Management consultants love to engage in overt cultural appropriation and, worse, misappropriation. The racist trope of the “inscrutable celestial” continues apace, as exhibited by the endless number of consultants who boast about being “Six Sigma Black Belts,” endlessly quote “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, drop words like “muda” in casual conversation, or treat the “Toyota Production System” as some sort of mysterious — that’s what “inscrutable” means — form of holy wisdom.

Sampling of business management book co-opting Chinese and Japanese culture.

Risk management consultants are not to be left out here, of course. The New Era risk managers began pushing the idea of “positive risk” in the mid-1990s, largely out of both hubris (they felt they knew better than dictionaries) and commerce (softening “risk” sells more books). But the dictionaries remain a problem. Going back to the 1700s, English-language (as well as French and German) dictionaries clearly defined “risk” as being solely negative. “Opportunity” was treated as a separate — and opposite — concept.

Here is the definition from a contemporary version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

And here it is from the 1775 A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson:

The New Era boys were not having that, though, and wanted to subsume opportunity into risk. Under the “positive risk” rebranding, risk is a container that holds both risk and opportunity within it. So not only is one of the contents “risk,” but the container itself is “risk,” too. It’s like saying a coin has two sides — heads and tails — but the coin itself is also “heads.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you look at it from the outside.

(An aside: I am not arguing the literal definition of “risk” in ISO standards, but instead, the surrounding text and notes that accompany the definition. These usually insist that risk is both positive and negative.)

To get around centuries of pesky dictionaries, they had to reach back further in time and misappropriate some Chinese culture. They found a single Chinese word, “wēijī  (危机), and latched onto it like grim death. They broke the word into its two characters —  wei (危) and ji (机) — and found something to bite into. 

Here is one example:

The Chinese word for risk, ‘wei ji’, combines the two characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. Another interpretation is ‘precarious moment’. Both translations show that risk is not a purely negative concept and that uncertainty involves a balance between profit and loss. A degree of risk is associated with almost every aspect of life.

And another:

The Chinese character for crisis, wei ji, is made up of two component characters. One is the character for danger, but the other is the character for opportunity. This spirit should exemplify our attitude toward risk management. Where many see only dangers they would prefer to avoid, we should strive to see opportunities to express our regard for our colleagues and the patients for whom we care.

That’s Not How Language Works

There are two main problems here. The word “wēijī ” is not translated as “risk” but instead as “crisis.” Mandarin and other Chinese dialects have an entirely different word for “risk,” and wēijī is not one of them.  The New Era boys just stole a word that sounded similar, and appropriated it for their misguided use.

The second problem is that Chinese words are not meant to be split apart by their characters and then interpreted as a combination of the meanings of the syllables, any more than “watermelon” should be understood as a “melon made of water” or “overlook” should mean “looking over.”

The definitive debunking of the wēijī trope comes from Dr. Victor H. Mair, professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His full takedown can be read here (and should be). Here’s a snippet, though (heavily trimmed by me, so please read the original; emphasis added here by me):

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. For example, one of the most popular websites centered on this mistaken notion about the Chinese word for crisis explains: “The top part of the Chinese Ideogram for ‘Crisis’ is the symbol for ‘Danger’: The bottom symbol represents ‘Opportunity’.” Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes.

… While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of “danger,” the  syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify “opportunity.” 

While that may be what our Pollyanaish advocates of “crisis” as “danger” plus “opportunity” desire  to signify, it means something altogether different.

The  of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits.

For those who have staked their hopes and careers on the CRISIS = DANGER + OPPORTUNITY formula and are loath to abandon their fervent belief in  as signifying “opportunity,” it is essential to list some of the primary meanings of the graph in question. Aside from the notion of “incipient moment” or “crucial point” discussed above, the graph for  by itself indicates “quick-witted(ness); resourceful(ness)” and “machine; device.” In combination with other graphs, however,  can acquire hundreds of secondary meanings. It is absolutely crucial to observe that  possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation,  added to huì (“occasion”) creates the Mandarin word for “opportunity” (jīhuì), but by itself  does not mean “opportunity.”

wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America. To confuse a wēijī with a jīhuì is as foolish as to insist that a crisis is the best time to go looking for benefits.

I then took this a bit further and checked the actual Chinese definition of the word “risk.” Here, I am using the word 风险 (fēng xiǎn), which is the term used in the official Chinese translation of ISO 31000 on risk management guidelines. (Keep in mind, the Chinese translated that document, so we can assume they know what they are doing.)

Using contemporary Chinese dictionaries, we find fēng xiǎn is defined as “risk, hazard, danger” and only in a negative sense. In Chinese, it is defined as “可能发生的危险,” which translates to “possible dangers.”

Here is the definition from Hanzii.net:

But I’ve been told the definition wēijī dates back 3,000 years, so are any contemporary dictionaries sufficient? Let’s go back in time, then.

