Languages evolve continually – as long as meaning remains clear, I don’t mind how language gets adapted. So when people start making a verb into a noun (to party, to author, to privilege, to google, to blog), I don’t flinch at all, says Paul Marketos, director at Metrix Software Solutions.
But, one thing that should be avoided is completely flipping the meaning of a noun by adding an adjective. The term “upside risk”, or its cousin “positive risk”, is a case in point.
Risk is risk. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it simply: “the possibility that something unpleasant or unwelcome will happen”. Linguistically speaking, you cannot use an adjective to invert the meaning of a word. A “positive liability” is still a liability; “downwardly satisfied” still means satisfied.
Coming back to “upside risk” – all this really means is opportunity. And this is the word we should use.
There are two primary reasons I do not like the phrase “upside risk”. Firstly it is confusing; and secondly it casts a negative shadow on something that should be positive.
About the confusion: by using a single word, risk, to mean two opposite things, based on a modifier, the adjective, we are still grouping those two different things together. The noun, the named word, is the same: risk and upside risk are still classed as risk. So our brains have to juggle the concept that in one way they are the same thing but simultaneously they are different. Additional confusion comes through our approach to these opposite types of risk.
We all know that risks should be controlled. But what does it mean to control a positive risk? Our approach to opportunities is different to our approach to risks, and by conflating the two we lose not only meaning, but focus as well.
Risk is essentially a negative concept. By viewing opportunities as a kind of risk, we do not focus on them as opportunities.
What I am advocating, and I know I am not alone in this view, is that, in the context of Enterprise Risk Management, we disentangle the word “risk” from the multiple usages of the word. We should call an “upside risk” an opportunity.
Within opportunities there are possibilities that something unpleasant or unwelcome will happen: these are the risks we should manage.
There is a much wider debate that this opens up: to what extent should risk managers be responsible for opportunity management? My belief is that we should be focusing on an ever-tighter integration between governance and risk.
Strategic objectives as a whole need to be set, evaluated and monitored, and the risks incumbent in them carefully managed; and risk managers are well positioned to assume a wider responsibility in this regard. But that is a topic for another day.
For now, let’s be as clear as possible on what we are talking about. The phrase “upside risk” is like some kind of inverted Orwellian doublespeak: putting a negative gloss on a positive concept. Let’s put an end to it. There is too much downside in “upside risk”.