Soon, the desperate onlookers notice. Consequently, they rush into this new, promising field, reformatting themselves as experts in an area they barely acknowledged yesterday. Now the commoditization effect takes place.

What was once unique and responsive to an under served market now becomes a commodity. Any field absorbing a great influx of entrants begins to lose its cachet. With a horde of reformatted, if dubious, "experts" crowding the market, the emerging field eventually begins to look over saturated with mediocrities. Conventional wisdom becomes the only wisdom on tap, and unoriginal reformatters soon suffocate the remaining innovators, crowding them out and shouting them down, with little regard for results attained. The market itself changes. Prices drop, as does quality. Reformatters reshape it, dumbing it down and lowering expectations.

The net result? Reformatted experts may still offer some value, to the extent that platitude and truism are often rooted in common sense. And common sense beats unbridled folly. But when the ultimate test comes and their offerings disappoint, the superficiality of their reformatting comes to the surface -- at somebody else's expense, hence this warning against instant experts of the reformatted variety.

Name Selection and Self-Sabotage

 

People may call themselves anything they please, although they cannot guarantee that the rest of the world will honor, tolerate, or even temper the snickering that outlandish name selections inspire. The aspirational world and the real world seldom align to suit every taste.

What happens when name selection verges into self-sabotage? Nothing good.

Witness the smug ignorance of subliterate parents who sentence their heirs to a lifetime of derision by christening them with first names and spelling them atrociously to boot. The resulting atrocities are not so much first names for innocent offspring as banners for their parents to wave as their expression of parental personality. Culturally, the net result is to proclaim to the world that the parent is a self-absorbed underachiever so starved of merit as to have to resort to branding a newborn with something atrocious enough to gain attention for the parent.

Examples abound, but why draw unnecessary attention to them to further torment the poor souls who had no say in their own mislabeling?

A Different Story

Team names take on a different character. Ostensibly, much thought goes into naming them to either honor a role model or evoke the winning spirit that the team aspires to emulate. Take the historical selection of “Redskins” as emblematic of the most celebrated warrior and leadership virtues that found an early admirer in George Washington. 

André Billeaudeaux, himself a veteran and mature social scientist, has made this case for the Native American Guardians Association, time and time again. Witness such deep dives into the genesis and perpetuation of that name, not as the pejorative some low-resolution thinkers suggest in activist screeds, but as a source of pride:

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

https://personalliberty.com/the-d-day-inspired-fight-goes-on-americas-soul-depends-on-modern-redskins-redmen-and-patriots-to-stand-up-like-the-greatest-generation/

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/creating_americas_soul_e_pluribus_unum_and_native_identity_.html

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

Add, finally, two clips of André's interviews on this theme: 

https://youtu.be/FS339W2P-kY?si=6OvuGXg1DELoJ2jh 

and

https://youtu.be/st2wGk141Bc?feature=shared

What's In a Name?

From the standpoints of self-preservation and self-sabotage, Commander Billeaudeaux supplies us this compelling answer: everything.

Terrorism, Extremism, and Crime

In the modern lexicon of societal atrocities, overlapping definitions may avail for some agencies while only confusing the citizens who pay taxes and find themselves just as dead whether felled by terrorist, extremist, or criminal. What are the distinctions anyway, especially if one seeks a basic grasp of where these terms get applied to villains and villainies that are the hallmark of equal-opportunity cutthroats? 

Consider this diagram that draws out distinctions while drawing an oval over areas of overlap:

Crime and fear of crime are the most familiar. As Steven Lab has told us [1], they have bedeviled society to the point of becoming an irremovable thread of the social fabric (my formulation, not Lab's). 

Terrorism, although a more modern term in its circulation, nevertheless traces to a long pedigree that, in its essence, differs from crime in what Boaz Ganor highlights as its political objective  [2]. 

What of extremism, a barbarism of bureaucratic utility to those seeking to affix a pejorative label on transgressions that may not qualify as terrorism, yet command insufficient notice (and funding) if allowed to languish as a sapling made invisible in a forest of crime? 

It helps to wrestle these cranky definitions to a mat of logical distinctions if one sees them in a certain light. In this framing, crime becomes a prohibited act, or even the neglect of a necessary act. Crime's manifestations may well approach infinity, which means sometimes they will no doubt share features with less pervasive horrors like terrorism and extremism.

As for distinguishing the isms, it may avail to regard terrorism as an act, which typically targets noncombatants and always furthers a political objective. By contrast, think of extremism as a measure of intensity. How so? Definitions of extremism, murky at best and often an affront to tautology, characterize this as a state of being "extreme," hence presumptively imbalanced or radically succumbing to some polarized position that would defy reason and invite danger. Invariably, the label is subjective. [3] "Extremism" as such is a term easier to brandish against opponents than to define with objective precision. But if one absorbs it into one's lexicon in the interest of remaining au courant, one may grudgingly do so under the foregoing characterization.

Overlap

Terrorism, extremism, and crime overlap when terrorists, extremists, and criminals use violence. Do the perpetrators define themselves by one of these labels? Maybe. Maybe not. More likely, government agencies reacting to their attacks apply whichever label yields the greatest advantage in thwarting the attackers. Experience suggests that violence is the sine qua non for terrorists; otherwise, their actions would raise no eyebrows and attract few adherents. 

Criminals have more diversity in their ranks. Since their aim is more geared to realizing a personal benefit than to advancing a cause, criminals retain the flexibility to play to their strengths. Thus, a world-class embezzler is unlikely to resort to violent crime. As a rule, fraud and nonviolent crime pay better and pose less of a penalty if caught and sentenced.

Who are extremists? People who are passionate or zealous to a fault? If this is their only failing, then it is difficult to brand them as dangerous -- unless they begin to pose a danger to society that translates to a threat of violence. An extreme lover of puns is a bore and a nuisance. An extreme lover of puns who insists on reciting his favorites to an audience held hostage at gunpoint is quite another creature. Perhaps he now qualifies as the "extremist" for which the term was intended. Add to his hostage-taking a political objective interspersed between his puns, and does he now qualify for promotion to "terrorist"?

The answer, a default for any seasoned consultant: It depends.

Notes:

[1] S. Lab, Crime Prevention: Approaches, Practices, and Evaluations, 3rd Edition (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, 1997) pp. 1-14.

[2] B. Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers,

(London: Transaction Publishers, 2005) p. 9.

[3] P. T. Coleman & A. Bartoli (2003). Addressing Extremism, The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, Colombia University (2003), p. 2. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/i/a/document/9386_WhitePaper_2_Extremism_030809.pdf