When you look at a likelihood/impact risk matrix, you might notice that “medium” appears twice – once as high-likelihood/low-impact, and once as low-likelihood/high-impact. These two “mediums” aren’t at all the same!| jacobian.org
In the real world, accidents happen when a series of small missteps align to create severe consequences. This is something we call the “Swiss Cheese Model”: imagining a systems failure as a set of “holes” in our layers of defense that all line up to create a series accident.| jacobian.org
Risk is usually defined as the product of two factors: Likelihood and Impact. However, some disciplines include a third factor: Exposure. What’s that about, and when is it useful?| jacobian.org
So you’ve identified a risk — now what do you do about it? Here’s a simple framework to help frame discussions about risk mitigation. It’s intentionally very simple, a basic starting point. I’ll present a more complex framework later in this series, but I want to lay more of a foundation before I get there, so we’ll start here.| jacobian.org
The RFC process has been a huge success in defining the standards that run the Internet, but naively adopting this process for your company is a mistake. RFC processes tend to fail at most organizations because they lack a clear decision-making step.| jacobian.org
A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when is it reasonable to be concerned about job tenure, and what should we do when we become concerned?| jacobian.org
I’m starting a new series on professionalism: the set of workplace behaviors that are generally expected at work. These behaviors are largely unspoken, but they do exist: there are consequences for violating them. In this series, I aim to write down some of these rules and explore their implications. Eventually, I hope to have a solid list of what “professional behavior” really means.| jacobian.org