As projects move toward developing increasingly complex, technologically advanced works, project teams must deal with ever increasing levels of risk. The tools and techniques available to support addressing large-scale risk depend on teams being able to identify and quantify the many potential sources of risk relevant to a given project. Prior to quantification, however, risks must first gain the attention of the team.

The success or failure of quantitative approaches to risk management depends on project teams effectively addressing pre-quantitative risk. My research investigates how project teams think about risk, reach a team-level shared conceptualization of risk, and manage risk before it ever reaches the point of quantification. I conducted a qualitative, longitudinal field study of a high-risk project. The resulting descriptive, extreme case study shines light on the processes by which project teams conceive and manage risk.

My research makes three major contributions. First it describes how project team members think of risk before it can be quantified, thus filling a significant gap in the literature between the behavioral processes of perceiving and conceptualizing risk and the highly analytical processes of assessing risk. Second, it contributes to our understanding of team risk processes by identifying the natural, emergent behavior of the team as it progressed from individual perceptions to a team conceptualization of risk and therefore fills an important gap by identifying a process by which teams conceptualize risk. Finally, it identifies how teams actually manage risk: by manipulating outcomes and uncertainty and by managing team discussion and work processes.

I set out to understand how team members bring their individual perceptions of risk to a team and how a team forms a joint conception of risk; how a team handles risk in its pre-quantified form, and how risk progresses from pre-quantified, abstract representations to concrete representations that can be managed using existing techniques. Through answering the question, How do project teams conceive of and manage pre-quantitative risk? My research sheds light on the processes, behaviors, and factors that influence team actions relative to risk, and contributes to future research and practice.