I’m uncertain about risk
AGAIN, I saw a post highlighting risk and how to manage risk in construction. Then I saw an article lampooning Bear Grylls and his positive outlook.
Bear has re-framed his ‘alarm clock’ as his ‘opportunity clock’.
My work colleagues talk about ‘challenges’. It’s always challenges, never ‘problems’.
We need to talk about risk.
The challenge is, I believe, how the word ‘risk’ is interpreted. As a non-specialist, when someone uses risk to talk about a subject I know nothing about, I hear a negative outcome. Why is this a problem?
At the Transforming Infrastructure Performance Summit organised by the Institute of Government and Public Policy and Mark Coates of Bentley Systems there was a lot of talk about blockers to using data in engineering.
The blockers were always qualified with the word risk.
Risk was given as the reason that investors would not bankroll privately funded projects.
Risk was quoted as a reason to not implement technological solutions on a project.
‘We know how our existing methods achieve the result needed, why risk new, unproven technology?’
However, the reasons that these solutions are not getting backed is not really about risk, it’s really all about the uncertainty of success. Something that fails 10% or even 1% of the time has a ‘risk’ associated with it even when the ‘certainty’ of success is 90% or 99%.
What was more alarming was when financial risk and technological risk on innovative solutions for projects was being rolled into a total risk factor.
The outcome was heavily swayed by the financial risk, but the excuse for not doing it was using the technological risk as the excuse not to invest.
In this fast-changing world, and especially where infrastructure solutions are involved, sometimes decisions on doing something, or not, need to be more altruistic.
#Discuss
Andy Evans FCInstCES, President