Risk taxonomy
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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A fine occupation for the idle lawyer: Describing, and grouping in relation to each other, the entire catalog of risks that face your undertaking, as if unrealised legal hazards can be ranked, boxed and sorted like the phyla of butterflies, tits or thrush.
This exercise can occupy as little — a breakout session on an away-day — or as much — the permanent task of a dedicated division in the department — of your firm's intellectual capacity as you have going spare: organisations that run to the bureaucratic[1] may become so swooned by this notion that they can find little time to do anything else. For how can one asses the risks of a transaction if one doesn't know from which family of what genus in what species it hails?
The problem with risk taxonomies
Jolly Contrarian has two reservations about risk taxonomies:
The false comfort blanket
Any taxonomy, like a map, can only document the territory you know, have raked over, surveyed and measured. Stables from which the horse has bolted, so to say. This is of a piece with the common lawyer’s usual mode of reasoning, the doctrine of precedent, whose organising principle is to move forward by exclusive reference to what lies behind. This is all very well in times of plenty, when the tide is rising, all boats are floating and all is well in the world. Here the world behaves according to the narrative we have supplied it — we are in a period of normal science. But by the same token the acute risks are in abeyance. Aslan is not on the move. Even if you left the door open, the horse has a nosebag full of hay and is’t going anywhere.
But what happens when our carefully constructed narrative falls apart? Those stressed scenarios in which, as the old saw has it, I'll be gone, you’ll be gone. Then, your paradigm has failed. People around you are losing their heads and blaming it on you and your stupid taxonomy, which isn’t working.
It’s a narrative
Any taxonomy is a narrative. Like any hierarchical organising system, a taxonomy commits you to one way of looking at the world, at the expense of all others. Now this a necessary evil when it comes to concrete physical things, like books: the Dewey decimal system is a single hierarchy by necessity: a physical thing cannot be in two places at once. So all library users agree a common taxonomy (subject matter, not author, or title, or publisher) and, for better or worse, stick to it. This has a consequent effect on how everyone thinks about the world: if you want to find the book you're looking for, you need to buy in to the taxonomy (what good is using another taxonomy, however suitable, if it means never being able to find the book you are after? Since book storage has changed, the Dewey decimal system has more or less disappeared from use. Boolean search means you can search on any keyword you fancy.
the decimal system divides the universe into a subdivisions of 1,000. In its way it offers infinite particularity, but only by subdivision of ten major categories (General reference, Philosophy, Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Natural Science, Applied Science, Arts & Recreation, Literature and History). These produced arbitrary dis-juxtapositions: Why is logic (part of Philosophy) removed from mathematics (a part of Natural Science) or even Language? And so on. But we were practically committed, and that forced an intellectual commitment.
A Boolean methodology does not require any such juxtaposition. It is open-ended and infinite, and agnostic to rules where in the same way that a full-blown taxonomy is closed-ended and finite.
Risks are not physical things
See also
References
- ↑ You know who you are.