Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Entrepreneurship is non sine periculo: risk comes with the territory. The discipline is to understand what you are risking, what could be gained or lost, and whether the risk is worth taking.
Perhaps every person starting a business should be handed a crest with three Latin words inscribed beneath it:
Non sine periculo.
Not without danger. Not without risk.
You cannot enter business and remain genuinely
risk-averse.
The moment you begin, you are risking something: money, time, reputation, opportunity, relationships, your assumptions about the market, perhaps even your understanding of what you are capable of building.
You dance with uncertainty.
Will people buy? Will the idea work? Is this the right time? Have I priced it correctly? Should I hire? Should I expand? Should I walk away from something that is no longer working?
There is rarely enough information to remove
every question.
That does not mean we should romanticise risk or charge enthusiastically into uncertainty. There is a difference between accepting that risk exists and being careless about what we expose ourselves to.
We can investigate. We can test assumptions. We can understand constraints. We can reduce exposure. We can preserve options. We can ask what happens if we are wrong. And then, at some point, we decide.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper realities of entrepreneurship: good decision-making does not remove risk. It helps us decide which risks are worth taking.
A line long attributed to Anaïs Nin, although the attribution itself is disputed, captures something important:
“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
There comes a point when staying where we are carries its own risk, and that extends far beyond business.
We risk when we begin. We risk when we stop. We risk when we trust, leave, stay, speak, remain silent, change direction or refuse to change direction. Sometimes the greater risk is the one we take by trying so hard to avoid risk altogether.
Life itself is non sine periculo.
Perhaps that is why it works so well as an entrepreneurial motto, not because risk is admirable, but because it is unavoidable. The work is to understand enough to know what you are accepting when you decide.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Where are you currently trying to remove uncertainty from a decision that can only be made by moving through it? What do you need to understand well enough to decide whether this is a risk worth taking?
About Giselle
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with leaders across the Caribbean facing problems that keep returning, solutions that haven’t delivered the expected results, or changes that prove difficult to implement.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.”
So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more money trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design an appropriate solution and work with their teams to implement it effectively.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
