Every leadership offsite in the world has said some version of this sentence. We need to take more risks. Be bolder. Move faster. Fail forward.
And then Monday arrives.
The person who took a risk and it didn’t work gets quietly sidelined. The team that tried something unconventional and missed the quarterly target gets restructured. The junior analyst who raised an uncomfortable question in the steering committee never gets invited back.
The advice was never really about risk. It was about the appearance of risk.
Here is what “take more risks” actually means in most organisations: take risks that work. Which is, of course, not risk at all. It’s certainty dressed in adventure clothing.
Real risk has a cost. Somebody pays it. And the question that never gets asked at the offsite is: who pays when the risk fails? If the answer is “the person who took it,” then you don’t have a risk-taking culture. You have a blame culture with better branding.
Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard showed something counterintuitive: the teams that reported the most errors had the highest levels of psychological safety. Not because they made more mistakes. Because they didn’t hide them. The teams with clean records weren’t better performers. They were better concealers.
The same logic applies to risk. Organisations that appear risk-averse may actually be taking risks all the time — they’re just invisible risks. The risk of not adapting. The risk of not listening. The risk of pretending that stability is strength when the market is moving underneath you.
Those risks don’t show up on a dashboard. They show up three years later as irrelevance.
In the Safe2Great research across thousands of leaders globally, one pattern repeats: leaders consistently rate themselves as more growth-minded than their teams rate them. The higher you go, the wider the gap. Nobody tells the CEO they’re punishing risk. That silence isn’t an absence of feedback. It’s feedback.
So here is the uncomfortable question. Not “how do we take more risks?” But: what happened to the last person who took one?
If you can’t answer that clearly, your risk culture is already telling you everything you need to know.
It’s just telling you quietly. Which is the most dangerous kind.