The Right Risk Questions

Known globally as The Risk Doctor, David has been working in risk management for about 30 years. He has worked in 48 countries on every continent except the Antarctic (too cold!), with clients in most industries.

  Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Risk management is all about asking and answering the right questions. It starts with broad concerns and concludes with well-defined ideas to address them. And it requires a basic understanding of question types and how they best map to the risk management process.

One of the most common symbols used to represent risk is a question mark, reflecting the uncertainty associated with all risks. Since risk is defined as “uncertainty that matters”, there will always be at least four important questions to answer about every risk:

   1. What is the uncertainty?  2. How uncertain is it?  3. Why does it matter?  4. How much does it matter?

But there are many other questions raised by risk, and the link between risk and questions means that everyone with responsibility for managing risk needs to know how to ask and answer the right questions.

Of course, asking and answering questions is part of everyday conversation for all of us, so we might think that questioning is a natural skill that we all possess. But perhaps it is not as easy as we assume. There is a range of question types that can be used for different purposes. Some questions provide structure, others direct flow, and some help us to reach closure. Question types include:

Open questions, to gather information and facts, for …

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