Michele Braun, Director IMR No, we can’t be prepared for all eventualities.   “It’s a stochastic world,” my grad school stats prof would remind us.   There is variability associated with all possible outcomes:   just ask the National Weather Service’s forecasters or, for that matter, political pollsters. Still, I was more than a little surprised to read the lead-in quotation for the New York Times’ post-election DealB%k coverage [November 15, 2016], in which the CEO of a major corporation admitted that “If you were to look at our game board of all the possible outcomes of the election, this one wasn’t even on the sheet.”   Given that there were only two possible outcomes to the November 8 U.S. presidential election—a Clinton victory or a Trump victory—and two possible timings for that outcome—immediate or delayed—how is it that two of the four cells in a two-by-two matrix weren’t “even on the sheet”? Enterprise risk management is the practice of reviewing possible o