Author: Arnoud Franken is a Principal Consultant at InContext Consultancy Group and Visiting Senior Lecturer at Cranfield University, where he has taught strategic change leadership for more than eighteen years. His fifteen years of fieldwork with the Royal Marines, Virgin Atlantic, IHG, and Jaguar Land Rover forms the basis of publications in the Harvard Business Review and California Management Review, and of his books ‘Leading Meaningful Change’ and ‘The Half-Life of Success’.
I have spent fifteen years studying how organisations handle adversity: inside elite military units, a transatlantic airline, a luxury automotive company, and one of the world’s largest hotel groups. What I expected to find was that the best risk leaders had better systems. What I found was a pattern that runs beneath any system and consistently outperforms it.
The organisations that absorbed adversity best were not the ones with the most sophisticated frameworks. They were the ones where people, at every level, could not bear to let those who depended on them down.
Most risk thinking focuses on the downside: what could go wrong, how to detect it early, how to contain it. That is not wrong, but it locates the problem in the environment, and the solution in the process. What my research revealed is that the most powerful risk mechanism available to any leader is not a process at all. It is a motivation.
A Colonel in the Royal Marines, reflecting on what held a multi-cap-badge regiment together under extraordinary operational pressure, did not describe selection criteria or command structures. He described what each person understood about what happened if they failed the person next to them. The driver. The mechanic. The intelligence analyst working through the night in an operations room many miles from the action. Nobody needed to be told that others were depending on them. The dependence was structural and visible. Nobody wanted to be the one who let the others down – not from fear of punishment, but from the refusal to be a weak link.
At Virgin Atlantic, the same principle surfaced in different language. The people closest to the operation understood themselves to be the last line of defence – and they were flying on the plane. The motivation to catch something early, to raise a concern, to not let a problem through, was not compliance behaviour. It was the natural consequence of knowing exactly who was depending on you to get it right.
At IHG, operating across more than a hundred countries, a senior leader described the company’s resilience in terms that initially sounded structural – spread of markets, asset-light model, distributed operations. But when the conversation turned to what made those structures work under pressure, the answer was human. The culture operated on a principle that, when something went wrong, it was always about the event, never the individual. That distinction points to an organisation where people are not protecting themselves. They are looking after the operation, and the people it serves.
At Jaguar Land Rover, the early warning systems and trigger point analyses that gave the company the ability to respond quickly to shifting market conditions depended on one thing above all: leaders being willing to surface what they actually saw. The mechanism that made them willing was not the governance structure. It was a culture where people understood who was depending on them to get the signal right.
The pattern, across four organisations and fifteen years, is consistent. Risk frameworks are designed to manage what can go wrong. The organisations I studied built something different – a culture where people’s own motivation to not let down those who depended on them acted as the most reliable risk signal available. Making dependence visible is one of the most powerful things a risk leader can do. And it costs nothing except the willingness to stop treating people as variables in a system and start treating them as the system itself.