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”.

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.

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.