Hegel and Risk Management

What has Hegel got to do with risk management? Everything actually. Hegel classically argued that change was the continuous dialectic of revolutionary forces and counterrevolutionary forces. The revolution poses a thesis, while the counterrevolution seeks to protect its antithesis. Out of the clash comes a synthesis through which progress slowly appears. What we call risk is often our micro view of a piece of these macro forces causing change. What looks random at one level of analysis, is anything but at a higher level of analysis. When a system's innate contradictions (whether that system be capitalism - See a chap called Marx, or an asset bubble) slowly develops the forces that cause that system to fail or end. Another way of saying this is that something that cannot go on for ever, certainly won't. A painful lesson for all concerned in the wake of the property bubble of the 2008-9. Or for the demographic bubble of the late 60s and 70s. Or the buildup in US armaments in the 80s and 90s. Or the defense spending in the former USSR over the same time. Bubbles build on a short sighted focus on momentum, rather that absolute values. This time its different goes the refrain. No one wants to be one left holding the baby when the music stops.
The risk is not apparent when the music is playing - our experience of the immediate past is too positive and discourages asking awkward and unpopular questions. When the music stops (as stop it must) the risk becomes an event, an event that brings down the house, and we ask ourselves - how could we have been so foolish...