Risk Management: How-to Manage Risks Made Easy (2023)

I received a question from a longtime friend of the show, Sheri Martin. Sheri asked: “How does one plan for SHTF with a balanced approach when everything seems most important? I always seem to get hyper-focused on one area at the expense of other important areas.”

Sheri, the short answer is Risk Management.

The long answer is to, through risk assessments, objectively examine the risk of each area or thing you’re trying to protect—your assets. That means looking at what you’re trying to protect and analyzing the impact if it’s lost, the threats which may target it, and your lapses in preparedness, which are known as your vulnerabilities. By quantifying those risk factors, risk managers, such as yourself, can objectively analyze and determine where to focus your preparedness in the form of risk reduction efforts so that you can work NOT to be unnecessarily hyper-focused on one area when you should be addressing another.

That applies during normal times, man-made and natural disasters, and SHTF scenarios. While the impact of losing an asset may shift along with the threats and vulnerabilities, the process of managing your operational risk profile remains the same regardless of the situation.

The Risk Management Process is a Fundamental Key to Preparedness

The risk identification and management process is, in my opinion, one of the fundamental keys to preparedness because it is the tool that prepares us to mitigate risk in a logical, objective, non-hyper-focused manner. It’s so important I included an entire chapter on it in my book, Mind4Survival.

As I write in Mind4Survival, to manage our risk and make our lives safer and less worrisome:

“…we must understand how to objectively (with a minimum of bias and emotion) compare our constantly fluctuating risks and opportunities as equally as possible. We must be able to compare risks equally and objectively with one another to judge which risks are most likely to cause the most significant harm should they happen. Our understanding of which risks are the most problematic in relation to one another allows us to paint the overarching picture.

Our risk profile is an objective view of everything we have to protect, everything we’re protecting it from, and everything we’re protecting it with. Therefore, understanding our profile provides us with the reality-based information we need to make the most effective decisions about managing risk and, ultimately, our lives. That’s not to say we can’t add emotion and bias to the process. What I’m saying, though, is that creating our risk profile provides us with information that we know to be as accurate as possible. How you make use of that information is up to you.”So, what does that mean? It means that to help us not hyper-focus on one aspect of our preparedness over another element that may be more important, we need to look at all of our assets on an equal and level playing field that compares one aspect of our preparedness to another.

The Three Questions

We create an equal and level playing field with which to compare our assets by repeatedly asking ourselves three simple questions:

1. What Do I Have to Protect? (Assets)

These are your assets and include all the things you value. Assets include your family, friends, home, car, and clothing. They also include your preps, such as food, water, medications, cash, etc. And they include your intellectual property, such as your computer files, essential documents, and even your reputation.

2. What Do I Have to Protect it From? (Threats)

The answer “What do I have to protect the things I value from is “threats.” These are the specific threats and hazards which, if and when they happen, can result in harm or loss to our assets. Threats include job losses, home fires, tornados, civil unrest, a pandemic, a corrupt government, and so forth.