The Fear

So on the weekend I encountered the fear, that gut wrenching feeling you have when you are truly out of your depth, the lack of experience, the lack of knowledge, and an inability to know what I should do. Fortunately in Australia you can always call 000 (911 in America, 999 in the UK and 112 in Europe).

My daughter, two years old, had a temperature that spiked to 44.6 degrees Celsius and started to have a fit while in bed. Fortunately we were able to have the 000 operator talk me through my first aid basics, by which time the Ambulance had turned up. The next 5 hours were spent at Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) while her temperature returned to normal.

So apparently this, febrile convulsions, happens to a group of children, they do not know what causes it or what gets you into the group, they know that it does not cause any long term effects as long as it does not last for long. In short my little girl is OK.

This fear is something that management teams around the world have to live with day in day out, in fact they have become so a tuned to it that they have built “the unknown” into their risk plans and rules of thumb that they run their businesses on every day.

The recent …

So on the weekend I encountered the fear, that gut wrenching feeling you have when you are truly out of your depth, the lack of experience, the lack of knowledge, and an inability to know what I should do. Fortunately in Australia you can always call 000 (911 in America, 999 in the UK and 112 in Europe).

My daughter, two years old, had a temperature that spiked to 44.6 degrees Celsius and started to have a fit while in bed. Fortunately we were able to have the 000 operator talk me through my first aid basics, by which time the Ambulance had turned up. The next 5 hours were spent at Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) while her temperature returned to normal.

So apparently this, febrile convulsions, happens to a group of children, they do not know what causes it or what gets you into the group, they know that it does not cause any long term effects as long as it does not last for long. In short my little girl is OK.

This fear is something that management teams around the world have to live with day in day out, in fact they have become so a tuned to it that they have built “the unknown” into their risk plans and rules of thumb that they run their businesses on every day.

The recent financial crisis has shown us just how devastating “the unknown” can be, leaving our management teams wondering how they can minimize the unknown. Risk Management in many organisations is evolving, and a detailed enterprise view is the vision with associated mitigation plans where possible.

Working at Teradata I have been involved in building solutions to manage the complexities of this vision, enabling management to spend time on determining the mitigation plans. Its very satisfying to feel you’re helping to prepare and lessen the impact of any potential future disasters. What is your organisation doing to mitigate the risk?

I do not believe that the fear will ever go away for management teams or for parents, but a little knowledge certainly makes coping easier.

P.S. A big thank you to the team at RCH

Daniel Tehan