A New Perspective for Risk Management: A Study of the Design of Generic Technology with a Matroid Model in C-K Theory - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 188

13.1 Introduction

Risk management is often seen as reducing the risk associated to a set of
alternatives, be it technological risk or market risk. In practice,thisraisescritical
issues since it requires to be able to list the risks and assess their probability of
occurrence. Hence great debates on nuclear (risk assessment: the probability is
very low but the consequences are so terrible that even low probability can not be
neglected) or GMO (how to identify the type of risks), and more generally on
“safety first” principle (also called precaution principle), which tends to favor
“no action” alternative, since it is often the one implying the least (known) risks.
Another issue appears in cases of “high uncertainty” or so called “unk unk”,
where the level of unknowness is so high that neither the level of risks nore even
the list of risks are known. In R&D contexts, this corresponds to “double
unknown” situations where neither technologies, nor markets are known. These
situations are often considered as just unmanageable and they are left to gam-
blers and random processes. More formally,thisapproachofriskmanagement
actually consists in applying models of decision making under uncertainty to
select among a set of given designs and probable states of nature the one that
maximizes the expected utility. Hence design is supposed to be already done;
this approach does not directly consider design as a way to deal with risk.
In this paper we would like show the paths opened by a design perspective on
risk management.
On the one hand, a design perspective leads to add a new action possibility in
the model: to design a new alternative to deal with the probable states of nature.
On the other hand, the new alternative design might also “create” new risks, so
that a design perspective leads also to model the emergence of new risks as an
exogenous “design process”. Hence a design perspective raises two issues: can we
design an alternative that would lower the risk? Does this new alternative create
new risks?
Main results: (1) we show that minimizing known risks consists in designing an
alternative whose success is independent from all the known risks—this alternative
can be considered as a generic technology. (2) we show that the design of this
generic technology (or the design of the new independence) depends on the
structure of the unknown, ie the structure of the space generated by the concept
of risk-free alternative. (3) we identify new strategies to deal with risks and show
that risk management in a design perspective shifts from dealing with uncertainty to
dealing with the unknown.