At Fraser it appeared that risk officers displayed a great deal of calculative idealism in that they aimed to represent the cost of true economic capital based on high quality data and they worried constantly about the ‘robust’ and ‘hard’ nature of their risk analysis. This calculative idealism was challenged in the process of allocating the Group’s capital to business units. It took a second team of risk capital controllers to realise that calculative idealism had to be combined with political shrewdness. Fraser’s own organisational culture imposed a constant consensus-seeking behaviour on decision-makers. Hence in the process of risk capital allocations risk people’s calculative idealismwas toned down to the extent that the next economic capital team was willing to compromise their preferred technique for the sake of reaching a compromise between the competing risk-return interests within the group. Nevertheless, by involving ‘experts’, the language of these negotiations remained technical. Different Economic Capital allocation methodologies wrestled with each other,representing the different risk-return interests of business units – until a final compromise was achieved.The quasi technical process of decision making by compromise (Burchell et al 1980) gave risk capital allocations sufficient credibility to make it integral to strategic planning and performance management at Fraser.