Same Room, Different Danger

A note before we begin. Readers of Dan's earlier piece, "Deciding Without Certainty," know he has a weakness for Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ series adapted from Mick Herron's novels. For anyone who hasn't watched it, the setup is simple. MI5's real work happens at its headquarters in Regent's Park. MI5 is the British equivalent of the USA’s CIA. Officers who embarrass the Service get sent to Slough House, a scruffy office building the Service uses as a dumping ground, where they push paper and wait for their careers to die. Slough House is run by Jackson Lamb, a slovenly former field agent, whose open contempt for everyone around him hides a very sharp mind. Every season something goes badly wrong, and the rejects end up in the middle of it. You don't need to have seen an episode to follow the argument. If you have, feel free to skip ahead.

There is a moment in nearly every season of Slow Horses when the whole team receives the same piece of bad news at the same time, and you can watch each of them decide how dangerous it is. River Cartwright is already reaching for his coat. Catherine Standish wants to know who else has been told and what's been written down. Roddy Ho assumes he can sort it out from his keyboard before lunch. Louisa Guy goes quiet and takes it personally. Lamb lights a cigarette and says something unprintable. Across town at the Park, Diana Taverner has already worked out who will carry the blame if it goes wrong, and has made sure it won't be her.

Nobody in that room has different information. They have different temperaments, and temperament decides what the information feels like.

We see the same scene in executive team meetings all the time. A CFO and a head of product look at the same market data. One sees exposure and the other sees an opening, and they spend forty minutes arguing about the numbers when the real disagreement is about how worried a reasonable person should be. Neither of them is being irrational. They are each reading the situation through a disposition that has served them well for most of their careers, and neither has ever been asked to name it.

That is the problem the Risk Type Compass was built to solve. Developed by Geoff Trickey and Psychological Consultancy Ltd, it is a tool both of us rely on in our own work. Dan uses it at Contemporary Leadership Advisors in executive assessment and coaching, and with the senior leaders in EdgePoint. Christine uses it with the leaders and teams she advises at Crescente Advisors. We have each found that it produces more useful conversation per minute than almost anything else in an assessment battery. Its central claim is that the way people perceive and respond to risk is rooted in temperament, and that temperament is stable enough to measure. Slough House turns out to be an almost perfect teaching case.

Two questions underneath every risk decision

The Compass is built on two dimensions of personality. The first is emotional, and it asks how much anxiety a person brings to uncertainty. At one end are people who feel risk sharply, anticipate what could go wrong, and take setbacks hard. At the other end are people who stay calm when everyone else is alarmed. The second dimension is cognitive, and it asks how a person handles risk once they see it. At one end sit the methodical and organized, who plan for contingencies and prefer to eliminate uncertainty before acting. At the other end sit the impulsive and unconventional, who would rather move and adjust.

Cross those two dimensions and you get a circle of eight Risk Types: Wary, Prudent, Deliberate, Composed, Adventurous, Carefree, Excitable, and Intense. Roughly one person in eight lands close to the center, with no strong pull in any direction, and is described as Axial. Two features of the circle matter more than the labels. It is a continuous spectrum, so neighboring types share characteristics and blend into one another. And the types facing each other across the circle are opposites, which is where most of the friction on a leadership team comes from.

Fictional spies don't complete psychometric assessments, so treat what follows as a parlor game with a serious point. But Herron writes character so precisely that the Compass maps onto Slough House with very little forcing.

Reading Slough House on the Compass

Jackson Lamb is Composed. Composed types are cool-headed and hard to rattle, and they keep their heads when others lose theirs. Lamb is the calmest person in every crisis, to the point of looking indifferent. That calm is a genuine asset, because it lets him see the board while everyone else is reacting to the last move. It also has a cost that Composed leaders rarely notice. Because they don't feel risk the way others do, they can underweight warnings that their more anxious colleagues pick up early, and their calm can read to a team as not caring. Lamb's people never quite know whether he is worried, and they often make worse decisions because of it. It's worth adding that Lamb also plans several moves ahead when he thinks no one is watching, which puts him near the border with his neighbor, Deliberate. Real people are like that too. The type describes the pull, and the continuous circle allows for the blend.

River Cartwright is Adventurous. Adventurous types combine low anxiety with high impulsivity. They are fearless, drawn to challenge, and willing to try what no one else will. River's instinct in every season is to go, alone if necessary, before anyone has agreed what the problem is. Sometimes that is exactly what saves the day. Just as often it puts him, and the people around him, in a situation that a little planning would have avoided. The Adventurous leader's gift is momentum. The liability is that they tend to discover the risks after they have already committed to them.

Diana Taverner is Wary. Across the circle from River sits the Wary type: vigilant, controlling, deeply sensitive to exposure, and determined to secure the future. Taverner survives every purge at the Park because she sees threats to her position long before anyone else does. Here the Compass teaches something subtle. Wary types are not risk-averse across the board. They are averse to the risks they feel, and the risk Taverner feels most is losing control. So she runs off-the-books operations and makes enormous gambles, including the one that sets the first season's crisis in motion, all in the service of feeling safe. Wary leaders will often take a large, poorly examined risk to escape a small, vividly felt one. That pattern is worth watching for in any organization with a strong control culture.

