Affiliation:
1. Risk Services & Solutions Inc., Canada
Abstract
The overall value of any risk management system could be qualitatively assessed by its capability to identify and manage relevant risks. This actually means that its value is reciprocal to the relevant risks it fails to identify (unknown unknowns). This chapter outlines comprehensive thinking processes and comes up with practical recipes on dealing with unknown unknowns, including handling unknown unknowns in probabilistic cost and schedule risk models. Four dimensions of unknown unknowns are discussed: novelty of a project, phase of project development, type of industry, and various types of psychological and organizational bias. “Regular” and “Supercritical” categories are introduced to further discuss various realizations of unknown unknowns such as “broiler black swans,” “game changers,” “show stoppers,” “corporate risks,” etc.