To follow up on my previous post regarding the work of Peter Sandman, I can’t help but advertise his short, yet important article entitled “Risk Words You Can’t Use” published in the August 2005 issue of The Synergist. While this article is a quick read, I will distill it down further and caveat some with my personal experience:
- Conservative: To risk people, conservative means an overestimate of risk. To laypeople, a “conservative” estimate is a low estimate. So whereas a risk person would use conservative to overstate the risk, a layperson (or perhaps decision maker) may interpret the message to be an understatement of risk, and thereby think that the risk could be much worse. Now, engineers and scientists understand what is meant by the