If talking about risk does not change what your team does next week, you are not managing risk. You are storing it.

Try Risk Up Front on your own project, right now.

Every team I work with has a risk list. Many of them have a filing system.

The language has to change first.

Risks, as written, rarely compel action. “The schedule is aggressive” gets nods around the table and changes nothing. Try this instead: name what is true today, what it leads to, and what it costs. Bring one of yours, something you have yet to say out loud, and click below.

See how good your risk language is

The urgency has to move to the front.

A team treats next week as urgent only when it knows what a slip costs. We are optimistic procrastinators. A week of slip looks cheap in March but is devastating by September. Put in your own numbers and see what a month of slip is costing you.

Use the cost of being late calculator

Why sixty risks should become two hundred.

A team leader told me last week that something is not a risk until it is a risk. By the standards she was trained in, she was right: a risk goes on the list once you can defend it, the list is a report for the steering committee, and a high risk gets escalated. I ask teams to do the opposite. If it is worth mentioning at the espresso machine, it goes on the list. Trust your prioritization. Put an action on anything that comes up high.

High-performance teams talk about how the project could fail from day one, out loud and on purpose. That is how they make sure it does not. One team lead told me they had sixty risks on their list. I told her to come back when she had two hundred. That is what a risk conversation looks like when a team is committed to finding its blind spots early. Getting a risk on the list costs a sentence. Prioritizing it takes a minute. Focus on the ones that come up high.

Inside an engagement, this is how the whole team talks every week. Bring me the project you are worried about. In thirty minutes you will know whether this is worth your team's time.

I have run this at Goldman Sachs, Google and Lam Research.

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