Quick congrats before we get into it, two 44Risk PM students passed the PMI-RMP® in the past couple of week. One from my Exam Prep Course, one from our RMP Prep Lab community.
Two different paths, same result. Proud of both of you.
Okay. Onto today's story.
A conversation this week dragged up a memory I hadn't thought about in years.
My first civilian job after the Marine Corps, I told my new boss I'd earned my PMI-RMP®. He laughed. Not a mean laugh... genuinely didn't know what it was. "What is that?"
I explained it. Risk management certification. Identifying, analyzing, and planning for the uncertainty in our projects.
He nodded, moved on, and then, for the rest of the time I worked there, never once acted on a risk recommendation I gave him.
Now, let's get Proactive Over Reactive!
"Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable."
—President Eisenhower
I'd heard that quote a hundred times before that job. I didn't really understand it until I lived it.
Here's the thing about risk management: it's not hard.
It's tedious, and it lives in probabilities, not certainties.
A 20% chance of something happening still means it can happen. That uncertainty makes people nervous... nervous enough to skip the hard conversations, blow off the deep dive, or avoid the details entirely, because if they never wrote it down, they can't be blamed for missing it.
That's not what we do. We do the work. We get into the details.
We put the real risk in front of leadership, even the uncomfortable 20% they'd rather not hear about.
And then, this is the part people miss, we let them decide.
I learned this in uniform first. I've briefed generals who took my recommendation and generals who didn't.
Sometimes their hands were tied. Sometimes they just disagreed.
That's not a failure of my analysis. That's leadership doing their job, same as I did mine.
Risk management ethics isn't about being right. It's about doing the work and telling the truth, whether or not anyone acts on it.
If they don't listen, that's on them. It's on us to make sure they at least knew.
The Bearded Risk PM on YouTube
Watch the full video on:
"Is Your Risk Matrix Just a Checkbox Exercise?"
Don't Forget to Like the Video, Subscribe to the Channel, and Leave any Questions You Have in the Comments!
Every hurricane season, someone's leadership decides a "low probability" storm track isn't worth the prep cost... until it isn't low probability anymore.
The risk lesson: probability isn't permission to ignore something. It's a call for a proportional response, not zero response.
Your action item: if a risk on your register has been sitting at "low" for months, ask when it was last actually reassessed, not just re-copied.
