Building Blocks of Mitigating Risk

As people, we often want to succeed through taking the shortest possible route, we don’t like to take the scenic route when we’ve got our eyes set on a specific goal. How does one then guarantee success for themselves? I think about this particular subject matter like baking a soufflé. How do you ensure you take it out of the oven at just the right time to be served? The answer to this question is simple, by mitigating risk.

Mitigating Risk: Let’s explore further what exactly that means in your context in an organisation.

Mitigating risk in organisations is important because it almost ensures success in any project. If you’ve been tasked with creating a new offering or solution for your organisation, where does one even start? The basic building blocks for the desired outcome include: formulating a plan, putting together a team, learning, patience & leadership.

Formulating a plan

Formulating a plan is exactly that, putting a plan together in order to understand the timelines you’re working with. Based on that plan, you need to organise a group of diverse & multi-disciplinary individuals. This will ensure that fresh perspectives are the order of the day when approaching challenges that need to be solved.

Putting together a team

The team needs to adopt a learning outlook; which effectively means that customers need to be engaged at every step of the solution creation.

Learning

Constant learning from what customers say is key to ensuring what is created applies to their particular context. Learning also ensures that you are always testing with customers; testing mitigates the risk of a solution not being adopted in the market.

Patience

Patience has to do with being comfortable with constantly iterating based on customer feedback; being patient to not want to scale too quickly without validating all the assumptions made about what customers want.

Leadership

Leadership is a key component in adopting all of the building blocks, they need to walk the talk.

Applying all of these building blocks ensures that the team is always focused on the customer problem, as opposed to having an end in mind and being fixated on it.

The more you do it, the more proficient the team becomes at using the building blocks.

When we refer back to our soufflé example it isn’t any different, mitigating risk in that context is all about repetition. With repetition, you end up understanding what it takes to reduce the margin of error in order to create the best output.