Incentivizing risk-taking

Sinan asked me to elaborate a bit on how I thought corporates could incentivize risk-taking.

There are tangible and intangible ways to support risk-taking, and it is a huge topic, but I am trying to distill it into a few simple suggestions.

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The most important is trust.

Employees have to trust that there is no repercussions of failing (if you have thought it through before going through with it)

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The second most important is tracking.

You have to be able to track how what you are doing is faring. And thus be able to make adjustments. Only then do you know if it is successful or not (this idea is a whole other post in itself)

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Lastly; reward success and celebrate failure

Make it financially or careerwise rewarding to take risks, and celebrate together when something fails. Success has many fathers as the saying goes, I say failures should have many parents too.

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