Monday, March 9, 2015

Experiment

The great physicist Richard Feynman stated that “The test of all knowledge is experiment.  Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.”  Despite his well known presence on the panel examining the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Dr. Feynman was not a risk manager.  It is rare in (business) risk that we get to do experiments.  Furthermore, even if we could do experiments we would find almost all of the results inconclusive.  Unlike physics, risk management is not a physical science.  It is a social science.  As such, the laws of nature underlying business risk management are not exact nor are they reproducible.  People and organizations change their minds and they change their strategies, tactics and actions – sometimes for reasons that are completely unknown.  Fortunately or unfortunately, as risk managers we do not have the power of experiment to develop our knowledge.  Thus I suspect Richard Feynman would consider risk management a science in name only – and I am ok with that.

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