Leadership Matters

CHAPTER 6MANAGE RISK, DON’T FEAR IT

It is always easier to remove or avoid risk than to manage it. There are competing interests, and those charged with reducing risk exposure and mitigating risk and potential harm will lean towards a strategy of avoidance. But the change makers, the innovators, the dreamers are less inclined to focus on the risk and reasons to say no in their pursuit of their goal. At the same time, as with most things, both extremes can be dangerous, unproductive and reckless.

I have never gone looking for projects that would increase our operations in Thailand. Our growth has always been on the back of circumstances where it appeared we could make a positive difference in a difficult situation. We have never been funded based on the number of kids we support or homes we build. We don't have it in our business plan to grow the number of kids or any measure that sees us increase in physical size. We celebrate the reuniting of families, of kids moving back to parents who were lost and are now found, or incapacitated but now capable. The ultimate reflection of sustained generational change would be that the need for our services no longer existed.

In 2010 I was working on a business project with a Thai woman living in Australia and at the end of one of our sessions she was talking to me about a charity founder in Thailand. I had never heard of the charity or the founder. She came from a town whose name I couldn't even pronounce or readily find on a map. ‘She ...