Improving Risk Assessment Communication

Assessors often diminish communicating risk to showing a single category or color without providing a full context of the evaluation, basis, and assumptions behind the risk assessment. We attempt to remedy that by presenting an approach to communicate risk assessments more completely with a clearer understanding of these issues. First, we specify the necessary information that an assessor should present as part of a standard risk assessment statement. This information is discussed in four groups: 1) the activity or collection of activities being assessed, 2) the context of the assessment (who made it, when, with what scope, and how rigorously), 3) setting of the assessment (scenario, assumed conditions, timeframe, assumed choices, and mitigation measures), and 4) the resulting assessment. Second,we propose a value-focused thinking approach to standardize the presentation of the actual assessment by applying the principles of simplicity, scalability, and consistency. The assessor needs to develop outcome-centric measures for key activities to provide a basis to assess the potential consequences, determine the success and failure points of the activity, and present the outcome for each scenario setting. We standardize the risk assessments by scaling the outcomes between the success and failure points. The risk assessments may be presented as categorical risks, such as colored ranges, by apportioning their resulting values. We discuss combining assessments for a single activity and for an aggregate activity. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force has directed all his Major Commands to use both our standard risk statement and our presentation approach in preparing their core function support plans.