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.

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.

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