How Standards stifle innovation

05/26/24 • 12 min

In this episode of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis from R2A discuss how standards stifle innovation.

They highlight the frustration of engineers who are designing to standards rather than focusing on solving the actual problem at hand. They argue that standards are often lag indicators and may not keep up with the rapidly changing world and provide examples of how standards can lead to shortcuts being taken and hinder the adoption of new technologies.

If you’d like more information about Richard and Gaye, head to https://www.r2a.com.au

In this episode of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis from R2A discuss how standards stifle innovation.

If you’d like more information about Richard and Gaye, head to https://www.r2a.com.au

Previous Episode

Risk Appetite versus Zero Harm & the Confusion at Board levels

In this podcast episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss the concept of risk appetite versus zero harm and the confusion it creates at board levels because they're trying to put all of their risk issues into a single statement.
They discuss how a risk appetite is about balancing risk and reward, whereas zero harm is about nothing bad happening, and this gets uncomfortable when applying risk appetite to human safety.
The outline the commonly applied risk paradigms and how a synthesis of risk appetite in commercial and safety practice does occur in project due diligence.
For more information about Richard & Gaye's due diligence work, head to https://www.r2a.com.au

Next Episode

Town Planning Disasters - The need for consquence planning, not risk planning

In this episode of the Risk! Engineers Talk Governance podcast, due diligence engineers and Co-Directors at R2A Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis, discuss town planning disasters and the need for consequence planning.

This follows Gaye’s recent conference paper at the International Public Works Conference where she detailed the VCAT decision around the major hazard facility and the planning law associated with it. But in this podcast, they reflect on other natural hazards like floods, bushfires, dam breaks and how town planning can address (or fail to address) these before they happen.

The biggest question they ask is rather than a focus on recovery, why aren't we building resilience into our infrastructure and/or seeing how we, as a community, build to be able to withstand some of these disasters? And how this is a shift from thinking from risk planning to consequence planning.

They also discuss the mismatch between town planning requirements and WHS/OHS legislation.

If you’d like to learn more about Richard & Gaye’s work, head to R2A at https://www.r2a.com.au

Risk! Engineers Talk Governance - How Standards stifle innovation

Transcript

00:00:01.229

Welcome to Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this episode, Richard and Gaye discuss how standards stifle innovation. We hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please give us a rating. Also, remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch via [email protected].

00:00:29.670

Hi Richard, welcome to a podcast session. Hello Gaye. We're back again. We are. Today we're going to