Risk Mitigation Model^©

1. Process Auditing: An established system for ongoing checks designed to spot expected as well as unexpected safety problems. Safety drills would be included in this category as would be equivalent testing. Follow-ups on problems revealed in prior audits are a critical part of this section as well.
   
   
2. Reward System: The reward system is the payoff that an individual or an organization gets for behaving one way or another. In this case, we are concerned with risky behavior. As all organizational theorists know, the reward system within an organization tends to have a powerful influence on the behavior of individuals within it. Similarly, the reward system that exists inter-organizationally also influences the behavior of organizations.
   
   
3. Degradation of Quality and/or Inferior Quality: This refers to the essential quality of the system involved as compared to a referent system that is generally regarded as the standard for quality.
   
   
4. Perception of Risk: Two elements of risk perception are involved here. (1) Whether or not there was any knowledge that risk existed at all, and (2) If there was knowledge that risk existed, the extent to which it was acknowledged appropriately or minimized.
   
   
5. Command and Control: This factor is borrowed from Roberts (1989, 1988, 1992). Roberts outlined command and control elements as separate factors, but I am combining them here and listing her separate factors as sub-factors in my broader model. The command and control elements are:
   
   
   1. Authority Gradient
   2. Migration Decision Making (the person with the most expertise makes the decision).
   3. Redundancy (people and/or hardware), i.e., backup systems exist.
   4. Senior Managers who can see the “big picture”, i.e., they don’t micromanage.
   5. Formal rules and procedures. A definite existence of hierarchy but not necessarily bureaucracy in the negative sense.