One of the best holiday decisions I made this year was to have a staycation in Kent at the end of August. The weather wasn’t up to much, but at least I avoided being trapped at an airport by the significant disruption to flights following a crippling failure of the UK’s air traffic control system.

The recent Nats report about the failure shows this to be an unusual and disruptive event that exposed vulnerabilities in the air traffic control system leading to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights and sustained disruption affecting 250,000 people across the UK’s airports.

The root problem was reported to be a faulty algorithm and has now, apparently, been addressed. It’s not the first time we’ve experienced disruption of this kind. The 2019 UK air-traffic outage was also a software failure, and in 2018 an overhaul of the Nats system led to significant delays for flights to Gatwick and Heathrow.

This is a classic example of why the role of risk management is so important. Nats described the disruption as “one in 15 million”. It may not have been a black swan event – a rare and unpredicted event that has a major impact and is evidently predictable in hindsight – but a rogue error, but even so well-designed risk management approaches and testing requirements should have been able to identify an issue of this kind.

There are lessons all risk managers can take to improve their practices and skills. In particular, risk managers should not rely solely on historical data and assumptions to assess and mitigate risks. It’s essential also to test future scenarios and consider the possibility of outliers and black swan events, developing critical thinking and creativity skills to imagine and simulate different outcomes and situations. This means using a variety of tools and methods to analyse and model risks, such as simulations, scenario planning, and stress tests.

This type of disruption particularly highlights the need to be aware of the interdependencies and complexities of the systems we operate in. A single error or failure can cascade with catastrophic consequences in other parts of the system. In response, risk managers should adopt an holistic and systemic approach to risk management. This means mapping and monitoring the connections and interactions between different components and stakeholders of the system and identifying and addressing the root causes and feedback loops of the problems.

Risk managers know all about being prepared for the unexpected, having contingency plans and being flexible and adaptable in their response to changing situations and new information. A key skill is learning from mistakes and failures through reflection and assessment, sharing lessons learned with others, and seeking feedback from experts and peers. Even though this was a systems failure we should recognizing the human factors and biases that influence risk perception and decision making and consider the ethical and social implications of all our actions.

Preparedness requires risk managers to continually keep their skills up to date in all these areas. But you may also want to think about training yourself and your teams to cope with stress and uncertainty and to communicate effectively in a crisis. Each risk event may be rare, but there are an awful lot of them around.

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