risk

term

governance & risksecurity

The combination of how likely something bad is and how much it would cost - the number a decision is supposed to be made against.

Its usefulness collapses when it becomes a colour on a chart. A risk statement that cannot name the asset, the scenario and the consequence is a mood, and it competes badly against a business case with numbers in it. The other failure is treating the register as the work: recording a risk changes nothing, and an organisation with a mature register and no remediation has documented its exposure precisely rather than reduced it.

Also known as: risk management

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