Purpose: Managers deal with environmental uncertainty and risk on an everyday basis, especially when it comes to making decisions and taking action. In order for a manager to be informed and to be able to take purposeful actions, he/she needs to translate and interpret what is going on in and around a business and by doing so make sense of the context. Management control, in its simplest form equivalent to planning and control, becomes a tool that can be used to manage environmental uncertainty and deal with a more specific risk. This paper comes from a larger study where management control as an organizational sense-making process was studied (Bredmar, 2011a).

Design/methodology/approach: A multiple case based study was conducted in the main study and this paper focuses on how the CEOs in five organizations reflect on their own understanding of environmental uncertainty and risk.

Findings: The findings show that from a theoretical perspective, risk is a small, well-defined part of a larger uncertainty. But from a practical perspective, uncertainty and risk are always there, in decisions and actions, however not that well defined.

Research implications: Management control, in general, becomes a tool that helps in dealing with uncertainty and risk and by doing so also becomes a way to manage risk.