Balancing Human Risk with Reward

I have *just* started reading Christian Hunt's new book “Humanising Rules” and I am enjoying it immensely - thanks CH!

Christian defines Human Risk as “the risk of people doing things they shouldn’t, or not doing things they should” which is a great concept to get your head around as you design, implement, analyse and evolve your risk management frameworks and culture.

In Chapter 1, he introduces something that really struck a cord with me as someone who is keen to see the trade-off component of risk management frameworks (the bit where the risk insights drive decisions which drive action) mature. This is the concept of Human Reward, i.e. assuming we need people in organisations (even as/after GenAI changes what they look like), so how do organisations get the best out of their people?

By balancing human risk with human reward, he says, “If we hire people because they are smart, then it’s probably not a good idea to treat them in a manner that suggests we think the opposite. But equally, (..), intelligent people don’t always make wise decisions”.

Love it. Cannot wait to keep diving into this engaging content to see how I can help my clients (and myself) design better policies, processes and tools and find the balance for their humans.

[Image: Today my post includes a real (not AI) picture I took last year when visiting Morocco, a country full of beautiful humans who had just experienced an earthquake a few weeks earlier. This photo is from the viewing window in Kasbah Amridil which was made by humans in the 17th Century to help them monitor for human risk that came in the form of warring tribes. The photo has nothing to do with Christian's book, I just love it.]

August Advisory