We seem to be surrounded by discord and impasses, both online and in the real world.  Whether it’s the insidious spread of disinformation in our current political climate, our inability to find workable solutions for homelessness or at our borders,  the impact that COVID has had on our society, or another hurricane or heat wave, we have lost confidence in our ability to manage daily conditions on the ground or to know which challenges are worth spending the time on to plan.

Tomorrow I’m doing a live one-hour broadcast with questions from the audience interspersed with questions from the host, EXP Technical’s Kelly Paletta.  The webinar is advertised as a look at risk and emerging cyber threats.  I’m anxious to see how the questions align with some of the ASA areas for investigation in the future.·       

Twenty-two years later, the sounds and images of that day reverberate. The 19-acre complex of buildings called the World Trade Center, considered to be the heart of the financial sector, was forever changed.

Many of you have already suspected that retirement from the fields of operational risk, governance, cybersecurity, or information ethics, policy, and law is just not in the cards for me. I am trying to manage myself and ASA by working fewer hours, but the world continues to present us with unprecedented challenges.

In spite of military standoffs, a deep sea disaster, pesky security breaches, and other operational risk failures, this month we celebrate ASA's 14th anniversary as we publish the 153rd issue of ASA News & Notes. The website went live on July 20, 2009, to announce a new risk consulting practice that had two divisions.

In the 1960s, a relatively new technology was able to record and broadcast as news the behavior of citizens and law enforcement in Southern states, in particular Alabama and Mississippi. The rhetoric matched the behavior, as protesters or voting rights advocates were beaten while the police stood by. One cannot repeat the names called, but can remember still the violent speech used by segregationists as they fought against the change that was coming. To be in the South was to be without the Rule of Law most of us had come to depend on in our lives. At the heart of the Rule of Law is the promise of equal protection under the law as we exercise our civil rights.

Last week, I was honored with a retirement party, hosted by the UW Information School, as well as a special profile iStory that appeared on the iSchool’s home page. I was deeply honored by both. My family came from other parts of the country to attend the party so, in the whirl of good company, I’ve hardly had a chance to take it all in.

Those words came from esteemed novelist Doris Lessing some years ago, when speaking of the value of public libraries and their role in creating an informed citizenry. I’m from a small town, where the public library was one rather small room, part of a combination City Hall and fire station. Its librarian, Edith Thiele, offered me my first job when I was in second or third grade -- on Saturday afternoons, I was paid a quarter to reshelve books. (This was an informal arrangement that Ms. Thiele could cover out of her book fines fund.) The job was about a lot more than reshelving books: I learned about the organization and alphabetization of books in categories, and I handled books for children, youth, and adults. A side benefit of the job was that I could take home as many books as I wished each week – which led to the kind of independent thinking that Doris Lessing was talking about. Though I gave up that job after several years, my affinity for reading and libraries has its roots there.

I examined the factors that should go into making responsible decisions around risky ventures in our current environment in my column last month and concluded:

“The general shape of risk has not changed that much in the past 15 years, but every time is new. There is no shortcut or quick fix to making consequential decisions at the right time. The elements that go into risk management are unchanging: careful, patient, and meticulous thinking.”

I talked about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and how the easing of Dodd Frank regulations on bank size and annual stress testing meant the regulators failed to act on the size of the risk they were observing.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) announced last Friday morning that it had seized and shut down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) after many customers pulled their assets out when news traveled about the bank’s shaky condition.  For those of us who were executives or senior managers at Washington Mutual in 2008, this felt like déjà vu – we had been part of the largest U.S. bank failure in history. Some of us had worked subsequently on banking and finance regulation that was designed to ensure that such bank failures would not take place again.