Taking risks relying on nose or good luck can result in taking the route for nowhere.
Taking risks without deeply understanding why we are taking them rather than others can be lethal to our organisation.
Taking risks implies that not only the nature of the risk or the actions to mitigate it must be perfectly known, but also and more importantly the cause-effect relationships among processes, actors, external factors, etc. must have been thoroughly investigated.
Time is another crucial variable when taking risks: risks that may compromise my strategy’s short-term milestones today may be insignificant tomorrow or might have been insignificant yesterday. And we might go on talking about probability and impact that are not eternally sculpted in the marble.
Risk responsiveness and risk resilience are neither fixed parameters of a company nor criteria according to which directors or managers decide to take a risk.
In the financial crisis, in many scandals of the first decade of 21st century, in many of the disasters affecting the environment and the peoples of our planet, the evidence is strong that a more accurate and thoughtful commitment in taking risks would have let the relevant companies -and the whole planet, after all- fare much better than they actually did.