Wei Ji

I remember a discussion with a friend from the Philippines about risk; he pointed out to me that risk in Chinese is known as Wei Ji:

When I opened a book by Hillson, I saw these two characters in his introduction!

I found the Chinese version of risk quite interesting. It is composed of two characters, the first one meaning danger and the second one meaning opportunity. This reflects the true nature of risk; that it can be negative as well as it can be positive. In the context of programme and project management, most often than not when we talk about risk management we almost always mean about managing the impacts of unpleasant events.  Reading through his book, however, Hillson always put risk on a higher note by always emphasising the optimisation of opportunity risks.

---
Source:
HILLSON, D. 2010. Exploiting future uncertainty : creating value from risk, Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, Vt., Gower.

Frog and the Lily Pad Dilemma

Not entirely related to my thesis, but just a food for thought...

I've been reading "Seeing the Forest for the Trees" to learn more about systems thinking for my Innovation assignment and I encountered an interesting snippet.

Click image to enlarge.

Answers:

• Exponential growth
• 49th day
• On the 40th day, the proportion of the pond covered by lily pads is very small! It would be less than one tenth of one percent! Computed as (1/2)^10

The moral of the story:

Click image to enlarge.

The book is quite interesting; it discusses systems thinking in a simple (ironic considering its a topic about complexity) yet really stimulating manner.

Images are all quotes from Sherwood. 

---

SHERWOOD, D. 2002. Seeing the forest for the trees : a manager's guide to applying systems thinking, London, Nicholas Brealey Pub.