In our era of corporate scandals, the pursuit of good corporate governance is prudent risk management. With compliance, it tops the business agenda and is itself big business. Beneath the financial complexity of modern business, however, there also lies a tangle of personal networks, digital interconnections, and interdependent business processes. These potential sources of risk can become resources for risk mitigation, if we make the connections and open up the communication arteries in our organisations.

Risk managers and compliance staff cannot work their street alone. Risk intersects with knowledge management, human resource development and client relationship management, so the combined strength of coalitions is indispensable.

All employees must constantly reconnoitre the changing business and regulatory landscape and practice risk-mitigation. They must educate themselves about poorly understood threats, like metadata (hidden properties which travel with electronic documents). Multidisciplinary projects often have a risk dimension that requires combining resources and solving composite risk problems. Carefully managed information technology interconnects everything, and total integration presents its challenges.

All this requires teamwork and reciprocity, which only flourishes in a climate of open communication and collaboration. Open, communicative organisations are also more likely to detect and intercept early, the more dangerous forms of leader or employee isolation, which are so conducive to misbehaviour, and stem from hauteur or a false sense of immunity. Peer or boardroom groupthink, or collusion, can also be moderated because openness encourages frank and unreprised dissent, when appropriate.

Without these healthy preconditions, risk management and compliance functions are road-blocked and undermined. Accountants (and workplace designers) must get to grips with the cost of ?missed connections? which result, including the cost of lost or concealed knowledge, critical intelligence that was not conveyed, or the failure to obtain or discover it when it could have reduced or eliminated risk. This goes beyond the routine use of smarter, more powerful retrieval technologies and collaborative tools to manage risk. It may actually involve rethinking the use and symbolism of physical space. Clues can be found around water coolers, cafeterias and coffee machines, churches and town halls, the very gathering spaces which collaborative technologies have attempted to recreate online.

Subject to the business pragmatics of confidentiality, legal privilege, non-disclosure, and the protection of intellectual property, the demands of risk today call for more collaboration and openness, not less, at all organisational levels and between offices and cultures in geographically dispersed entities. The price of security is eternal vigilance, which depends on a high level of collaboration. Since it doesn?t just ?happen?, people have to get round a table, roll up their sleeves and dig deep into the devil of the details as they work through the right balance and interplay of openness, non-disclosure and client confidentiality. If your business is seen to be committed to transparency, especially at senior levels, employees at all levels have a clear incentive to (re-)align their conduct. Self-serving secrecy, territorial, protectionist behaviour, organisational turf wars, or departmental apartheid, have absolutely no place here. Businesses must frequently take a long, hard, honest look in the mirror. What is the nature of their prevailing ?cultural conversation?? Is it secretive and sclerotic? How does the organisation communicate, formally and informally, up, down and laterally within the organisation? Is everything done on a ?need to know? basis that breeds resentment and disenfranchises employees? How would you rate the level of openness and trust, or lack of it, in your business? Employee surveys on trust frequently alarm management. Why? What is the real business justification behind the various types of non-disclosure? Given the high stakes involved in safeguarding a business and protecting its reputation, this kind of soft scrutiny is also good risk mitigation. Greater openness also defuses rumour and speculation.

The stampede towards stiffer accounting practices and compliance hyper-regulation has focused mainly on issues of director scrutiny and greater accountability to shareholders, policed by a zealous slew of industry watchdogs. However, accounting and regulatory ?solutions? may be deftly avoiding the deeper attitudinal roots of the problem, or the prevailing business acquiescence in corporate misbehaviour in the first place. At worst, responses become expensive knee-jerk reactions, which have created an arsenal of bespoke technologies and procedures for the compliance industry.

Risk management and compliance are pervasive. They rely on many departmental touchpoints and resources and typify a convergence of interest and expertise in safeguarding a business and its reputation. Greater openness and collaboration can only enhance this. Na?ve pipe dream? Perhaps. But the economics of the real world will not forgive us for the cost of not changing our business practices. Eventually, a failure here will bite us back.

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