NRI has its roots in discussions between the founder board members. These focussed on risk management and the common theme of MORT - the Management Oversight and Risk Tree. MORT is an investigation method and a risk management programme established by the US government in the public domain thirty years ago. We were interested in MORT both as a practical tool and as collection of unifying concepts for risk management. We had all gained by using MORT and were keen to see others have access to the same benefits. Because well-informed advice about MORT is scarce and the existing public domain materials were ageing, we saw a practical mission for ourselves - to produce a more universal version of MORT.

We were impressed that MORT treats the management of risks to Environment, Safety and Health (ES&H) as a function of normal business management - a philosophy that could usefully be extended. As each of us worked in areas where management of risks concerned domains other than EH&S (for example medical risks, information risks and operational risks) we were interested in the application of MORT to areas outside of health, safety and the environment. To do this, the concepts underlying MORT need to clarified and generalized. The clear statement and structuring of these concepts will allow MORT to be revised for ready application to other fields.

In our discussions, tools and underlying concepts became inter-related by a virtuous circle: making tools clarifies concepts, and clearer concepts allow new tools to be made. In this way, our mission has become more general: from EH&S to risks generally; from MORT to tools generally, and; from tools to tool-making.

By developing these practical and academic themes, a social agenda has come into focus. Using tools to structure and model real-world problems allows people with quite different viewpoints to share ideas and to adopt different perspectives more easily. Similarly, abstract problems benefit from clearly articulated concepts; they enable people from quite different scientific, technical and organisational traditions to share knowledge more easily.