Comparing Traditional and Graphical Risk Matrices: A Case Study in Healthcare

Risk and opportunity assessments are essential for decision-making in complex systems such as healthcare and critical infrastructure. However, widely used tools like the risk matrix fail to explicitly capture uncertainty. This study presents the first empirical comparison between a traditional risk matrix and a previously proposed graphical method that visualizes uncertainty using two-dimensional intervals. In a comprehensive survey, healthcare professionals assessed identical scenarios using both methods. The graphical approach yielded systematically different results, particularly in the estimation of probabilities, and revealed differences across occupational groups and infrastructure experience. These findings suggest that explicitly representing uncertainty may enhance the transparency and nuance of qualitative risk assessments, potentially addressing key limitations of conventional tools. Such approaches could support more reflective and differentiated decision-making in high-stakes environments.