Manageability of Risk – A Literature Study

In the current practice for analysing risk, the concept of manageability is frequently used to characterize how difficult it is to treat risk. In theory, the manageability concept is intuitively easy to understand. However, in practice we experience that there is a lack of consistency in how the concept is realized and used. In risk assessment applications where the manageability concept is included, a definition of the concept is often lacking. This may lead to different understandings of what manageability is, for example, among participants in risk workshops, which may result in poor assessments and poor decision making. In this paper, we explore how the concept of manageability is used in the research literature in the context of risk analysis and risk management. We have studied to what extent is the manageability concept defined in the research literature and how is the manageability concept defined. We find that there are few research papers where manageability is the main topic and that when the term is used, it is often used in an imprecise manner.

Keywords: Manageability, Risk, Risk management, Risk assessment, Uncertainty, Decision making.

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