Risk management is a structured process where you can measure the uncertainty and risk of a thread.

This analysis does exhaustive research to evaluate risks and establish a strategy for risk controls.

You are identifying, assessing, and controlling potential risks in your organization – for example, financial, legal, and strategic issues that could become escalation factors and real headaches for your business.

Risk management will help you return processes to their logical flow. Traditional bowtie diagrams – and other similar graphics – will help you develop preventive controls and consider all the consequences.

As a business owner or any other business role, you can use risk analysis for multiple objectives, especially if you combine it with a bow tie analysis.

Some of the situations when you can apply a risk analysis with the bowtie method are:

• When developing a project to anticipate issues or reinforce existing control.
• When deciding to move ahead with a plan.
• When improving adverse event prevention systems.
• While preparing against circumstances you can’t control, such as technology failure, theft, staff sickness, etc.
• While developing new management strategies and other changes in your company, such as digital healthcare research or starting an annual scientific meeting in your IT department.

When you develop a risk analysis, you create barriers against all those issues.

A bowtie diagram is a visual tool used in risk management to analyze potential risks and identify appropriate control measures.

It’s called a “bowtie” because it typically has that shape, with a central "knot" representing the potential risk and two "wings" representing the risk consequences and causes. Bow-tie diagrams can be used to identify the most effective control measures to prevent the threat from occurring or mitigating its potential impact.

The diagram is easy to understand and follows a particular time flow from left to right.

An easy illustration of what the bow-tie diagram tries to express can be:

“This happened [event] because of [reason]. Resulting in this [effect].”

It’s an easy formula that works to understand the bowtie diagram concept. Still, its application is made by management roles for risk controls. As such, you shouldn’t apply it to any problem, only those representing an actual situation of human error.

Essentially, the Bowtie diagram:

• It’s a simple, straightforward, and concise way to determine the event occurring.
• It provides possible causal factors about an event linked to a situation that could harm your business.
• It helps with risk assessment.
• It’s a supporting diagram that can be used with other risk management techniques.

You can use a few analyses to measure critical events and learn the possibility of them happening.

Event Tree Analysis

The event tree analysis technique is a method that comes straight from the decision tree analysis. This accident-cognition procedure considers adverse events and outcomes in chronological order.

This methodology uses an event tree approach to explain the relation between future events and their motives for happening. 

Event tree analysis is a quantitative risk evaluation based on events and the chance of finding solutions.

A generalized Bowtie diagram is easy to understand and can manage escalation factors. So, applying the Bow-tie method will grant you these benefits to your project:

1. You can visualize how a critical event should evolve.

2. Brings information about specific barriers of the risks, threats, consequences, and critical events.

3. Creates scenarios following a logical cause-and-effect model.

4. Works as an excellent mapping tool to identify scenario weaknesses to improve decision-making.

As you can see, using the conceptual Bowtie diagram gives you plenty of benefits when applying it to your business.

Just as with any other accident-probability analysis, they have flaws.

As such, here are some of the cons of using the Bowtie diagram as a management tool:

1. Bowtie diagrams require deep knowledge.

2. It may take time to develop a successful bowtie program.

3. Some barriers could ignore potential hazards, necessarily leading to an unstable situation.

4. If done improperly, there could be misleading threats and escalation factors.

The Bowtie diagram and its analysis shouldn’t be taken for granted, as it may seem easy to understand but could potentially bring more troubles than solutions.

Now, if you’re still interested in developing a diagram using conventional Bowtie terminology, this is what you need to do:

Identify a Proper Threat

Before developing a bowtie diagram, you must consider that every Bowtie Diagram requires a threat to functioning. The idea is that you identify something that could cause an effect in your business that you want to prevent—For example, a downloaded unauthorized software that could bring ransomware. As a result, the virus could encrypt the server’s data and provoke significant losses.

So, create a Bowtie that starts in the middle, expressing the event you want to analyze. To do this, ensure everyone involved or affected by the potential incident is aware of the event.

Include Potential Causes

A Bowtie Diagram has two sides, one for causes and the other for effects. As such, the Bowtie diagram represents a comprehensive analysis of the potential risk that could affect your business, which is why sources and effects are included.

You must add on the left-hand side all the potential threats that could jump-start an event. You don’t need to rank them. Just type them down as they come.

Add The Possible Consequences

Now on the right-hand side, add all the effects from those causes. This is essential to see how a critical event may evolve if you don’t apply escalation controls.

To create any type of diagram – like anesthesia Bowtie diagrams relating to medical learning – you need a solid productivity software.

Microsoft Excel is one of the best productivity tools in the market so far for immediate management of your projects. This software doesn’t come alone. When you purchase a Microsoft Office license, you also get other programs like Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, etc.

You can combine them and improve your experience by creating conclusion bowtie diagrams.

RoyalCDKeys allows you to get the whole software suite for barely $10. This way, you can obtain a Microsoft Office 2021 license that will help you activate the programs and start using them to create the ultimate Bowtie Diagram.

Risk management is a process that involves identifying, assessing, and controlling potential risks that could impact an organization. 

One tool you can use in risk management is a bowtie diagram, which visually represents the potential risk at the center, with the causes and consequences on either side. 

They are usually prepared to identify effective control measures to prevent or mitigate the impact of risks. 

Other techniques for analyzing risks include event tree analysis, which considers the chronological order of events and outcomes, and fault tree analysis, which identifies the root causes of an event. 

These analyses can help businesses make informed decisions and develop strategies for risk management.