Compendium of best practices in Risk Management

ETH Zurich is conducting the project, represented by Prof. Dr. Didier Sornette (ETH) and Dr. Dmitry Chernov (ETH).

The background to this project is the fact that, prior to industrial disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, some employees of the affected organizations were aware of dangerous conditions that could potentially escalate to a critical level. However, for a variety of reasons, information about these risky conditions was not delivered to decision-makers in time. The project aims to develop practical recommendations and solutions to improve the internal transmission of risk information.  

This project has four objectives:

This project has four objectives:

• To establish practical solutions to improve the quality of internal risk information transmission within critical industries
• To formulate detailed improvements to internal risk transmission practices, to be recommended to organizations/industries that have met with disasters caused by a failure of risk transmission.
• To systematize the existing best internal risk transmission practices found in leading critical industry companies worldwide (nuclear power, oil and gas, the chemical and petrochemical industries, hydropower electro-energetics and underground mining).
• To develop a handbook clearly explaining the best practices and effective solutions for internal risk transmission in critical industry companies. When timely risk information exchange becomes standard practice in these critical industries, insurers will be able to better assess the risks faced by their insureds. More importantly, major industrial accidents could be averted. 

The project thus combines various fields of research and technical cooperation such as general management, organizational studies, communication theory, risk communication and decision-making.