RAG status

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The RAG status characterises the infantilism of modern middle management whereby hard concepts like reasoned passages of text, have been supplanted by wingdings, radial diagrams, animated slide transitions and graphics — a vernacular of nonsense vouchsafed by Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

The RAG status renders the world in three colours: read, amber and green. Cute, like a traffic light!

This simplification is is designed for upward communication to the fat birds of middle management, perching on their thin branches, desirous of knowing only that all is in hand, and all is well.

To present a RAG status that is not uniformly green — perhaps flecked with the occasional amber, on something immaterial, for appearance’s sake — is a measure of some dishonour for an aspiring middle manager.

This all flows from that hard determinist dogma, that business success is an equation to be solved, and risk an externality to be isolated and programmed out of existence.

It is a little old fashioned to suppose that risk to be an inherent quality of any pursuit offering a reward, and that therefore a RAG status showing green across the board, far from being a sign of commercial rectitude, suggests your organisation is either delusional, in denial, or occupied in the headlong pursuit of margins that will be tending to zero, if they haven't already got there.

Real risk management involves not persuading yourself that there is no risk, but asking your risk management specialists to identify where it is most concentrated and insuring your your resources and weapons are trained on that.