Your teams have to move without putting the company in danger, and that is where everything jams. Too much caution and innovation stops; too much exposure and the danger becomes real. Risk taking is one of the five topics in the keynote by Domitille Kiger, skydiving world champion. Her subject: giving your teams a clear criterion to tell the risks that destroy from the risks that propel, and to decide without getting it wrong.
Faced with risk, a company either over protects itself or exposes itself, rarely in the right place. When everything needs sign off, innovation dies in the process. Teams wait for a green light that never comes, and meanwhile the competitors who dare pull ahead. Blanket caution is itself a risk, the quietest one of all.
At the other end, a team that takes risks without sorting them exposes what should never be exposed. It mistakes speed for haste, and discovers too late that it has gambled what cannot be replayed. The problem is never the amount of risk, it is the absence of a shared criterion for knowing which ones to take.
There are risks you have to forbid, and risks you are obliged to take. The whole point is not to confuse them.
Domitille lives it on every record: “A record is a series of failures that ends in a success. Out of roughly twenty attempts, you miss nineteen before landing the twentieth.” Taking those performance risks is non negotiable. But touching the physical safety of the team, never. A fatal risk gets eliminated. A vital risk gets taken. The whole method sits in that distinction.
It is also what connects this topic tocourage at work : daring only makes sense once the fatal has been cleared. The triage comes first, the daring second.
Domitille brings across her field method, built over more than 10 years of world records. Three pillars. For risk, the Flight Plan eliminates what cannot be replayed, the Parachute makes possible what has to be dared.
Identifying and eliminating the non negotiable risks. Procedures, guardrails, checking everything that is under control. Domitille tells of a Himalayan climber she assumed was reckless and who checked everything, methodically: the real risk taker neutralizes the fatal first.
Daring the vital risk assumes a team where people speak up. The risk roundtable surfaces problems before they get expensive, and gives permission to try, to miss, to start again.
People accept risk when they know what it is for. Intent grants the right to fail along the way, because failure is part of the process as soon as the objective is worth it.
This triage does not freeze a team, it frees it. A team that has eliminated the fatal dares much further on the vital, without the diffuse fear of breaking everything. The frame is not the opposite of risk taking, it is the condition for it.
Domitille has been taking risk in heavy doses for more than 10 years. Large formation skydiving is an environment where fatal risk is real and daily, and where you still have to take performance risks on every attempt to break a record. Few speakers can talk about the fatal / vital triage from a practice where a mistake does not get replayed.
In front of an executive committee, that experience changes everything: the fatal / vital triage is not an offsite concept, it is a reflex carried over to business decisions. The Risk Mapping workshop extends the keynote into a shared matrix, where your teams sort their own risks into two columns, to eliminate or to dare.
An outstanding speaker, with a gift for telling stories that connect her career as a skydiving champion with risk taking inside organizations. Fluent in English, which makes her a fit for an international audience. I recommend her without hesitation.
Domitille takes this thinking on our relationship to risk further in the podcasts Mordu and The Lunatic Fringe, where she explores the border between method and extreme risk taking.
By sorting, not by braking. You first eliminate the fatal risks, the ones that endanger the structure, the reputation or the people. With that frame in place, teams dare freely on the vital risks, the ones without which nothing moves. A keynote on risk taking installs that shared criterion, then the RECORD Protocol turns it into a method.
By looking at what can be replayed and what cannot. A risk to avoid commits you to the irreversible: safety, the survival of the company. A risk worth taking is repairable and serves progress. Domitille Kiger sums it up through her own practice: on a record, failure is allowed, physical danger never is.
A fatal risk is non negotiable: it endangers what cannot be replayed, the structure, the reputation, the people. It gets eliminated. A vital risk is necessary: it is the one without which you do not innovate, you do not progress. It gets taken. Confusing the two either paralyzes or exposes; telling them apart lets you decide.
Because it makes the triage concrete. In a sport where fatal risk is real, Domitille built a reflex for separating what you eliminate from what you dare, tested across 10 world records. Carried over to business, that reflex becomes a decision tool, not a stage metaphor.
Risk taking is the topic closest to the mechanism: this is where the fatal / vital triage plays out in the open. The four others follow from it, carried by the same method, the RECORD Protocol.
An in depth brief to understand your risk taking challenges and to build a tailored session that leaves your teams a real decision frame.
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