How ‘risk management’ hinders rather than helps decision-making and actually degrades value

Organisations can only hope to advance their Purpose - and thus create value - by making and implementing decisions. Decision-making approach and competency is thus fundamental to sound governance.

This workshop will show that although the array of current and past approaches to ‘Risk Management’ with their many artefacts and paraphernalia absorb precious resources, they serve only to hinder rather than help sound decision making. We will contend that these ‘Risk management’ belief systems create an illusion of confidence as to which outcomes will flow from decisions and so act as an organisational ‘Kool-aid’ that insidiously undermine sound governance.

We will examine a diverse selection of well known, public domain case studies of decisions that resulted in very serious unintended consequences (ranging from Fukishima to SVB) to illustrate that it was the distraction of ‘Risk management’ that resulted in the defective decisions that made these events possible.

While our presentation will demonstrate how the advocacy of the proponents of these unnatural ‘Risk management’ belief systems to ‘integrate’ them into the (natural) way that organisations (and their ‘Deciders’) actually make decisions distracts and hinders, it will also demonstrate (by contrast) that greater awareness of how decisions are actually made supports and facilitates even better decision-making.