Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hi everyone. Here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Imagine this scene: a child climbing a tree. For the child, it's an adventure; for the mother, it's a trip to the hospital for the old brother; probably it's nonsense, a waste of time. The same event, three different interpretations. That is what risk is. Risk is not what happens. It's what each person thinks could happen. And today I want to challenge you and also to challenge myself with this idea: risk lives in the observer and not in the project. In project management, we love spreadsheets, impact scales, and probability formulas, but all of that fails if we ignore one key factor: the lens or the prism of the person looking at the risk. This concept has a name, risk lancing, the way each person, team, or department, or even stakeholder group sees and interprets a threat or an opportunity. And this is, of course, a consequence of people's experience, different cultures, personal background, and role in the project. It all shapes that lancing and the line delivery might just be a small adjustment in the schedule for the engineer, but for legal, it could mean a breach in the contract for the client. It might break their trust. You are dealing with the same situation, but each person sees different risks because they see it through different lenses. And here is the classic mistake: trying to make all of this objective. Pretending that risk is just a neutral number in an Excel spreadsheet. That is why so many risk plans are technically correct and many times completely useless because they don't reflect what actually worries the people involved. So let me share with you some practical tips on that. Before filling out any risk log, go to your stakeholders and ask them: What worries you the most in this project? And I'm sure you will hear things that would never show up in a standard matrix. Another suggestion involves people in the process and building a collaborative heat map. Ask each person to visually highlight the risks they see as critical. Then layer the results and see where there is agreement and where there is noise. And I'm sure your opinion might be very different from everyone else. And that is exactly why divergent thinking is gold. It's pure gold in risk management. Something that took me a long time to learn. Managing risks is not about removing uncertainty. It's all about aligning perceptions. It took me many, many years to learn that. And remember, the project does not have risks. The stakeholders do. If you don't understand how each person sees the risks, then you are not really managing it. You are just doing bureaucracy, dressing it up as a control, because the risks are not what is written in the plan. It lives in the minds of the people involved in the project. And only when you understand those perceptions can you anticipate, communicate, and act with intelligence. At the end. Good risk management starts with empathy, understanding, and listening. Look. It took me a long time to learn this process, and I hope this episode helped you to see things a little bit differently. I hope you enjoy this podcast and see you next week for another 5 Minutes Podcast. Enjoy your week!
