Evaluate Risks Dispassionately

On any project, there are things that could go wrong. Are you being realistic about them? What are the things that have gone wrong on projects you've worked on before? Did you consider the risk of those going wrong this time around? Did you think about how you might control the things that led to them going wrong?

According to some researchers in the field of disaster response, there are five considerations in risk estimation, leading to five different ways to get risk management wrong:

• Incorrect evaluation of probability (usually presented as optimism bias – the false belief that nothing can go wrong)
• Incorrect evaluation of impact (again, usually assuming, optimistically, that the damage won't be too great)
• Statistical neglect (ignoring existing real data in forecasting future outcomes, usually in favor of folklore or other questionable heuristics)
• Solution neglect (not considering all options for risk reduction, thus failing...