The thought of being a member of a 'Risk Review Group' is possibly one of those things that put people off the thought of going into a management role.  In my early days as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor it was not something that I found the most intersting part of my job.  But I have grown to see the value of it, and to see how the ideas discussed within it can actually be applied in my research area - in other words, this is an example of 'administration-led research.'

I was first asked to undertake a risk analysis in around 2004 when I was acting Head of Economics.  Colleagues seemed totally uninterested in the task, so I dutifully placed a few points on a two-axis graph suggesting things that might adversely affect my department - the likelihood of them happening and the impact if they did.  Most of the things I identified were things we could actually do nothing about - global recession reducing international student flow, and other similar things. 

But as time went by I got more interested in risk analysis as a management tool.  And then I started to think how some of the concepts ould be applied in everyday life - or at least to the analysis of everyday lives.  I am not saying that individuals undertake formal risk analysis, but that we might analyse their behaviour using concepts derived from that.  To me the crucial overall considerations are as follows:
1. The likelihood of something happening.  It might be something we want to happen, or something we don't want to happen.
2. The impact if it does happen.
3. What we can do to change the likelihood of it happening - to increase the chance if we want it, to decrease the chance if we don't want it.
4. What we can do to change the impact of it happening - to increase the impact if we want it, to decrease it if we don't.

At today's meeting of the university's risk review group we were looking at things such as the likelihood of a fall off in student demand as a result of the new regime, or the likelihood of the university being able to achieve significant research collaborations with other institutions.  We were looking at all the four steps I've outline above.

But after reading into the risk review literature I realised that some of the ideas within it could help a project being undertaken by one of my research students. She was working on why migration from East to West Germany after the reunification of Germany in 1990 had been less than one might have predicted on the basis of economic conditions.  Risk analysis provided a useful basis for explaining why many people had adopted strategies that minimsed the likelihood of occurrence of things they wanted to avoid, such as losing family links, moving into what people saw as a potentially hostile social environment in a new region.  I later suggested a similar use of risk analysis to another research student working on the entry of Tamil refugees into the London labour market: her problem was that many refugees took employment within the ethnic economy on low wages and poor conditions when they could have secured much better employment outside it.  Information their might suggest that they didn't know about the outside opportunities - but in fact they did.  What they were doing was to seek to mitigate what they saw as risks in working outside their community even if, for the biggest number, the outcome was actually poorer than it might have been.

Today's Risk Review Group meeting did not set off any new lines of research enquiry - but it seems to me quite rare that experience in one area of what might seem to be our segmented jobs can not lead to applications in another area.