SOS - The Key to Risk Maturity

Are you in the business of observing and shaping a maturing risk culture in your organisation?

One of the keys to your objective will be whether your teams feel able to Speak Out Safely 🆘 about poor or worrying risk behaviours. To get formal risk escalation and decision making happening effectively, your teams need to feel like they can openly discuss things they are feeling might not be quite right.

Sometimes it helps to start with the informal conversations (1-2-1s, coffee catch ups, walking meetings). But discussing how people are behaving at work can feel like gossip ... a few B words can come to mind ... which helps no-one!

But if the intent is to be curious about behaviours in order to help your 'system' of risk based decision making work better, perhaps you might need a little tool to help "signpost" the intent of your comments.

The Code

Why not create a "code" for your teams... something like "I need to have an SOS (speak out safely) conversation with you about something I observed in ..., can we grab a coffee" Then put a conversation framework around it like:

🤔 Situation - when, where, context?
😖 Behaviour - who, what, how, how often?
🙁 Impact - who, what, who else, why?
🙂 Action - desired outcome? any or none? who to involve? timing?

What other ideas have you seen to help create a movement towards transparency in conversations? I'd be keen to hear from you!

#riskculture #oneconversationatatime #psychologicalsafety