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Rethinking
Management
of Risk and
Crisis
with Professor
Edward
Borodzicz
Brett Cherry speaks with
Professor Edward Borodzicz
about crisis management in
contemporary society
We don’t rise to the level of
our expectations, we fall to
the level of our training.
A rc h i lo c h u s
What is the very first thing
you should do when turning up at a crisis?
Try standing back and having a cup of tea.
‘Take it in, work out what’s going on
around you. The most important facility
to have is to be calm and actually
understand the event taking place
because if you don’t then you’re not really
understanding what you’re responding to
and firing off a response that may not be
appropriate to the setting’, says Professor
Edward Borodzicz, an expert on risk
and crisis management at Portsmouth
University, who gave a seminar on
emergency and crisis at the Institute of
Hazard, Risk and Resilience.
Borodzicz believes breaking the rules may
be necessary to resolve a crisis that risk
management has failed to address:
Risk management is done with the
ultimate assumption that if you did
everything correctly you would get rid of
the risk. My argument is that we can’t
get rid of the risk, things will still go
wrong despite our best and most valiant
attempts to prevent risk.