In the last decade, we have witnessed more volatility and uncertainty in the markets than the previous three decades put together. Brexit, Covid, climate change events, Ukraine, multiple UK Prime Ministers, US-China strategic competition, the explosion of AI, cyber security attacks and the Middle East conflict to name but a few. It is fair to say that managing risk is an inescapable part of modern-day business life, including that of managing risk through construction endeavours.

All infrastructure and construction projects have risk attached to them, a statement which is hard to dispute. The vast majority of projects and programmes will also try to manage risk, largely by using traditional techniques of identifying risk, assessing it, controlling it and monitoring the evolving situation – using qualitative approaches relying on judgement and experience of the whole project team along with perhaps a quantitative approach involving calculations and statistical data to give a weighting to the impact and likelihood of potential risks.