Sport is Embracing Risk, while Business is Avoiding it...Why?

We love borrowing metaphors from sport. Leaders are coaches. Sales teams are athletes. Strategy is a game of execution under pressure, and we all use "playbooks." Most of the time, those comparisons work.

But right now, something unusual is happening. Sport and business are moving in opposite directions when it comes to risk—and the reason has less to do with data or performance, and more to do with morality.

In elite sport, risk is being reclaimed. In modern business, risk has been quietly moralized, and marginalized.

And once risk becomes a moral issue, behavior changes fast.

Sport Is Relearning How to Take Risk

Watch high-level sport today and the pattern is unmistakable. Tennis players go for winners on shots that used to be defensive. Golfers chase distance even when it costs accuracy. (Golf teaching has changed from focusing the young on “getting it in the fairway’” and then teaching distance, to “rip it as hard as you can”,” and then teaching control). Football coaches go for it on fourth down at rates that would once have triggered outrage. Quarterbacks attempt throws that would have been benched ten years ago. This isn’t recklessness. It’s recalibration.

Sport has adopted a different viewpoint that says playing “safe” doesn’t eliminate risk—it just limits upside. Analytics didn’t make athletes bolder; they made the cost of caution visible. Losing slowly, politely, and defensibly turned out to be worse than failing decisively, and fast.

Mistakes are still punished. But not taking the shot is now seen as the bigger error.

Business, Meanwhile, Is Doing the Opposite

In business, especially inside large organizations, risk is no longer something you take. It’s something you manage, mitigate, transfer, duck, or avoid.

At first glance, that sounds sensible. Who would argue against prudence? But beneath the language shift is a deeper change: risk has been moralized. Risk is no longer treated as an inevitable condition of decision-making. It is treated as promising personal failure.

What It Means to Moralize Risk

Something carries moral weight when it becomes a signal about character, not just competence.

In a moralized environment:

• Good outcomes imply good judgment and good people

• Bad outcomes imply flawed judgment—or worse, flawed people

Crucially, the presence of risk itself becomes suspect, even before outcomes are known.

After a failed decision, organizations rarely ask - “Was this a reasonable judgment given what was known at the time?” They ask: “Why wasn’t this risk mitigated?”

That question assumes the risk should not have existed. Which quietly reframes uncertainty not as an unavoidable reality, but as a preventable lapse. This is how risk shifts from being a technical variable to a moral one. People willing to take on risk begin to be perceived as reckless, disorganized, selfish, thoughtless - morally questionable at best.

When Exposure Becomes a Character Test

Once risk is moralized, decision-makers are judged less on the quality of their reasoning and more on the visibility of their exposure. You can make a thoughtful, well-reasoned decision and still be seen as irresponsible if it introduces risk that later becomes visible. Conversely, you can avoid making any meaningful decision at all and still be viewed (wrongly) as prudent.

In this world:

• Prudence becomes virtue

• Caution becomes considerate and  professional

• Courage starts to look like recklessness

Not because the decision was bad—but because being associated with risk itself is bad.

Modern organizations don’t lack intelligence. They lack courage. They lack sponsorship. Sponsoring an initiative now means carrying moral liability.

How Rational People Adapt

Faced with this incentive structure, people adapt intelligently.

They learn that:

• Delay is safer than decisiveness

• Consensus is safer than ownership

• Process is safer than judgment

• “We aligned as a group” is safer than “I decided”

Committees grow. Reviews multiply. Governance expands. Each layer adds reassurance—and removes clarity. What looks like diligence often functions as insulation. This isn’t cowardice (maybe). It’s survival.

When mistakes are treated as ethical failures rather than contextual judgments exercised under uncertainty, the rational move is to minimize personal exposure—not to maximize outcomes.

Why Sport Can Take Risk and Business Can’t

The difference between sport and business isn’t appetite for risk. It’s how failure is interpreted. In sport:

• Failure is expected – failure and success are accepted as two sides to the same coin

• Accountability is immediate and explicit

• Yesterday’s mistake doesn’t permanently disqualify tomorrow’s decision

A quarterback who throws an interception is allowed to throw again.

In business:

• Failure is retrospective and forensic

• Context evaporates

• Decisions are judged with information that did not exist at the time (look at how we judge our historical predecessors by critiquing their actions and tearing down their statues, refusing to allow for the context of their time.)

A buyer who sponsors a failed initiative may never sponsor another. So buyers behave exactly as the system teaches them to.

No Decision as a Moral Safe Harbor

This is the uncomfortable truth behind modern buying behavior:

“No decision” is no longer a failure mode. It is a risk strategy. Doing nothing preserves reputations. It avoids scrutiny. It allows attention to drift. Inaction rarely carries moral weight (it should). Action does.

So deals stall without objection. Transformations linger in review. Opportunities die quietly in committee. From the outside, this looks like indecision. From the inside, it feels like professionalism.

The Real Divergence

Sport has accepted that avoiding risk does not eliminate it—it guarantees mediocrity.

Business, by contrast, has convinced itself that risk can be engineered away through process and governance. The result isn’t better decisions. It’s fewer decisions.

Until organizations relearn how to carry risk—rather than merely managing it—business will continue move (despite popular claims in the media) in the opposite direction of sport: slower, safer, and increasingly unable to take the shots required to win.

In a world where deciding itself has become the riskiest act of all, choosing not to choose will remain the safest moral position available.