Writing Business Cases in a Risk-Averse System
Earlier this year, Dan Davies published The Problem Factory: Pre-emptive Risk Aversion in Infrastructure Planning and the Role of Professional Services through the Niskanen Center. It’s an insightful and unsettling read for anyone working in the infrastructure and public policy space.
Davies argues that infrastructure planning in the Anglosphere (US, UK and Australia) has evolved into an ecosystem of pre-emptive risk aversion. Consultants, lawyers, and government agencies together have created what he calls a “problem factory” — a system where every new precedent, every additional study, and every refinement of process expands the surface area of risk. Each actor behaves rationally: no one wants to be the person who misses the fatal flaw that kills the project. But the result is a self-reinforcing cycle of caution, delay, and over-engineering.
I see this dynamic in many Australian infrastructure projects. The challenge isn’t bad intentions or incompetence; it’s structural. Our systems are built to avoid error, not to make decisions.
Departments face genuine uncertainty but limited internal capability.
Consultants, in trying to help, produce more data, models and reports — all of which are read defensively rather than decisively.
The result is what Davies describes: a permissioning process that maximises the documentation of safety rather than the delivery of outcomes.
Where Strabo Rivers Fits
I currently work in this environment as a business-case writer and integrator. My role isn’t to add to the volume of analysis but to synthesise it into something actionable. I don’t see paralysis as a fatal flaw — I see it as a predictable feature of a risk-averse system that must still function.
That means designing business cases that help decision-makers move forward within uncertainty, not around it. In practice, that involves:
Framing decisions around proportional confidence — distinguishing between what must be proven and what can reasonably be assumed.
Integrating fragmented disciplines — connecting hydrology, economics, engineering, and policy so that the evidence speaks in one voice.
Narrating decision logic — making transparent why certain judgments were made and what trade-offs were accepted, so that agencies feel comfortable owning them.
Clarifying the limits of analysis — explaining where further precision will not materially improve the decision, thereby setting a boundary on risk surface expansion.
The aim is not to eliminate risk, but to make risk governable — to show that the decision process itself is sound and proportionate.
Working With the Grain
Davies suggests that the only sustainable path forward is to “work with the grain” of the Anglosphere model: build better information loops, not just more paperwork. That’s what a good business case should do. It provides a forum where multiple strands of analysis, often commissioned separately, are reconciled into a coherent narrative that allows Treasury, ministers, and project teams to share a single view of the problem.
In a world of pre-emptive risk aversion, progress depends on integration — on building the confidence that someone has joined the dots.
That’s the work I aim to do.