Every Strategy Carries Risk

By Sarah Williams, Founder of Leading Culture | Business Growth Strategist

When I’m working on strategy with a client, there’s always a point in the process where we need to step back and assess the risk.

Because strategy is, ultimately, a series of choices.

We can do a ton of research. We can analyse the market, look at the numbers, talk to customers, challenge assumptions, and have hours of discussion about what those choices should be.

But at some point, if we want to move forward, choices have to be made.

We’re going to play here, not there.

We’re going to invest in this, rather than that.

We’re going to pursue this customer, this market, this product, this opportunity.

And every time we say yes to something, we are inevitably saying no to something else.

Which means there is no such thing as a risk-free strategy.

In fact, I’d probably be more concerned if we developed a strategy that appeared to have no risk at all. I’d be questioning whether we had actually made any meaningful choices.

So once the choices start becoming clear, there’s another piece of work I think is incredibly important.

We step back and ask:

⚠️ What is the risk here?

For me, this is almost an insurance policy on the strategy.

Not because it makes the strategy safe. That’s not the objective.

It’s about making the risk visible.

Once we can see the risks, we can decide what to do about them.

Some risks can be mitigated.

We might run an experiment before committing significant capital. Build a capability we know we’re going to need. Change the sequence of implementation. Put additional measures in place. Create a contingency plan.

But mitigation doesn’t make risk disappear.

Eventually, we arrive at what I think is one of the most important questions in strategy:

⚖️ Are we prepared to accept the risk that remains?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

The leadership team understands the exposure, understands what could happen, and decides that the potential upside makes the risk worth taking.

Sometimes the answer is no.

And that might mean changing the strategy, changing the sequencing, or going back and reconsidering one of the choices we’ve made.

There’s another side to this conversation that I think businesses can easily overlook.

We tend to examine the risk of doing something far more closely than the risk of doing nothing.

The status quo somehow gets a free pass.

But choosing not to enter that market carries risk.

Choosing not to invest in AI carries risk.

Choosing not to develop that capability carries risk.

Choosing to continue serving an unprofitable customer segment carries risk.

Doing nothing is still a choice.

So when I’m assessing a strategy, I’m interested in both sides:

What is the risk if we do this?

And:

What is the risk if we don’t?

Neither answer will give us certainty.

That isn’t what strategy is designed to do.

The goal isn’t to prove that we’ve found the one objectively correct strategy. Most of the time, we simply cannot know that in advance.

The goal is to make the best choices we can with the information we have, understand the assumptions those choices rely upon, expose the risks they create, mitigate what we reasonably can, and then make a conscious decision about whether we are willing to accept what remains.

For me, that’s the point at which a strategy is really ready to move forward.

Not when we’ve eliminated the risk.

But when we’ve made the choices, understood the risk, and decided it’s a risk worth taking.

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Whether you're building a growth strategy from scratch, stress-testing choices you've already made, or trying to make the risk visible before you commit, this is exactly the work we do with leadership teams. One conversation is usually enough to know whether we're a fit.

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