Module 22 – Engaging with Risk

How did you get on with your SWOT analysis, and in particular with reframing threats into opportunities? Now you’re probably going to tell me it wasn’t as easy as you made it out in. Well, I know. I realized that. It’s not easy. It takes a lot of practice, but I introduce that now with the idea that you can keep on having a go at that.

Being positive is so important and finding the positive in everything is so important. Even when it’s a threat, trying to reframe that, so we can drive forward to something rather than simply move away from something that’s negative.

So today, we are going to look more at the same, but with a slightly different angle. And this is about risk. Now, in business, as in with anything else in life, every single thing we do has some risk attached to it. Stepping out of your front door has a risk. Hopefully, it’s a manageable risk. You’ve learned to manage it. You’ve learned to accept it. And you have proactively engaged with the risk.

But in business though, we’ve so some much greater risks, risks that maybe you’ve not taken before. And in the same way that we redefine threats as opportunities, you need to engage with risk. You need to manage risk. But I ask you to not think about risk as simply something to be avoided. I ask you to engage with it, proactively and positively. And look for the upside in managing risk, in looking at it as part of the positive, and not the negative. It’s something you must do, you must look at risk, you must manage risk. But don’t do it as a chore, don’t do it as a tick box exercise. Manage it actively, proactively, enthusiastically. Understand that when you take risk, it does mean that sometimes, things go wrong. That’s the nature of risk. But if you’re creating the right environment in your team, where people know it’s okay to take a risk, and so long as they’ve managed it as best, they can, if it goes wrong, it goes wrong. And there’s no blame attached.

Once you start attaching blame for failure, once a risk has been managed, but it just simply did still go wrong, once you get into the blame game, and people stop taking risks, they stop managing them positively, and we start to get into a risk-reverse culture. We start to get into demotivate people, people who do just enough to avoid threat, and not engaging proactively with opportunity.

So, building on yesterday’s theme of converting threat to opportunity, I ask you today to have a look at the risks that you are running as a team, wherever you work at the moment. And try and say to yourself, yup, happy with that. We’re managing it proactively and we can accept that risk, and when things do go wrong, do be positive. And rather than getting angry, rather than blaming, simply ask the lessons, ask what the lessons are, learn the lessons, and then put into practice the lessons you have learned. And in that way, you’ll be proactively engaging with risk.

Best of luck with that one. Tomorrow we’re going to move on and talk about vision and building positive visions.