Have we identified all the risks? The Whole Story framework

To identify risks, project teams may envision scenarios that involve specific project components or activities. But have all the important risks been identified? This is the Achilles’ heel of risk identification. An important risk might be overlooked and thus be left unaddressed. Many risk‐identification schemes fail to target consciously risk sources that lie in the gaps among the scheme's components or outside the scheme altogether. The Whole Story framework suggested here is comprehensive in that (1) each of its six independent perspectives is nominally holistic on its own, and (2) the perspectives themselves overlap. This minimizes the conceptual space where undetected risks can hide. The core of the Whole Story framework is journalistic: ask who, what, when, where, why, and how. Each query becomes an independent project breakdown system: a project is viewed as the sum of its actors (who), and as the sum of its functional components (what), and as the sum of its phases (when), etc. Risks are then identified with respect to each element of each system. Each system views the project from a different angle, so risks hidden among the elements of one system may be revealed through other systems’ perspectives. Extra diligence in risk identification can be far less costly than data gaps or hardware retrofits caused by nontreatment of an overlooked risk. In this article, the six project breakdown systems are tailored to CO2 capture and geologic storage (CCS) projects but, because the six journalistic queries are universally applicable, the Whole Story framework can be adapted to leading‐edge projects of many types. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.