Planning for grey rhino risks : How to prepare for the ‘unforeseeable’

Abstract

Grey rhino risks are high-impact but seemingly low-probability risks that get shuttled to the sidelines, often due to a misguided hope that the risk will not materialise in the near term, so mitigation planning can be delayed or dismissed. As the author has argued previously in this journal, it is time to change the way we look at risks in order to reassess and re-prioritise our grey rhino risks. We must stop shrugging our shoulders and treating grey rhinos as ‘unforeseeable’ and therefore absolving ourselves from doing anything about them. The author’s previous paper, ‘‘Rhinos and risk assessments: Adjusting risk assessment methodologies to account for “unforeseeable’ events”’1 provided a methodology for pulling grey rhinos into the spotlight, so that we can see them more easily and recognise that their high-impact status requires both acknowledging and planning for. The present paper takes the methodology a step further — demonstrating how to plan for grey rhino risks that have been identified. Rather than continuing to tag grey rhinos as ‘unforeseeable’, we can and must prepare our organisations for them.