The Risk of Risk Registers - Managing Risk is Managing Discourse Not Tools

Abstract

This response to Drummond (2011) argues that risk registers, despite their drawbacks, are a useful tool in organizations. Their main function is to act as a boundary object, bridging the intra- and extra-organizational discourse about the risks and organization is facing. Thus their effectiveness should not be measured in truthfulness but in terms of their ability to establish communicative rationality for which both quantitative and qualitative insights are necessary.

Keywords: risk, risk registers, boundary objects, fallacy of misplaced concreteness, false certainty, communicative rationality