Author: Josée Touchette is a seasoned executive with extensive experience leading complex organisations through transformation, risk, and change. A lawyer, Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), MBA, and ICD.D-certified director, Josée is known for combining strategic vision with disciplined execution. Josée’s career spans almost four decades in the public sector, including fourteen years as an Assistant Deputy Minister in five different departments of the Canadian public service and as Chief Operating Officer with a national regulator and in a multilateral organisation.
Too often, we speak about risk as if the objective were to reduce it to the lowest possible level. I believe that is neither realistic nor desirable.
No organisation that innovates, grows, transforms or leads through uncertainty can operate without risk. The real discipline of leadership is not to eliminate risk. It is understanding which risks are worth taking, which risks must be mitigated, and which risks should never be accepted in the first place.
That discipline matters more than ever.
We are operating in an environment defined by geopolitical instability, technological disruption, cyber threats, fiscal pressure and declining public trust in institutions. Yet, expectations of organisations continue to rise. Leaders are expected to move faster, deliver more, transform operations, adopt new technologies and respond to crises, often simultaneously.
In that context, the pursuit of “zero risk” can itself become a source of risk.
Organisations that become excessively risk-averse often slow decision-making to a point where they lose adaptability. Layers of controls multiply. Escalation processes become heavier. Innovation is stifled. Accountability becomes blurred because individuals focus on avoiding criticism rather than on solving problems.
Paradoxically, an excessive focus on avoiding all risks can create new vulnerabilities. This is particularly visible in complex organisations where leaders must act despite incomplete information. In a crisis, waiting for perfect certainty is rarely an option. But reacting impulsively creates its own dangers. Leadership requires judgement under pressure: the ability to decide with enough clarity while accepting that some uncertainty will remain.
That is why mature risk management is not fundamentally about control. It is about conscious choice.
The best organisations are not those that convince themselves they can eliminate uncertainty. They are the ones that develop clarity around three questions:
What risks are we prepared to take in pursuit of our objectives?
What risks are we not prepared to take?
And do we truly understand the trade-offs involved in both decisions?
These trade-offs are often harder than organisations admit. For instance, choosing to accelerate digital transformation may create cybersecurity and operational risks. Meanwhile, choosing not to transform may create strategic and competitiveness risks.
Choosing to decentralise decision-making can increase agility while reducing consistency and oversight. Choosing to centralise control may strengthen coherence but weaken speed, initiative and responsiveness.
There are rarely risk-free options. There are only different types of risk profiles.
This requires a more mature leadership conversation than the traditional language of compliance and mitigation alone. Risk management must be integrated into decision-making itself. it should not operate as a parallel administrative exercise disconnected from strategy and operations.
Good governance also plays a critical role here. Governance is often misunderstood as the multiplication of controls or approvals. Truth is that strong governance is about clarity: clarity on who decides, who is accountable, what risks are being accepted and under what conditions.
Too much control can paralyse organisations but too little creates disorder. Effective leadership is a constant balancing act between those two extremes.
Perhaps most importantly, organisations must recognise that risks evolve over time. The risks present at the beginning of a transformation or crisis are rarely the same risks that emerge halfway through it. Effective leaders continuously reassess assumptions, adapt strategies and recalibrate responses as circumstances change.
This is why resilience matters so much today. Resilience is not the absence of disruption. It is the capacity to absorb shocks, adapt under pressure and continue functioning when conditions become unstable.
Ultimately, leadership is not about creating perfectly safe systems because such systems do not exist. Leadership is about developing organisations capable of making thoughtful, deliberate and transparent decisions in environments where uncertainty is unavoidable.
Risk cannot be eliminated. But it can be understood, prioritised and consciously chosen.