Executive Context

Senior leaders increasingly describe risk culture as open, constructive, and proportionate. Escalation is encouraged. Challenge is invited. Governance appears to function as intended.

That assessment is often sincere and, from the top of the organisation, frequently justified.

Boards and executive committees engage with risk through designed structures. Discussion occurs in scheduled forums, supported by aggregated reporting and prepared narratives. Accountability is mediated through role authority and shared governance. From this vantage point, risk feels visible, contained, and manageable.

The difficulty is that this is not the only experience of the system.

Elsewhere in the organisation, risk is encountered through delivery pressure, competing priorities, and personal exposure. Escalation is not abstract. It carries consequences that shape how people decide whether, when, and how to raise concerns. Over time, this creates a second, equally coherent experience of risk culture, one that is learned through outcome rather than intent.

The challenge for senior leaders is not a lack of commitment to good risk culture. It is that governance rarely forces these experiences to meet.

Core Insight from the Long-Form Argument

Risk culture is not defined by what leaders say about risk. It is defined by what happens after someone raises it.

Organisations teach risk behaviour through escalation, response, and consequence. Policies, frameworks, and tone create permission. Experience determines whether that permission is used.

When early escalation leads to friction, delay, or personal exposure without changing outcomes, the system teaches restraint. When late escalation arrives with solutions attached and is received more easily, the system teaches caution. These lessons are rarely articulated, yet they shape behaviour far more powerfully than any formal statement.

This is why risk culture can appear healthy at senior levels while becoming selective and constrained in delivery. The issue is not misalignment of values. It is asymmetry of experience.

How the Gap Manifests in Practice

The gap does not emerge through dramatic failure. It forms through ordinary governance mechanics.

Issues surface informally long before they become formal. As they move upward, they are reframed, aggregated, and contextualised against performance narratives. What feels consequential at the frontline becomes bounded and manageable by the time it reaches senior forums.

For executives, this produces reassurance. For delivery teams, it increases exposure. Each escalation changes how individuals are perceived, how much justification is required, and how much disruption is tolerated. Over time, people learn what kind of risk is safe to raise, how complete an issue must be before escalation, and when it is better handled locally.

Both perspectives are rational responses to the system. The problem is that governance allows reassurance to form at the top while adaptation occurs below, without requiring those realities to intersect.

How Risk Accumulates

Risk does not accumulate because people fail to escalate.
It accumulates because escalation becomes costly.

Under sustained pressure, organisations adapt. Issues are held while more information is gathered. Judgement is delayed until uncertainty can be reduced. Workarounds preserve momentum. Escalation remains possible, yet increasingly selective.

From above, indicators improve and issues appear contained. From within delivery, effort and fatigue accumulate. Signals weaken. By the time escalation occurs, options are narrower and consequences are larger.

Silence in this context is not ignorance. It is experience.

The Role of the Risk Function

This dynamic raises an uncomfortable question for risk leaders.

Many organisations expect the risk function to “own” risk culture. In practice, culture is shaped far beyond the function’s control. Performance incentives, leadership behaviour, and governance design all play decisive roles.

The distinctive value of the risk function lies elsewhere.

Its role is to expose where governance teaches the wrong lesson. That means surfacing patterns rather than incidents, experience gaps rather than compliance gaps. It means tracing how escalation actually travels, where it slows, and how personal exposure changes along the way.

Risk cannot enforce behaviour or create psychological safety on its own. What it can do is make visible the distance between reassurance and reality early enough for leaders to act.

Directional Implications for Senior Leaders

Strong tone from the top matters. It creates permission. It does not create alignment on its own.

Alignment occurs when leaders experience risk friction directly, not only through reports. When escalation is treated as a decision input rather than an interruption. When consequence is shared rather than absorbed silently below.

Risk culture does not fail everywhere. It fails at specific points of escalation, handoff, and consequence. Those points are visible long before incidents occur.

The leadership task is not to restate values, but to test whether governance produces the same experience of risk across levels.

Closing

Risk culture disappoints when intent and experience diverge without being reconciled.

Organisations do not fail because leaders do not care about risk. They fail when the system teaches people to be careful about raising it.

Consequences teach faster than messages because you only need to feel them once.

By Julien Haye

Keywords: Culture, Leadership, Risk Management

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