Risk accompanies every aspect of life: every thought, every action, every decision. Your risk disposition will be the most significant of your individual differences – at least from a biographical perspective.
The way you cross a busy street, how carefully you plan your holidays, your preferred employment, whether you would consider a free-fall parachute jump, the people you hang out with, and the stability of your personal relationships – these all reflect your Risk Type. It impacts on every decision you make.
Risk Type Compass™
Combining your emotions and rationality, the two distinct neurological systems involved in decision making, the Risk Type Compass™ maps you onto the 360° spectrum of risk dispositions. This circumflex model is segmented to define eight distinctive Risk Types.
Find out more about the Risk Type Compass™ here.
Team Homo Sapiens
We have collected data from more than 13,000 individuals across over 20 industry sectors, showing a remarkably even balance of the eight Risk Types. In view of the importance of decision making to survival, we can conclude that the success of the human race has depended on this balance across the centuries. For homo sapiens, survival has been a team game. There is strength in diversity. When individuals, teams and organisations harness the realities of Risk Type and share their different perspectives, they ‘up their game’.
Risk Type & Industry
Our data also shows striking differences in the balance of Risk Types across particular industries and job roles.
The Air Traffic Controller sample, for example, shows a very distinctive differentiation: more than 70% of individuals were assessed to be Deliberate Risk Types; and Deliberate combined with its neighbouring Types accounts for over 95% of the sample. This shows they balance a low risk preference for compliance and procedural formality with the constitutional calmness to keep a cool head in a crisis. It is reassuring to note that there are zero Excitable Risk Type Air Traffic Controllers!
More on our Air Traffic Controller research can be found here.
Looking at the array of industry-specific data we have collected, it is easy to see how and why some Risk Types are more prevalent in particular industries than others. Both in terms of their appeal to job seekers and in terms of likely success in that role, your Risk Type can contribute to your career path in very significant ways.
Risk Type & Your Biography
The Risk Type Compass™ provides a taxonomy which charts the subjective side of the risk domain and, in so doing, makes a substantial contribution towards the clarification of risk complexity as a whole.
Aligned with the neuroscience of decision making (the somatic marker hypothesis, the common currency model, and social defence theory), the Risk Type Compass™ provides a remarkably reliable way of differentiating people with very different orientations towards risk: the perception of risk, reactions to risk, and willingness to take risks – all of which feeds into the decisions they make.
Decisions form the basis of our entire lives, and the pervasive influence of personality plays a huge role in determining which paths we walk down. Your Risk Type in particular dictates your preference for one choice over another and, given free reign over your life choices, will write your biography.
Geoff Trickey, January 2019