A skills shortage is a supply problem. A budget shortage is a demand problem. The entire skills-gap apparatus is aimed at the wrong side of the market.
None of the failures in this database required an unknown technique. Each required somebody with time to notice, decide and act.
Scarcity normally produces rising wages and employers training people up. “Cannot afford” and “cannot find” describe the same failed hire.
Forty people at one supplier is the number that describes what the £1.9 billion is made of.
The visible portion of workforce exposure is a sample of listed companies’ workforce exposure — a specific and wealthy subset.
A customer can stop being a customer. An employee cannot decline to give their employer a national identifier and a bank account.
The constraint was never analyst hours. It was people with standing to make a decision and time to follow it through.
The discipline that demands organisations quantify their risk does not measure the stability of the function that owns it.
Avoided-loss reasoning is unfalsifiable. A differential compares what actually happened to two groups — in the currency budgets are written in.
Success is the absence of an event, which is unobservable. Failure is a public incident with a named owner.