Risk Management (or not)

Reasons to Disregard Risks

• Superstition. "Speak of the Devil and he shall appear."
• Magical Thinking. "If we don't talk about it, it can't happen". And the corollary:
• Likelihood Thought-Action Fusion. "Talking about it makes it happen".
• The Ostrich Effect. "Bury your head in the sand and the bad thing will go away".
• Risk Denial. "Don't document it otherwise it staff affects morale and upsets stakeholders and then it will happen".
• Minimisation. "That's not a real risk".
• Normalcy Bias. "It's never happened before".
• Optimism Bias. "That wouldn't happen here".
• Risk Discounting. "It wouldn't be that bad".
• Disaster Myopia. "Nothing like that has happened for years".
• Denial Culture. "Keep calm and shut the **** up".
• Defensive Denial. "Are you saying my plan is flawed?"
• False Positivity. "Don't be so negative. It might never happen."
• Blame the Messenger.
• Punitive Delegation. "You saw it, you fix it."
• Slopy-shoulders. "Bring me solutions, not problems".
• Safe Inaction. "Let sleeping dogs lie".
• Career-minded Inaction. "You don't get sacked for making no decision".
• Omission Bias. "If I ignore it and it blows up, bad luck. If I poke it and it blows up, I'll get the blame."
• Benign Neglect. "It's not broken enough to be worth fixing".
• Strategic Inaction. "I have decided it should wait".
• Wilful Ignorance. "La, la, la, can't hear you. Oops, dropped it in the bin."
• Organisational Inertia. "We don't do it that way here".
• Kick it Down the Road. "I'll move on before it happens".
• Science Will Fix It. "Not a problem. Science will find a solution."
• Groupthink. "There's only you thinks that so you're wrong".
• The Abilene Paradox. "It looks like everyone else thinks this isn't a problem so I'll keep quiet".
• Bystander Effect. "Surely everyone can see this, so someone must be dealing with it".
• Pluralistic Ignorance. "Everyone else is cheering the Emperor's new suit. It must be me that's mistaken."
• Weaponised Competence. "If you can't see ow this works, you aren't thinking strategically".
• The Newcomer. "When you've been here a while, you'll understand".
• Unstoppable Project Momentum. "We've gone too far to stop now".
• Traffic Light Quota. "We already have our limit for red risks on the dashboard".
• Goodhart's Law. "The SLA says we can't have any more risks".
• Organisational Inertia. "We can't change how we do things, it's like turning a super-tanker".
• Cassandra Syndrome. "Oh is he complaining about that thing AGAIN? He's always complaining about it. Ignore him."
• The Law of Triviality. "We'll worry about that huge thing another day. First we need to count the paperclips."
• The Crocodile Nearest the Boat. "Don't worry about that huge problem that's downstream. There's a little problem right here."
• Bum-covering. "It's OK, I already alluded to that on page 156 in Appendix D."
• Panic Avoidance Bias. "Don't mention that; it'll set the hares running and create more work."
• I Hear What You Say. "I'm not interested. Shut up and go away."
• The Chilling Effect. "Stop looking to cause trouble. It is disruptive and not appreciated."
• Cascade Anxiety. "Don't go opening that can of worms, it'll just create more problems."
• Pandora's Box Effect. "If we go down that path, it opens up too much complexity for us to handle".
• Strategic Misrepresentation. "If we document that risk, we might lose the funding."
• Action Bias. "Stop thinking about what might go wrong and just get on with it".
• Scope Insulated Execution. "We need to protect the scope and not get tied up hypothesising legal implications".
• Budget Protection. "We haven't the money to do anything about that anyway".
• Analysis Paralysis Pre-emption. "Don't go down that rabbit hole and get us bogged down in what-ifs. Let's move on".
• Career Warning. "You need to think about your audience before making statements like that."

Reasons to Raise Risks

• Come to think of it, I'm not sure there are any now.