You're Not Managing Risk—You're Just Cleaning Up Messes

Imagine you're a ship captain navigating treacherous waters. Most captains rely on their damage control teams—when the hull gets breached, they spring into action, pumping out water and patching holes. That's feedback control, and while it's essential, it's not what separates legendary captains from the rest.

Risk Management is a Feed Forward Process

The best captains?

They're obsessed with their barometer readings, wind patterns, and ocean swells before the storm hits.

They're tracking leading indicators—subtle changes that whisper of trouble long before it screams. That's feedforward control, and it's the secret that transforms risk management from crisis response into strategic advantage.

Here's the truth that will revolutionize how you think about risk:

Risk management is a feedforward process. Everything else is just damage control.

Walk into any company's "risk management" meeting, and you'll see the problem immediately. They're not managing risk at all—they're managing the aftermath of risks that already materialized. These meetings are filled with lagging indicators—the equivalent of counting holes in your ship's hull after the storm has passed.

True risk management is feedforward by definition. It's about reading the environment, anticipating what's coming, and adjusting course before the storm hits. When you're reacting to problems that already happened, you've left risk management behind and entered crisis response.

This means fundamentally changing what you track. You measure leading indicators:

• Employee engagement scores before they become turnover rates

• Customer complaint sentiment before it becomes churn

• Process deviation patterns before they become quality failures

• Market volatility signals before they become financial losses

• Compliance inoperability before it becomes violations

Organizations that make this shift see remarkable transformations in their risk posture by changing their measurement focus from "How badly did we get hit?" to "What's building on the horizon?"

Consider how this works in practice: instead of tracking injury rates (lagging), organizations can track near-miss reporting frequency and planned change frequency (leading). This approach often leads to dramatic reductions in actual injuries—not because teams get better at treating injuries, but because they get better at preventing the conditions that create them.

True risk management isn't about reading storms or cleaning up after them—it's about creating the conditions for smooth sailing.

What leading indicators is your organization ignoring while it counts yesterday's damage?