What is Risk Appetite

The author discusses whether the impressive progress achieved by technical advances in project management have been stalled by failure to make similar advances in addressing the Human Factors. This imbalance may, he believes, be contributing to challenges being widely experienced in dealing with a residual ‘rump' of workplace safety incidents, for example. He argues that ever tightening the controls and micro-managing workplace behaviour or pursuing zero safety incidents can be counterproductive both for compliance and for the bottom line. Professional, regulatory and standards bodies increasingly emphasise the importance of employee participation and risk leadership in achieving the mutual trust and respect necessary for objectives to be fully realised. He advises that project managers need to appreciate distinctive and deeply rooted individual differences in the behavioural dispositions of individual employees and proposes that readily available assessment techniques that address these issues should be added to their toolkit.