Risk Appetite - Aligning the Poles
Bryan Whitefield
I empower leaders to cultivate high-performance teams making faster and better decisions | Recognised expert in strategy and risk | Expert facilitator and trainer and sought-after mentor | MAICD, MRMIA & CCRO
Your staff come to work and bring their best selves (mostly). However, each ‘best self’ can have a different appetite for risk taking. If you haven’t already, survey their attitude to risk to their personal safety or their personal financial risk. Here in lies the need for them to understand the organisation’s appetite for risk taking, so that they can make the right decision way more often than not.
There is another often overlooked need for the board and exec’s appetite for risk taking to be embedded in the DNA of your organisation. This story I tell in my book?Risky Business: How Successful Organisations Embrace Uncertainty, explains it:
There’s one more phenomenon you need to understand, however. It became very clear to me years ago when I was running risk champions training for a team tasked with putting workers in a high-risk and emotionally stressful environment. I was talking about the need to design policies, processes and systems to guide decision making ‘so staff will make the same decision the CEO would make’. Then, from the middle of the pack of 25 in the room came, ‘Bullshit! The CEO would not know shit when it comes to some of the decisions we need to make.
And there you have it. Leaders hire staff with specialist skills to get the job done. The CEO can’t be a specialist in all areas. So what happens in organisations is that senior management are trying to influence decision making of staff. Meanwhile staff are looking back at the executives in their ‘ivory tower’ and saying to themselves, ‘They have no idea!’ and they try to influence the executive. And poor middle management is caught in the middle.
It’s like what happens when two magnets are brought close to each other when the poles are reversed (figure 8.1). The flow of the magnetic field from north to south is interrupted. Getting risk appetite right is the beginning of alignment of the poles, where decisions are made within appetite, or are escalated if they are not, and information is fed back to decision makers to increase the knowledge and overall capability of staff throughout the organisation.
I believe risk appetite matters. BUT it is not as easy as saying, ‘Let’s have one.’
If you want to know more about my thoughts on risk appetite download my?whitepaper?or, better still, buy my?book?and gain access to my latest risk appetite templates.
Ensuring risk management adds value to your business
1 年Bryan, Although the idea of a risk appetite is interesting I am far from convinced in practical terms it is a particularly helpful concept. The problem arises with how and when to use such a statement. As we all know risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives. Achieving objectives takes time and in that period the risk profile reduces. (There is much uncertainty when setting out to achieve an objective and none when it is achieved.) So when should an appetite statement apply? Add to this other variables such as project type, business area, complexity, the state of the market and it is far from clear when and how a risk appetite can help with making decisions. If someone has ideas on the practical application of a risk appetite statement throughout an organisation then that would be a valuable discussion otherwise we may be better served to consider "appetite" as an interesting, theoretical, non-essential concept with questionable value.