Calculative culture and its impact on risk assessment An organizations culture, and specifically its calculative culture, impacts how and which risks are assessed (Power 2007). Mikes (2009) distinguishes ERM by the numbers and holistic ERM, which differ regarding their approach to assessing risks, raising the question of how the assessment of risks is impacted by the organization’s culture. A cognitive perspective on risk assessment We need to better understand how actors think and communicate about risks (Power 2016). We can improve the understanding of how risk management happens in organizations by accounting for the sense-making of decision-makers regarding risks (Taarup‐Esbensen 2019). Distributed cognition in risk assessment Risk assessment needs to bring together expertise from several domains and to include different perspectives on a risk (ISO 2009). The cognitive task of assessing a risk is shared between several stakeholders, a setting described as distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995). Risk workshops as a tool of risk assessment A common approach to identify and assess risks are workshops, where people with different roles and hierarchies within the organization discuss and share their knowledge to come to an evaluation of certain risks (COSO 2017). Participants start with a list of predefined risks and discuss each risk for a limited time. The discussion ends with a decision on how to classify a risk, e.g., regarding its impact (Quail 2011).
