ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an approach to risk control that emphasizes ideas like creativity, value, distributed use of multiple methods, and human skill alongside corporate processes. It considers some of the unhelpful ideas that can delay progress, for example by making people feel they cannot put numbers on risk, or have to do risk control one way and no other. These unhelpful ideas are linked to each other, encourage poor practices, and block better practices. Underestimating risk is nearly always a problem because of people's tendency to view the future with mental blinkers. The techniques people use to make estimates helps to counter that bias. Probability impact matrices (PIMs) have become so common and are so often promoted in books and regulations that some people have come to the point where they see PIMs as the only way to characterize risks, even arguing that other techniques are just PIMs in disguise, which they are not.
