ABSTRACT
The findings from Chapter 5 can be directly implemented into policies and procedures within water practice. Reputational risk needs to be considered as assessment of likelihood that may be overestimated, leading to projects not being pursued. This chapter recommends a number of actions and policies that can be implemented to reduce this bias within risk processes. For example, an approach that has been successfully tested in practice is to ensure that all projects that rank highly on reputational risk are referred automatically to a risk assessment panel. Similarly, there are also biases related to psychological impacts of new and innovative projects that this chapter discusses. Processes such as expert elicitation as well as group scoring of risk can work to reduce individual biases in risk scoring. However, these approaches come with caveats. It is important to note power dynamics in group processes, and this chapter discusses ways to make these approaches fair.
