🧠 The most important data foundation in ERM In Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), it is often argued that one must rely on expert assessments because there is no reliable data foundation for certain risks. That sounds plausible. But the real dynamic only begins after the first assessment. Once a risk has been assessed qualitatively or quantitatively, a strong anchoring effect sets in. Future assessments orient themselves around this original assessment, often without critically questioning whether that original assessment was ever sound to begin with. The result: An apparent continuity emerges that says less about the actual risk situation than about the staying power of the first assessment. Anyone who wants to deviate from it suddenly has to justify why at length, regardless of whether the original assessment was good and still is. 🔁 The paradox: The assessments that were made because there was supposedly no data foundation become the de facto data foundation for everything that follows, including reporting, scenarios, and measures. Even more problematic: this foundation may have little to do with reality, yet it still develops a normative force of its own. 📌 So we often work not with reality, but with the appearance of reality, collectively cemented by earlier assessments. This first assessment acts like a mental reference point, no matter how uncertain, provisional, or unreflective its origin was. It shapes everything that follows: discussions, assessments, scenarios, measures, often more than we realize. Perhaps that is exactly where we should start measuring: At the question of what we believe we know, and why. 👉 What counts as settled fact in your company, and should it really?
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