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Risk Management only works when an organisation has a shared understand of what matters, why it matters, and how uncertainty should be managed. When people are asked to make decisions without a clear sense of organisational meaning and purpose, we end up with organisational nihilism. Individuals are left to create their own meaning, leading to conflict, inconsistency in approach, and ineffective risk management.

Top-down risk culture frameworks and monitoring are useful, but they only take firms so far. Risk teams can build stronger frameworks, better challenge, and more resilient organisations by adding a bottom-up, decision-focused lens inspired by Mary Parker Follett’s idea of collaborative “Power With”.

Risk teams should recognise the explicit and implicit incentives that influence how frameworks are designed and how challenge is delivered, because only by making those pressures visible can they decide when standard approaches are useful and when they need to be adapted or temporarily abandoned.

Business norms can be critical to organisational success, but only become noticeable when they stop working or start to become harmful. Changes in strategy, company size, or personnel are the most likely causes for the undermining or corruption of business norms. Risk teams can benefit from identifying, documenting and evaluating business norms, especially when they have an unacknowledged impact on the decision-making process.

Foucault’s ideas about power, knowledge, and the limits of systems make him a risk management role model.

Risk frameworks are often oblivious to power dynamics, instead focusing on the robustness of the decision-making methodology and its application. This can undermine the effectiveness of risk assessments, particularly with respect to change initiatives where the impact of power dynamics is often elevated.

How to tailor risk team stategy to the culture of the organisation to increase the likelihood that valid challenge will be constructively engaged with.

IT teams talk a lot about Technical Debt, but it is a really powerful lens for risk teams to use when thinking more broadly about their organisation.

Organisational Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, information or understanding. Considering Organisational Ignorance in a structured way can revolutionise Risk Management Strategy.

Case study of 3M, looking at how individual and group dynamics suppressed concerns around forever chemicals, and what lessons this may hold for risk strategy more generally.

Whistleblowing is an extreme form of dissent. How organisations seek to disrupt, ignore and discredit whistleblowers provides insight into how organisations seek to actively silence unwanted dissent and challenge more generally.

Ideology (our values, assumptions, and mental shortcuts) shapes what we notice, trust, and consider acceptable, especially when data is limited or uncertainty is high. While ideology can enable speed and coherence, unchallenged or dominant worldviews create blind spots, making it critical for organisations and risk teams to surface assumptions, encourage diverse perspectives, and question the stories they tell about themselves.

Risk event processes can incentivise organisations to add low‑value controls that protect individuals from blame but gradually erode judgement, empowerment, and adaptability. Over time, this control‑heavy response to failures makes organisations more brittle; better at managing yesterday’s risks, but less able to respond intelligently to future shocks.

Risk frameworks often fail because they overlook how formal, informal, and personal incentives, stress, and loss‑framing predictably shape human behaviour, especially under pressure.

Organisations operate within a 'perceptual bubble' shaped by their data, language, and assumptions. By challenging outdated frameworks, exploring alternative viewpoints, and understanding how categorisation shapes decisions, risk teams can help organisations navigate unseen risks and make better-informed choices.

How Risk teams can use assessments of organisations' Overton Windows and Social Capital to build strategies to drive more effective challenge.

Risk teams require a "social license" to provide effective challenge. This can be measured and used to support risk management strategy.

Integrating organisational psychology into the risk management toolset.