The Risk Register Is a Political Document
Someone in a post-mortem always says it: “Why didn’t anyone flag this?” The risk register exists to make that sentence unsayable. Not because it tracks risks, every project does that informally, but because it forces the people in the room to say, on the record, what they plan to do about them. That’s not an organizational function. It’s a political one. And most PMs are using it wrong because they’ve never understood what it actually is.