Big Thinkers

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.

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

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