Strategic risk appraisal. Comparing expert- and literature-informed consequence assessments for environmental policy risks receiving national attention

Strategic risk appraisal (SRA) has been applied to compare diverse policy level risks to and from the environment in England and Wales. Its application has relied on expert-informed assessments of the potential consequences from residual risks that attract policy attention at the national scale. Here we compare consequence assessments, across environmental, economic and social impact categories that draw on ‘expert’- and ‘literature-based’ analyses of the evidence for 12 public risks appraised by Government. For environmental consequences there is reasonable agreement between the two sources of assessment, with expert-informed assessments providing a narrower dispersion of impact severity and with median values similar in scale to those produced by an analysis of the literature. The situation is more complex for economic consequences, with a greater spread in the median values, less consistency between the two assessment types and a shift toward higher severity values across the risk portfolio. For social consequences, the spread of severity values is greater still, with no consistent trend between the severities of impact expressed by the two types of assessment. For the latter, the findings suggest the need for a fuller representation of socioeconomic expertise in SRA and the workshops that inform SRA output

Managing five paradoxes of knowledge exchange in networked organizations: new priorities for HRM?

The life-blood of most organizations is knowledge. Too often, the very mechanisms set up to facilitate knowledge-flow militate against it. This is because they are instituted in a top-down way, they are cumbersome to manage and the bridges of trust fail to get built. In their thirst for innovation, the tendency is for firms to set up elaborate transmission channels and governance systems. As a result, staff are drowned in a deluge of mundane intranet messages and bewildered by matrix structures, while off-the-wall ideas and mold-breaking insights are routinely missed. Added to this is the challenge of operating across professional, cultural, regional and linguistic boundaries, where ways of sharing knowledge differ markedly, even within the same project team. Drawing upon extensive research with scientists in the ATLAS collaboration (a high-energy particle physics experiment comprising 3,500 scientists from 38 countries) we explore five paradoxes associated with knowledge exchange in global networks. Each paradox leads to a proposition which takes the theory and practice of knowledge management in a fresh direction. We conclude by outlining a number of HRM priorities for international knowledge-intensive organizations

Inspiring the next generation mobility workforce through innovative industry-academia partnerships

The transportation industry is at the cusp of an entirely new landscape brought about by advanced technologies. These technologies are fundamentally changing the way the industry operates, shifting the required skills and abilities for existing occupations, and creating new jobs with work functions and requirements that did not previously exist. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) competencies will dominate requirements for the future workforce, whether in traditional STEM occupations or not. These changes create exciting opportunities for the new mobility workforce, but also require new approaches to how we attract, educate, and retain workers to combat serious pipeline challenges. Effective strategies must be coherent and collaborative to create comprehensive solutions across the workforce continuum (K-12 to career). And, attracting diversity must be considered from the outset rather than as an afterthought. Industry-academia partnerships are at the core of transformative approaches that will move the needle for inspiring the next generation workforce

On being a good listener: setting priorities for applied health services research.

Although there are numerous methods for setting priorities across health services, no equivalent attention has been given to ways of setting priorities for health services research. One of the greatest lessons from setting these priorities is that the involvement of users, while difficult to achieve, is central to clarifying the underlying values and assumptions often buried in technical, data-driven exercises. It also leads the users to greater ownership in and commitment to the eventual priorities. This article applies these lessons to setting priorities for applied health services research, outlined in a six-stage "listening model." The model is then applied to both an English and a Canadian case study, and the lessons from these experiences are summarized