Having launched this site a week ago, I was worried that I might not have anything to blog about.
Maybe Human Risk wasn’t really a thing.
Fortunately (at least for the blog), Human Risk is alive and well in the UK where this week has seen a number of ministers resign for what The Economist summarised as Unparliamentary behaviour: sex scandals and ministerial mistakes.
It’s Human Risk in full effect: people doing things they shouldn’t. Albeit, people who absolutely should know better.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Ministers have had to resign for behavioural reasons; there are plenty of examples of that in the past.
In fact, it’s been a feature of British government for some time that people in positions of power don’t behave appropriately.
So much so, that there’s something called The Ministerial Code which is a set of principles that outline what is expected of Ministers.
Note the word “Code” rather than rules. It’s a peculiarly British way of managing Human Risk. We love Codes.
Whether it’s The Highway Code that is a set of principles to guide road users or The Takeover Code which governs behaviour during (surprise, surprise) takeovers.
Codes are a form of principles based regulation; rather than containing a detailed list of rules, they outline principles that people in a given situation need to abide by. By not being overly prescriptive they allow for flexibility of interpretation, which in theory removes loopholes and means the regulations don’t need to be constantly updated.
As a means of managing Human Risk, Codes are an interesting idea. Because they’re not having to list out all potential scenarios they want to cover, they can be short and easy to read. Those subject to them have to think about their behaviour; you can’t just point to a (potentially badly worded) rule to justify your actions. The spirit of the law takes precedence over the letter of it.
Of course that only works well if the body enforcing the Code has some teeth. What’s amazing about some of the Ministerial resignations in the UK, is that they were allowed to resign rather than get fired. A code won’t control Human Risk, if the humans it is attempting to control don’t fear the consequences of non-compliance, but are instead prepared to run the risk.