The purpose of risk assessment

I’m often asked a simple question: “Why do we need to do a risk assessment?” There are a lot of good reasons to do risk assessments, but ultimately, the purpose of risk assessment is best summed up in this quotation:

“Risk assessments, except in the simplest of circumstances, are not designed for making judgements, but to illuminate them.”

Richard Wilson and E. A. C. Crouch, Science, Volume 236, 1987, pp.267

© 2011 – 2022, Compliance inSight Consulting Inc.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Related posts:

Understanding Risk Assessment Understanding the Hierarchy of Controls Emergency Stop – What’s so confusing about that? How Risk Assessment Fails – Fukushima Dai Ichi The Problem with Probability