I thought I would check the Amoy Chinese Dictionary published in 1883. (We don’t have copies of Chinese dictionaries from 3,000 years ago, so anybody quoting them is making it up. 1883 will have to do.) Amoy is a spoken dialect of Hokkien Chinese, and here we see every definition of the term “risk” is clearly negative:

In digging further, we find “fēngxiǎn” is translated as “hong-hiám” in Hokkien, which the 1883 Amoy Dictionary defines as “jeopardize” … again, entirely negative.

What’s the Chinese Word for Shameless?

Let’s take a look at just how widespread this has become. Here are just a few examples, and — yes — some of these are actual thesis papers.

  • Corporate Crisis Management: Challenge for Survival; S. Shiva Ramu, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations (2000) [link]
  • Understanding the Interplay between Resilience Capacities and Internal Controls: A Literature Review Perspective, Alae al Shakarchi, and Mohamed Achraf Nafzaoui, Revue du Contrôle de la Comptabilité et de l’Audit, Volume 8 No. 3, 2024 [link]
  • Enterprise Risk Management Adoption: An Empirical Investigation of its Effects on Firm Performance, Federica Carcani, 2015 [link]
  • China’s Perception of Risk and the Concept of Comprehensive National Power, Sean Golden, The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies (2011) [link]
  • 2011 WICHE Work Plan, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 2011 [link]
  • Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic: A Review of Coronavirus Disease on Human Health During Crisis, Saurabh Birla, Shail Pragya, and Kamal Kishor Sinha, International Journal of Advanced Research in Biological Sciences, Vol 10 Issue 5 (2023) [link]
  • Risk Managers are NOT Traffic Constables, Nayeema Kouser, Centre Head Kraft Heinz GCC, via LinkedIn post (2019) [link]
  • Risk and Opportunity: Healthcare Leaders in Asia Reflect on Post COVID-19 Recovery, Kevin Jia-Ven Lai and Bhawana Malhotra,  Egon Zehnder blog post (2020) [link]

This trope has gained new steam on LinkedIn, which is comprised mainly of bargain basement-level inspirational posts that have only been slightly updated since the era of the “Hang in There, Baby!” kitten posters. Take a look at some recent entries:

That last one is worth pursuing further. It was posted by Emma Stephens, who was a TEDx speaker. Remember that TEDx speakers are just sentient Kitten Posters, and you can predict where this is headed. In her extended LinkedIn blog post, Stephens discusses that she found the modern wēijī definition to be to her liking because it made her feel good. Later, she admits, she was pointed to an article that debunked it. (Stephens didn’t link to it, but I will: here.) Stephens rejected the facts because feeling good is more important than things like fibbing and cultural misappropriation:

How exhausting must it be to live in a world where you’re constantly feeling like you’re either walking on egg shells, or fighting an uphill battle, when we can just as easily turn our wariness into a slightly more positive outlook and lean into hope, opportunity, and the recognition that there really can be – and often are – blessings in the mess.

The Emperor Really Is Naked

This is the nefarious edge of this “positive risk” knife. It doesn’t make any sense, but people just want to feel good or need to sell stuff. ISO knew that invoking “risk management” in ISO 9001 would hurt sales, so they invented “risk-based thinking” out of thin air, ignoring the fact that standards are supposed to capture proven, subject matter expert-vetted methods, and not made-up nonsense. ISO 31000 added “positive risk” because they just copied it from someone else and because they felt if the standard only dwelled on the negatives, their sales would be diminished.

To get here, though, let’s be very clear: the New Era risk boys have done one of two things (or both): they cherry-picked an obscure Chinese word for “crisis” and lied, saying it was actually for “risk,” knowing no one would ever check these things. Choosing the wrong word implies intent.

If it wasn’t intentional, then they just copied and pasted stuff that someone else had attributed to the “mystical Orientals” and got away with it because white Westerners don’t really give a shit about getting Chinese culture wrong, especially if it means selling books and seminars and standards and public speaking gigs.

Either way, we see risk management infected with a stunning lack of academic and scientific rigor, and the laziest forms of intellectual functioning one can imagine.

It’s concerning, as I keep saying, because “positive risk” has now infected every professional discipline and international law. You would hope that laws would not be based on lazy influencers and absent editors, but you’d be wrong.


 

(* The “inscrutable celestial” trope is likely most famously used in Sax Rohmer’s mystery pulp novels about “Fu Manchu,” where Chinese were portrayed not only as impossible to understand, but as villains. The racist treatment of Chinese as “celestials” pre-dated their use as slaves to build the United States’ railroads, but is likely most well-known for that era. In reality, the trope dates back to when the first Europeans encountered the peoples of China, Japan and the eastern Asian regions as far back as the 1500s.)

 

 

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