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Greater Alabama Chapter Lunch and Learn
January 14, 2020 @ 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Happy 2020, Cost Professionals!
Please join us at our next monthly luncheon speaker series for the Greater Alabama chapter of ICEAA, which is taking place on Tuesday, January 14th, at 11:30AM CST.
Feel free to bring your own lunch or enjoy a delicious Ted’s BBQ buffet lunch for $8.
Speaker: Dr. Christian Smart
“Here Be Dragons: How Risk Blindness Is Endangering our National Security and How to Fix It”
Abstract: One of the earliest known globes of the Earth is housed in the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library. Known as the Hunt-Lenox globe, it is a hollow, made of copper, and quite small, at only 4.4 inches in diameter. Near the Eastern coast of Asia the Latin phrase “HC SVNT DRACONES” is inscribed. In English this phrase means “Here Be Dragons.” Maps and globes from the sixteenth century did not fully plot the entire Earth, as there were some areas not yet explored. Mapmakers would include dangerous creatures in uncharted areas, such as dragons. This was a way of saying there are risks in these unknown areas. People in those days had a much greater appreciation of the chance of danger than in the modern world. Pretty much anywhere you look, risk is underappreciated, underestimated and often outright ignored. This blindness to risk is prevalent in the development of government weapons and aerospace programs, such as spacecraft and fighter jets. One dimension of that risk is financial – the chance that cost and schedule will grow from inception to completion. Solving this problem is an important issue for national security, as the underappreciation of risk slows down the completion and fielding of key weapons and space systems. Even though the US has been the world’s only superpower for several decades, competing nations such as Russia and China are gaining on us and will soon surpass us unless we more efficiently develop and field emerging technologies. This presentation is about the poor job that the government currently does with planning for, estimating, and managing financial risk, and how to fix it.