The article will present some possible explanations of the difficulty to bridge research and practice in the domain of risk management. A first block of reasons has to do with the very content of the analyses themselves. Of great importance is also the time chosen for them to be carried out. The second argument will bring to the foreground the difficulty for a lot of fruitful research to permeate into management spheres. One way to reconcile experts, scholars and decision makers may come from new attention devoted to organisational design and formal structures. This calls for the study of normal operations as opposed to relying too exclusively on accident cases and crisis situations. We believe that this perspective can help us improve our level of understanding of complex organisations, because it focuses on the duality of organisational life : the dark side and the bright side, always tightly coupled.