Grant Purdy

Seeking sufficient certainty is an age-old challenge with many approaches including ‘good old common sense' (although the sense is often neither good nor common!). Through most of my career this has been labelled risk management. However, despite the best efforts of many, this is still widely perceived as being concerned with failure rather than with success. It also harbours a dirty secret: like ‘risk’, it is a made-up expression and has no commonly accepted or applied meaning.

Over the years I watched with horror, what is essentially a very simple concept, be mangled and perturbed beyond recognition. Now the people who need our support have become even more confused about what 'risk management' offers and how that relates to the challenges they make to make good decisions. No wonder people in our profession become disillusioned when they struggle to convince the people they serve that this risk management thing can actually create value rather than just be some form of administrative and regulatory overhead.

Fortunately, there is a form of renaissance occurring now, where some practitioners have realised that more complexity is not good and that if we truly want to help people make better decisions we must start from the basis of how they make decisions and then how we can provide the information they need. Rather than continuing to force upon them more whacky concepts and exotic confections based on ambiguous concepts and loose language.