Decision Makers and their Risk Types | 🇬🇧 🇧🇷

Decision makers vary predictably in their risk dispositions. Your personal Risk Type* is shared by less than 20% of the population.

What are Risk Types, and how can we make sense of them?

*Take the Risk Type Compass assessment and find out your Risk Type for free by via the following link: https://www.psy-key.com/default.aspx?AccessCode=RTCRAW2024

OBJECTIVES

In this session, we will be setting out the findings of a decade of research into Risk Type, sharing with you techniques that maximise decision making performance. Our emphasis is on risk instinct and the important advantages of its inherent diversity, whether between individuals, or amongst contributors to team or organisational decision making - and also, concerns about AI overwhelming these efforts to maximise human potential for informed, accountable, risk aware decision making.

DECISION MAKING

To flourish, ALL life-forms need to address the necessity to survive and pro-create. Decision-making combines risk with opportunity - and within that context, decision-making is forced upon us by our mortality.

Given the many complexities and ambiguities involved in viewing risk as a ‘disembodied abstraction,’ it’s important to recognise the significant role of the ‘decision-makers’ who interact with these abstractions. Their personal risk tendencies and biases, along with the risk culture they operate within, have a major impact on all decision-making.

Like missile defence operators, do we devote enormous amounts of time and effort scanning the ‘event horizon’ for signs of incoming risk, while failing to recognise these realities of our own nature? 

Michael Mazarr (RAND Corp). “risk procedures can be brought low by human factors such as overconfidence, herding, group think, institutional culture, and malign incentives”

In effect, risk is something that we create when we plan our endeavours – risk potential is prevalent in whatever stands between us and the achievement of our objectives. One person’s risk may be another person’s opportunity. On the football pitch, when we develop a strategy for our own success, we create the risk that our opponents must overcome for them to succeed.

Risk as a subject, in its-self, is incoherent:

1. ‘Risk’ has no common unit of measurement 
2. Subjective and objective perspectives will be incongruent
3. Generalisations cannot be made across domains e.g. what is a danger? 
4. One’s terror may be another’s thrill - Free solo climbing, investing money, public speaking
5. Cognitive challenges are personal: ‘working it out’ vs ‘on the fly’
6. There is no consensus on the relationship between “Risk” and “Uncertainty”

IMPLICATIONS & APPLICATIONS

As well as risk being an inevitable consequence of the challenges we face in the battle for survival, risk is also incited by everything else that we aspire to. The individual differences in the way we perceive risk adds to species resilience in the face of uncertainty. The question is, whether unaccountable AI would benefit or demolish this resilience.

The Risk Type Compass (RTC) is a highly reliable, peer reviewed* psychological questionnaire backed by extensive validation research. It focusses specifically on deeply rooted personal characteristics that have a considerable and persistent influence on decision making and the trajectory of lives and careers. RTC research aligns with neuroscience, Behavioural Economics and adds a ‘mental measurement’ chapter to the 2,000 year story of Dualist Theories of Mind.