Risk Management as Knowledge Production: Application to Fast-Tracked Complex Multi-Stakeholder Airport Projects

Introduction

Being comprised of stakeholders in such a way as to ensure a thorough environmental scanning mix, the risk management teams advocated for in the present chapter should approach risk management not just as a process matching identified risks to controls, but - much more ambitiously - as an active intelligence gathering and knowledge production activity which continually informs and yet also transcends that process. Accordingly it can be argued that risk management, considered in both interconnected aspects, should take operational readiness and commissioning factors as their focus for developing abstract-categorical risk knowledge.

In other words these categories should be considered important for sensitising the minds of all who manage risks on projects, to specifc risks likely to arise which might otherwise be invisible owing to the overwhelming complexity of the projects. Such practice can be explained as harnessing abstract-general risk categories for purposes of top-down risk identification to capture logically aligned subsets of concrete-specific risk. To complement this view, it can be further explained in terms of the risk management metaphor which calls for project risk radars to be pointed towards where risks are most likely to materialise.