7. Luck

TRL:    Good luck on your next project . . . but don’t count on it.

When you choose to ignore a risk, you’re depending on luck to keep the undesirable thing from happening. This may be a perfectly sensible way to deal with some risks, but not all of them. The “not all” part is essential here because a common pathology is the decision to count on luck to take care of all risks.

Just for the record, though, before dealing with the pathology, let’s take a look at the kinds of risks that may be sensibly excluded from management.

“We’ll take our chances on that one.”

Can you think of a real risk (a bad thing that legitimately could happen and which would certainly have awful consequences) that makes no sense to manage? One that’s not even ...

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