Risk

Your Turn Does your organization’s structure function as envisioned? Does it help your team achieve its goals? Where is power located in your organization? Who benefits from being close to this power? Where in your structure is responsibility for risk? Is this responsibility understood and respected? The Bottom Line Structure enables or inhibits th

We tend to look for leaders to provide something few ever really could—salvation from the things that threaten us. But the more constructive analysis would be to acknowledge that the real requirement in the people who lead us is not status but actual leadership, or the ability to effectively oversee the multidimensional Risk Control Factors—to turn

Petrov also considered the fact that the blaring “missile strike” warnings were coming from a single source: Soviet satellites. For the threat to be authentic, Soviet ground-based radars, while slower to detect an attack than satellites, should have been serving as a second source confirmation—but they remained silent. Finally, Petrov remembered th

An Unclear Mission. The organization does not understand what it’s trying to do. This is all too common. Lack of a Strategy—or Failure to Follow It. There is a lack of alignment across the team on “how” the mission is to be accomplished. Often strategies brief well but are either unrealistic or simply ignored. Poor Communication. The parts of the o

Unable or unwilling to calibrate for important factors like communication, structure, and bias, we remain vulnerable to threats.

Let’s first focus on the basics. There are four key “tests” that determine if communication is effective. We’ll begin with two: The physical ability to pass the information (can or can’t) The willingness to pass it (will or won’t) ... The quality of the message (accurate, complete, timely, relevant) The receipt of the information (able or unable to

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. —Sun Tzu, Chinese philosopher and military strategist To study risk is to reconsider what we think we know about being

Your Turn What biases are endemic to your organization and its culture? To your industry? What are the sources of your biases? What are the structural or cultural factors that create or reinforce biases in your organization? How can you mitigate the impact of biases? The Bottom Line Biases are the lens through which we see the world. Often rooted i

Most battles are won before the contest begins—by those who are most prepared.