How can you communicate the importance of risk management in creative problem solving?

Risk-taking is a quality that makes creative teams innovative. When teams are not afraid to fail, weigh the pros and cons, ready to manage risk, they set forward to explore new opportunities and achieve breakthroughs.

Risk management is crucial in creative problem solving as it helps identify potential pitfalls, reduce negative impacts, and increase chances of success. By showcasing examples, emphasizing long-term perspective, and involving the team, the importance of risk management can be effectively communicated.

A Risk is something that could stop us achieving our objectives, which can be cost, time, quality (hard), and other factors such as learning or reputation (soft). Those objectives should be set before the start of a project, with the team and the client, where you define what success will look like. This is where you can tie in the creative goals as well as ways of working e.g. co-design. Have those involved express what they think success will look and feel like, to get away from thinking of risks as a purely technical issue. That allows you to get people involved at the start, as well as setting a clear and mutually agreed understanding, and a measure, of when you reach the end.

The biggest issue that I see around risk management frameworks, is that people confuse an event, its impact, and then resulting risk (see above). Too often, people mix up the event with the risk. That makes it difficult to develop the risk management/response plan and identify the controls (how to reduce or eliminate the impact) or treatments (what to do if the risk is realised). When I run the risk sessions, I get people to think about the risk (failing to achieve the objective), and work backwards through the associated impact, and then triggering event. For example, COVID was not a risk. It was an event, where the impact was no-one could get to my shop, resulting in drop in income - which is the risk.

Agree wholeheartedly - engagement is key. Everyone involved has to be aware of how a risk can affect the project, and most importantly, if they are responsible for any risk controls or treatments. I find it is critical that the controls and treatments must be expressed in plain-speaking terms, relevant to that audience. If people can understand them and their importance, they will make an effort to monitor and manage them and get involved in discussions around improving them - including saying when the risk should be retired (always a good thing).

The best way to navigate the risk is to run some simulation drills and understand what actors in the scenario will play their part. Because, everything is connected to everything. For example, if you are running a project which is about an installation of smart and automated sanitisers at the airports in Australia, consider what if there is internet connectivity or a sudden communication outage which will prevent the smooth running operation of a sanitiser. In this case, a project management team need to think creative and find out other risks such as a sudden surge of travellers due to public holidays, popular events, protests, strikes, wars and conflicts, or any natural disasters. By conducting simulated drills can help projects succeed.