Hypegiaphobia

What's that spell? Hypegiaphobia?

Yes, Hypegiaphobia is the unpronounceable 'short' for:

A fear of responsibility

In a 2008 white paper, called Hypegiaphobia, KPMG stresses the importance that organizations want to be and must be 'in control' of a multitude of risks and therefore make enormous sacrifices to achieve this goal.

CEO, management and employees have to comply to so many simultaneous goals, and the consequences of not being compliant on a single issue are that high, that people fear to take individual responsibility in a organization.

In search of the balance between rules and trust, KPMG calls upon the parties involved to provide more space for individual responsibilities. In the mentioned white paper KPMG answers two key questions:

• Are the high investments in risk management effective and do they really lead to a lower risk profile?
  
  
• Does risk management overshoot its goal and produce undesirable effects, such as reduced entrepreneurial spirit, increasing litigation, a culture of fear and a potentially adverse effect on the competitive position?

Trust Rules
Moreover, in 2009 KPMG extended their view on Hypegiaphobia by publishing a document called 'Trust Rules'.

Guts, vision and trust go hand in hand in a time of increasing litigation.

Unplug
Lately, numerous persons and organizations in the Netherlands have had the guts to “unplug”. Unplug is a new work style by which numerous (compliance) issues are handled in unconventional ways :

• Getting rid of unnecessary rules, of fixed places and times
• Dealing better with knowledge
• Collaborating more
• Taking more personal responsibility

All this with a a single focus: The client.

Principles
To organize trust and to be able to trust, KPMG has formulated (on basis of client interviews) nine principles they call trust rules (mark: the noun has turned into a verb) :

1. Make contact personal
2. Define common goals
3. Set the right example
4. Build trust with sensible rules
5. Share responsibility and trust
6. Stay on course and keep calm, even when things go wrong
7. Rely on informed trust, not on blind trust
8. Be mild on misunderstanding but crush abuse
9. Dare to experiment and learn from experience

Risk
In a document called Signs of Safety, risk is defined as an increasingly defining motif of the social life of western countries.

However, risk is almost always seen as negative, as something that must be avoided.

Killing Black Swans
To put it simply: everyone is worried about been blamed and sued for something. Thus organizations have become increasingly risk-averse to the point of risk-phobia. Elimination of every Black Swan risk at any price, seems the unrealistic and never ending target.

New solutions
The challenge for management, actuaries and accountants is to see and define Risk in terms of a potential big win and investment instead of only a potential big loss. This also means that - as a society - we have to reformulate rules and laws in a way that risks can be taken in such a way that failure, bankruptcy are or catastrophes are not (nearly) completely excluded anymore.

Often economies of scale lead to the rise of international (financial) companies that overshadow individual countries in terms of VAR.
If country governments of such 'inhabited' international enterprises are convinced that an eventual bankruptcy of such a company would create great collateral damage and therefore is not an realistic option, things will have to change. In these cases governments have no other choice than to order by law:

• a limitation of (international) company size
• a limitation of reciprocal contracts between big companies
  

or...

• to demand and allow companies to restructure themselves in such a way that, in case of a catastrophe, only a part of the company goes bankrupt and not the company as a whole
  

In these cases state (re)insurance is not a preferable solution. Pricing this risk would be too expensive or - even worse - not charging for this risk would lead to a situation where management can take every risk they want, because in case of a bankruptcy, the government would back up anyhow.

Risk-Phobia Virus
As actuaries we're extremely vulnerable to the 'risk-phobia virus'.
Let's not get caught by this virus or hide in the bush, but take a calculated risk and go out to present our new solutions that make the difference in tomorrows risky world. Risk..., a never ending issue....

Links: Hypegiaphobia Video , List of phobia's, Dutch nine trust rules
Sources: Signs of Safety

Actuary Core Qualities

Apart from an official outstanding actuarial education, what core qualities does an actuary need to be successful?

