ABSTRACT
This book has been written because of my continuing frustration that risk management as described by most current project management literature does not correlate very closely with my own experience of the ‘real’ world – a feeling apparently shared by many project professionals in the private, public and third sectors. These beliefs appear not even to be unique to the UK or indeed Europe; having facilitated many seminars in the Middle East, North and South America and Asia, I repeatedly encountered similar problems, namely that the behavioural and societal aspects of risk are under represented in the project risk management processes. This appears to be compounded by the engineer’s and project manager’s apparent yearning for a world of unity and simplicity in which to practise their skills, where in this ‘reality’ there is a compulsion to reduce all the complexities in the natural world to the simple application of learnt processes and explicit knowledge.
