Challenging the Default

Insight

The very mechanisms designed to minimize risk in government actually create the biggest risk of all: irrelevance.

Risk committees, impact assessments, and approval chains don't eliminate risk; they transfer it from "doing something wrong" to "doing nothing at all."

Risk aversion isn't just about big decisions. It's the daily micro-choices: the pilot that gets delayed another month, the stakeholder meeting that gets postponed, the "let's gather more data" reflex.

These 1% daily retreats compound into systemic paralysis.

In a rapidly changing world, we need to address this now more than ever.

Insight in Practice

Here are four actionable ways to shift risk from being a blocker to becoming a lever for progress:

• Establish risk budgets. 
  Allocate a quarterly “risk budget” to teams—measured in scope, time, or investment. Make it mandatory to spend. This creates a structure for experimentation, and removes the fear of “stepping out of line.”
  
  One team we supported built a “risk runway” into their quarterly planning process, allocating time and budget specifically for learning-driven experiments. It gave them a clearer mandate to try, learn, and adapt without waiting for permission.

• Flip the burden of proof.
  Instead of asking, “Why should we change this?” ask, “What happens if we don’t?” Let the status quo justify itself.

• Build reputational shields. 
  If you want new ideas, protect the people who voice them. Leaders need to own the risk and distribute credit.

• ‍Encourage small, smart failures.
  Highlight teams who tried bold things even when outcomes were mixed.

It’s not about being reckless. It’s about removing the quiet incentives that keep good people standing still.

Perspectives

Regret bias leads to risk-avoidance in grantmaking.

"Staff likely experience greater regret from making a grant that fails than from letting a good opportunity go by, which may inject a bias toward passivity, given a fear of proactive failure.”
— Stanford Social Innovation Review, Understanding Risk Tolerance in Grantmaking

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Status quo bias is reinforced by poorly designed decision frameworks.

“Addressing the status quo bias is largely a matter of process: organizations must design decision-making frameworks that explicitly challenge existing assumptions and encourage critical evaluation of alternatives.”
— Springer Nature Review, How to measure the status quo bias?

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When comfort trumps creativity, we lose originality.

“Disrupting the default system is uncomfortable. Unfortunately, when we let comfort become more important than progress, we lose the necessary moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work. Achievement motivation leaves us chasing zero-sum games like prestige and status. The fastest, most obvious way to win these games is not to try something that may not work or do something that’s never been done before. Instead, following a conventional path, climbing a pre-constructed ladder faster, better, higher than anyone else sadly fulfills our intense desire to succeed. This leads us to strive for guaranteed success and makes us reluctant to pursue originality.”
‍— Adam Grant, Think Again

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Question to Consider

What policy decision has been in “review” for over 90 days? What would change if you moved it forward in the next two weeks, even imperfectly?

Quote of The Week

“If we want to build a different future, we must begin by challenging what we’ve normalized.”

— Cheryl Dorsey