Summarized, here are some of the main qualities:

• Great Mathematical skills and experience
• Outstanding multi level, oral and written communication skills
• Interpersonal and social skills
• Being able to downgrade complex problems to simple decisions to be taken
• Self-motivated, ambitious, creative, independent, team worker
• Conflict solving capabilities; Empathic but also decisive
• Professional integrity, commercial outlook
• A professional discussion partner for professionals in other areas as Pension, Investment, Health, Risk, Governance, ICT, Finance, Administration, Marketing, HR, Legal & Fiscal affairs, etc.

To put is simply: an actuary has to be a kind of 'White Raven', a 'one in a million professional'.....

However, actuaries are just like humans, they do not only have their core qualities, but also their pitfalls.

Besides, how can you find out what your core quality is?

Core Quality Test
Well, the simple answer is that -thanks to Daniel Ofman - you can find out in a one minute online test what your core quality is.

This test doesn't only defines your core quality, but also your pitfall, challenge and allergy.

TAKE THE CORE QUALITY TEST

Now you know what your qualities and pitfalls are, you may as well start working on them!

Links: Core-Qualities
Sources : Wiki, RSS,

Swine Flu Counter update 06-07-2009

Want a simple global Swine Flu Counter on your web page?

You may find the old (July 6, 2009) Counter/Calculator Here.
There is already a new counter on a more recent model available.
Look at : Swine Flu Counter Update-sept-2009

The (old) counter is based on a 'July 6, 2009 estimation' as described on Actuary-Info. However, now the data have been updated based on the official, more reliable and accurate WHO reports.



If necessary, counters will be updated again on a on a regular basis. The latest data you'll find in this XLS spreadsheet.

Install Swine Flu Counter
How to implement this old Swine Flu Counter on your web site?

• Put the next HTML-script (without the outer quotes) just before the end of the body tag:' <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://jos.blogspot.googlepages.com/swine-flu-2009.js"> </script>'
  


• Put the next HTML-line (without the outer quotes) where you want the Swine Flu table to appear on your site :
  ' <div id="swineflutable"></div> '
  
  
• Ready!

Remember, you may only install one counter on your website, either the old or the new.

Paradox
The best what could and will happen with regard to the original swine flu model and corresponding counter, is that they don't turn out to be valid. This way the model and counter will have proven their 'reason for existence'. Simply just by contributing to the necessary awareness and prevention measures to diminish or stop the exponential swine flu infections growth.

Contrary, developing but not publishing models or counters will create a lack of warning and attention and would therefore prove the (exponential) model to become true. This is the inevitable paradox of modeling with our without follow up actions.

This paradox is the main reason why an 'actuarial advice' should therefore alway be presented in a (minimal) "two-way scenario" form:

• Estimation of results without follow up actions
• Estimation of results including advised follow up actions

Anyway, have fun with your Swine Flu Counter!

Joshua Maggid

ADD July 18, 2009
On July 16, 2009 WHO reports:

• Further spread of the pandemic, within affected countries and to new countries, is considered inevitable.
• This assumption is fully backed by experience. The 2009 influenza pandemic has spread internationally with unprecedented speed. In past pandemics, influenza viruses have needed more than six months to spread as widely as the new H1N1 virus has spread in less than six weeks.
• The increasing number of cases in many countries with sustained community transmission is making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for countries to try and confirm them through laboratory testing. Moreover, the counting of individual cases is now no longer essential in such countries for monitoring either the level or nature of the risk posed by the pandemic virus or to guide implementation of the most appropriate response measures.

In short: now h1n1 really gets important and probably is running out of hand, WHO stops reporting.....
Let's see if we can find another source....

ADD July 21, 2009
Wikipedia's 2009 flu pandemic reports (based on ECDC reports, as WHO reports fail) an accumulated number of 143,652 reported infections and 899 deaths on July 21, 2009. As the WHO has decided not to registrate the number of infections anymore (as from july 9) and, except for the US, reports are based on confirmed laboratory test results, the actual number of infections will be much higher.

That's why, as long as the actual deaths are in line with the modelled estimated death, the 'July 6th exponential model', used as basis for the swine flu counter, seems still realistic and valid!

ADD Sept 06, 2009
The data have structurally changed from exponential to linear.
Take a look at the new counter at:

Swine Flu Counter Update-sept-2009