n the holy theater of the Steering Committee, risk is treated as a ghost: acknowledged in the liturgy, ignored in the sermon, and exorcised from the budget. The Project Risk Log is bowed to, as one might nod at the Ten Commandments, and then briskly violated. Funds for mitigation? Contingency? A bridge too far—indeed, a bridge they propose to cross when it is already on fire.
Permit, for once, a domestic parable. You are the father of the bride: dazed by the prospect of your princess leaving the citadel, and newly acquainted with the medieval custom that her joy will be financed by your treasury. The dress was chosen at thirteen, the napkin colors at fifteen; the bill is due now. You hire a wedding planner—your project manager—who compiles requirements, drafts a plan, and totals the cost.
Do you then sleep the untroubled sleep of the credulous, persuaded that a fairytale admits no plot twists? Or do you, like any sentient mammal, ask what might go wrong? Rain, for example—the wet kind, not the confetti. Power failure, a vanishing band, an inconvenient illness, a venue that “regrets to inform you” at the eleventh hour. If you have even a trace of paternal instinct—and a memory of how reality behaves—you treat these not as hallucinations but as probabilities with price tags.
So you act. You watch the forecast and line up tents. You rent a generator—not to run Versailles, perhaps, but enough to keep the champagne cold and the music audible. You fit the band’s contract with a penalty clause and stock a list of disc jockeys as fallback. You arrange for first aid. As for the nightmare of the venue canceling: it is low-likelihood, high-impact. You can insure against it with a punitive clause, line up a backup site, or—consciously, deliberately—accept the risk and its consequences. Note the verb: accept, not ignore.
On the day, something does, of course, go wrong. A shower passes; the tents shrug it off. The band appears; Uncle Peter does not, quite—he is revived by the medics after too many toasts to the happy couple. The generator hums pointlessly, and you are glad it does: paying for a needless precaution is cheaper than mourning the absence of music and melted ice. The event is beautiful. The album will inflict ninety minutes of “how delightful” on future visitors. Your wallet is thinner; your daughter is incandescent. You count that a bargain.
Now observe how differently projects are treated. Project managers are told to identify risks, to update the log, to demonstrate vigilance. But when they propose the adult sequel—mitigation with a price, contingency with cash—our sacerdotal Steering Committee recoils. Risks, you see, are “virtual.” Their probability hovers near zero in the metaphysics of the spreadsheet. Money attached to them is “optional,” “non-productive,” a tax on optimism. Why approve now what you might never need? Why buy tents when the sun is still shining on the slide deck?
And then, inevitably, the sky darkens. A major issue arrives, punctual as gravity, and the most scandalized faces in the room are the very ones that vetoed the umbrella. The risk, documented from day one, never registered as real because it was never budgeted as real. In that sense alone, the surprise is genuine: they are startled by their own refusal to believe in weather.
Memorize this, if you can’t bear to tattoo it: a risk not priced is a risk not managed. Either mitigate and fund, or accept and own. But do not sanctify pretense—do not confuse a log entry with a parachute.
If only every risk were addressed as if it menaced a daughter’s wedding, we might have fewer heroic postmortems and more quietly competent successes. Alas, the corporate preference remains for fantasy over foresight, for vows without provisions. And reality, unforgiving as any jilted bride, keeps the receipts.
