Nice concept on risk management applied to Meerkat Manor. I’m missing the drama, though–the blog posting just didn’t draw me in like it should.

Oh, to be a meerkat on sentry duty performing risk management for the clan. My story would go something like this:

09 October 2007: Dear diary, I drew sentry duty for the third day this week. I know it’s my solemn duty to protect the clan, but my risk assessment has determined that, although a predator is a high-impact event, it is a low rate-of-occurance activity and so I think a better use of my time is in foraging for stray eggs. Besides, if the predators come and eat us all, it’s not like I’ll have to face the Meerkat Manor Board of Directors.

10 October 2007: Dear diary, I grow tired of the incessant looking for predators. I mean, why do us meerkats focus exclusively on detective controls which use up to 15% of our available manpower when we could just as easily reduce the sentries to 5% of our efforts and put in place corrective controls such as trap holes and punji sticks to reduce the threats to our home? The true cost savings is that the effort for corrective controls is a one-time installation where sentry duty is a recurring bill. Didn’t the alpha-pair learn anything in their Masters in Meerkat Administration classes?

11 October 2007: Dear diary, today I instituted a metrics program to gauge the effectiveness of our sentry program and to determine if we are getting the best level of risk for the time that we are investing. So far, I’ve made a bar chart to analyze the total number of predator alerts versus the total number of predator intrusions. I think I have a business case to slowly reduce the ratio of sentries to foragers during the day.

12 October 2007: Dear diary, I noticed today that the younger meerkats are ineffective at sentry duty because of their inability to stand still for long periods of time without chasing each other around the veldt. This is a problem staffing-wise because sentry duty now takes some of the best, well-trained meerkats and takes them out of other occupations. I’m not criticizing my clan leadership, but I just feel like we’re doing a bad job at meerkat time management. Maybe we need to cross-train into other skills.

13 October 2007: Dear diary, I was standing on a rockpile today and the idea hit me: why don’t we do a meerkat predator drill weekly to instill confidence in our abilities to respond to a predator incident? I brought it up to the clan’s alpha-pair and they said they would “take it under advisement”. I guess that’s what it means to be just one of the peons out here, standing in the sun. I swear, if they don’t up my salary from 80 bugs to 90 bugs, I just might leave the clan and start my own on the other side of the hill.

14 October 2007: Dear diary, today we had a visit from the Better Meerkat Bureau’s auditors. Our clan pretended to be extra-vigilant and we put out several extra sentries to try to impress them. Some days I think the auditors would be happy if we all starved to death as long as we were all on sentry duty doing our part to keep the predators at bay. I guess that’s the price of blind compliance.

15 October 2007: Dear diary, I spent 3 hours today in bark training. Apparently the auditors reported back that our barks were substandard, so now we have every-friggin-la-dee-da-merkat out in the hot sun standing in a line practicing how to bark. I mean, come on, it’s barking, we do it all day. We bark when we’re scared. We bark when we’re mad. We bark when we’re hungry. But I guess auditors know what they know, and what they know are checklists, and we didn’t do too well in the bark section of ours for some reason, so here we are practicing.

16 October 2007: Dear diary, I had a meeting today with the meerkats from the “vendor” clan. They want to trade some food for some bald eagle repellent spray and a device called “Hole Access Control” which ensures that only meerkats from my clan can crawl down our holes and into our burrows.  Needless to say, I’m a little skeptical at first, I’ll see if I can get them to throw in an inflatable lion to “sweeten the deal a little”.

Postscript: Added the 16th of October because when I read this a second time I realized that I listed all the problems in the life of today’s risk manager except for vendors. That’s now been fixed. =)

• Core Belief #2 — Risk Management Uber Alles
• Indicator Species
• When Acceptable Risk is Not Acceptable
• A Visit from DCAA
• Meerkats Join the Big 4