By Liz MacDonald
for the 2025 Risky Women Writing Competition, presented in partnership with Ocorian
The strongest insights don’t just come from the frontline, but also from operations, technology, data, compliance, and across both senior and junior colleagues.
Risk frameworks are designed to help organisations prepare for the unexpected, avoid costly mistakes, and protect their reputation. They provide structure for identifying threats, assigning responsibilities, and implementing controls. Yet too often, these frameworks overlook a crucial principle, namely inclusion. Without inclusive practices, risk assessments and risk monitoring activities can miss emerging issues, thereby underestimating the impact of change, and overlooking the concerns of different stakeholder groups.
Why Inclusion Matters in Risk
Whether you’re just starting out in risk or already a few years in, one of the most valuable habits you can build is actively seeking out diverse voices. It’s something I’ve learned first-hand in banking: the strongest insights don’t just come from the frontline, but also from operations, technology, data, compliance, and across both senior and junior colleagues. The wider the lens, the better the outcomes.
Here’s why inclusion isn’t optional — it’s essential:
It counters groupthink.
When everyone in the room thinks the same way, blind spots multiply. Different backgrounds — whether shaped by gender, culture, age, or professional experience — bring fresh ways of looking at problems. Healthy debate makes risks visible that a uniform team might never even consider.
It strengthens decisions when the future is uncertain.
Risks don’t arrive in neat, predictable packages. They emerge from complex systems: markets, technology, geopolitics, even human behaviour. Diverse teams are better equipped to challenge assumptions, stress-test scenarios, and prepare for the unexpected. Research shows time and again that varied groups outperform homogeneous ones when tackling complex challenges.
It builds trust and protects reputation.
Regulators, customers, and communities all expect fairness and accountability. An inclusive approach ensures policies and controls reflect the needs of different groups, helping organisations avoid reputational damage linked to bias, exclusion, or unfair treatment.
Case Studies: Where Diverse Perspectives and Inclusiveness Made a Difference
Below are concrete examples where including diverse voices changed outcomes, reduced risk, or prevented disasters.
Aviation: Safety through every voice
The 1977 Tenerife disaster revealed the dangers of hierarchy in the cockpit. Junior crew members spotted errors being made but didn’t feel safe to speak up. Since then, airlines have embedded “Crew Resource Management,” which explicitly promotes inclusion: every voice, regardless of rank, must be heard. The result led to a more inclusive cockpit culture and ultimately a reduction in human-factor accidents.
Financial services: Avoiding algorithmic bias
Some banks that deployed credit-scoring algorithms without inclusive oversight have found themselves facing regulatory scrutiny when models systematically disadvantaged women and minority applicants. Whereas those institutions that involved diverse teams including data ethicists, data scientists, and community advocates as part of model governance were better placed to detect biases early and adjust models .
Public health: Inclusive Pandemic Planning
During COVID-19, governments that failed to consider marginalised groups saw higher infection rates in migrant and Indigenous communities. Others, like New Zealand, designed communication in multiple languages and partnered with community leaders. By proactively making inclusion a priority, they achieved better health outcomes and stronger public trust.
Conclusion & Practical Steps to Embed Inclusion
Inclusivity has the ability to amplify governance, improve risk identification, build trust, and protect organisations from avoidable failures. Organisations should holistically be promoting good risk culture practices and now is the time to review the existing Risk Management Framework and underlying activities and explore opportunities to strengthen inclusion.
It’s time for organisations to stop treating inclusion as a side project and start seeing inclusion as a critical factor in bringing the Risk Management framework to life
For example, this might mean reviewing and challenging existing policies and procedures and asking:
- Do current feedback mechanisms encourage/support diverse and inclusive input from different internal stakeholders within an organisation?
- Who is represented on our risk committees? Is there sufficient diversity?
- What evidence is there that the organisation actively seeks out diverse perspectives i.e. feedback from different teams?
- Ensure diversity in GRC roles: risk committees, model governance groups, audit, compliance should include people from varied backgrounds (cultural, gender, professional, age).
- Promote risk culture and psychological safety: junior staff, minority voices must feel safe to raise concerns or alternative views.
- Make inclusion explicit in policies: treat inclusive review as an essential control factor; document when diverse input was sought; require challenge/feedback mechanisms.