Two Foundational Ideas of Risk—Undesirability and Unexpectedness—With Implications for Risk Science and Its Applications

This paper contends that the concept of risk is fundamentally shaped by two distinct motivating ideas: (1) that something undesirable may occur (dominant in safety, security, and engineering contexts), and (2) that something unexpected may occur (central to many business, strategic, and decision-making domains). Any framework aspiring to generality across diverse application areas must therefore be sufficiently inclusive to accommodate both perspectives. The paper explores the ramifications of this dual conceptualization for foundational aspects of risk science-including core definitions, the scope and boundaries of the discipline-as well as for risk understanding, communication, and management.