Catherine Standish is Prudent, and Roddy Ho is Carefree. These two sit directly opposite each other, which is part of why they are so funny together. Catherine is organized, disciplined, and keeps a record of everything. Prudent types want to bring order to uncertainty and have a backup for every plan, and Slough House would have collapsed long ago without her. Roddy is her mirror image. Carefree types are unconventional and impetuous, and they don't plan much because nothing about uncertainty bothers them. At their best they are agile and imaginative. Roddy mostly shows us the shadow side, the confidence that has never been tested against a consequence. Put them side by side and you see why facing types need each other. Catherine sees every risk Roddy misses. Roddy will act in moments when Catherine would still be checking the file.

Louisa Guy is Intense. Intense types feel things deeply, react strongly, and are their own most severe critics. They go all in, and they rarely make the same mistake twice. Louisa carries every loss with her, most painfully the death of Min Harper, and she channels it into a relentless seriousness about the work. Her opposite on the Compass is Composed, which is to say Lamb, and their relationship shows both sides of that tension. She reads his calm as callousness. He reads her intensity as noise. Each of them is partly right, and each of them misses something the other sees clearly.

Shirley Dander is Excitable. Excitable types pair strong feelings and anxiety with an attraction to novelty, action, and change. Shirley is restless and volatile, happiest when something is happening and least reliable when nothing is. Her opposite, Deliberate, is the analytical type who tests the ground and never walks into anything unprepared. Slough House has almost no one who lives in that quadrant, and you can feel its absence every time the team charges into a plan nobody has pressure-tested.

Type is not the same as attitude

The Compass makes a distinction that executives find immediately useful. Risk Type is temperament. It is deeply rooted and changes very little across adulthood. Risk Attitude is something else. It reflects experience and circumstance, and it can vary sharply from one domain to another: financial, career, health, social, and ethical risks can all draw different responses from the same person.

Marcus Longridge is the clearest illustration in the series. He is a seasoned counterterrorism officer, steady and competent under fire, and he cannot stop gambling away his family's money. Nothing about his calm in the field predicts his behavior at the betting shop. Louisa shows the other half of the distinction. Her temperament doesn't change after Min dies, but her attitude toward certain risks does, because experience has taught her what they cost.

This matters in the executive suite because we constantly draw conclusions about people from single decisions. A leader who made one bad bet may have been responding to circumstances rather than revealing a character flaw. A leader who is admirably disciplined with capital may be reckless with their own health or careless with relationships. When you evaluate someone's judgment, it helps to ask which you are looking at: the stable disposition or the situational attitude.

The Park has a risk culture. Slough House has a risk mix.

The deepest lesson the show offers about risk is organizational. Regent's Park runs on what Herron calls London Rules, the first of which is to cover yourself. Over time that culture selects for the controlling, organized side of the Compass and exiles anyone who looks too adventurous, too volatile, or too unpredictable. The irony that drives every season is that the exiles hold exactly the temperaments the Park needs when a crisis breaks and the procedures stop working.

Organizations do this without anyone deciding to. Leaders hire and promote people who feel familiar, and familiarity includes temperament. Research from Psychological Consultancy has found, for example, that HR professionals lean noticeably toward the organized and controlling side of the Compass compared with the working population. That isn't a criticism of HR. It's a reminder that every function develops a center of gravity, and that a team drawn from one part of the circle will share the same blind spots and reinforce them.

Trickey tells a story that makes the point well. An executive on a lively, talkative team was disappointed when her assessment came back Prudent, since everyone around her was Excitable or Carefree and she had hoped for something more interesting. Then she remembered that she had been the only person on the team worried about an approaching regulatory deadline. Nobody else felt any urgency, and in the end she did the work herself. Her temperament was the most valuable thing in the room, and the room had no way of recognizing it.

What leaders can do with this

Name the temperament before debating the facts. When a team disagrees about how worried to be, stop and ask whether you are arguing about the data or about how the data feels. Putting Risk Types on the table turns a contest of wills into a conversation about perspectives, and it makes it much easier for people to change their minds without losing face.

Know what your own type hides from you. Every type sees some risks early and others late. Composed leaders miss the early warnings their Intense colleagues feel in their stomachs. Wary leaders see threats everywhere except in the controls they build to manage them. Adventurous leaders find the risks after they have committed. The value of knowing your type is less about your strengths and more about the specific places you should borrow someone else's eyes.

Keep a counterpart from across the circle. Lamb keeps Catherine close, and for all his contempt he listens to her. The senior leaders we see handle uncertainty best almost always have a trusted counterpart whose temperament is the opposite of theirs, someone whose alarm they have learned to take seriously even when they don't share it. If you can't name that person, finding them is a better use of your time than any risk framework.

Protect the minority type on your team. A mix of temperaments only helps if the outlier gets heard. The Prudent executive on an Excitable team and the Adventurous voice on a Wary one will both be easy to dismiss as difficult. Build explicit moments into decisions where the least represented perspective is asked to speak first.

Separate type from attitude when you judge a decision. Before you draw a conclusion about someone's judgment from a single call, ask whether you are seeing their temperament or their circumstances, and whether their record in one domain tells you anything at all about another.

Bad at different things

Slough House is not a well-run team. Its people are difficult, damaged, and frequently wrong. But they keep surviving situations that defeat the polished professionals at the Park, and we don't think that's only because Herron is on their side. It's because they are wrong in different directions. River's recklessness gets checked by Catherine's caution. Louisa's intensity catches what Lamb's calm lets slide. The team works, when it works, because no single temperament is allowed to define what counts as dangerous.

Most executive teams are built the other way, out of people who see risk the same way and have been rewarded for it. They look far more competent than Slough House right up until the moment the procedures stop working.

Slough House doesn't survive because anyone in it is good at risk. It survives because, between them, they are bad at different things.