Course: The Psychology of Risk-Taking in Innovation

Risk, resilience and more than a little stubbornness, that's the texture of innovation. Here is an A to Z roadmap for creating curiosity into focused creativity. Designed for Australian workplaces, practical, a little opinionated and deliberately unpredictable as you read, because bold conversations rarely take the most direct route.

Course Title
The Psychology of Risk Taking in Innovation: From Bias to Breakthrough

Target Audience
Up and coming leaders and middle managers in professional services and technology, people who will run experiments, sponsor pilots or protect teams as they step outside their comfort zones. For groups of 12 to 20 students.

Program Description
Applied professional development, not academic. This is practical, hands on and immediately applicable, for those who lead teams and make decisions; not deep clinical neuroscience education.

Duration & Format
6 week Blended Program:
- 2 × half day face to face workshops (Melbourne hub, with an optional satellite in Sydney)
- 4 × 90min live virtual sessions
- Self paced microlearning Modules, 3 short modules per week
- Optional one on one Coaching drop in (30 min per participant) in Week 5

Delivery Mode
Hybrid, face to face and live virtual delivery modes combined with self directed learning. Pragmatic: not everyone is in the same city; being present is important for the messy work of culture change.

Practical Limitations & Logistics
Cost: $495 incl. GST per person (pilot cohort pricing, minimum and realistic)
- Minimum cohort size: 12; maximum: 20
- Venues: Melbourne (Main plus Sydney, Brisbane by request)
- Platform: Zoom + dedicated LMS for microlearning + Miro for collaboration
- Trainer team: two facilitators for face to face workshops; one lead facilitator for virtual sessions
- Materials: participant workbook (digital plus printed where face to face), leader brief, roleplay scripts, assessment rubrics
- Confidentiality: all learner scenarios anonymised; safe space assured
- Guarantee: We commit to delivery, no cancellations

Rationale & Business Case
Innovation is not a spreadsheet game. It is a behavioural challenge. Teams don't just screw up for want of smart ideas; psychology, bias, fear, misapplied incentives, silently strangles them. Organisations that deliberately confront the human side of risk are better at experimentation, faster at learning and more capable of handling the inevitable failures with cool heads. Practical point: your senior sponsors get higher ROIs when these teams learn how to frame experiments that minimise the downside, but preserve the upside.

One number to ground the need
Less than half of Australian businesses reported performing innovation activities in recent national surveys by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is a signal there remains considerable risk aversion at scale. (See Sources & Notes.)

High level Learning Outcomes
Participants will:
• Identify and counter the top five cognitive biases that thwart innovation decisions (measured by pre/post bias recognition quiz).
• Write or lead low cost experiments that preserve optionality 50% of participants to have launched at least one pilot in 90 days.
• Create a short risk management protocol for their team, a one page "safe to fail" charter.
• Increase indicators of team psychological safety by measurable amounts manager observed changes over two months.
• Use a simple checklist grounded in neuroscience to see when emotion is hijacking reason in decision making.

Assessment and Measurement
- Pre programme diagnostic: Bias recognition quiz + psychological safety baseline survey (team and individual)
- Formative assessment: Roleplay scoring in face to face workshops using a 6 point rubric
- Summative assessment: Post programme action plans, manager validation of pilot initiation
- Longitudinal measure: 90 day follow up survey + quick interview with sponsor to gauge behaviour change and pilot outcomes
Optional peer feedback

Delivery & Technology Design
Peer video submissions for asynchronous learning.

Programme Structure (week by week)

Week 0, Onboarding (self paced)
- Pre read: short primer on innovation risk.
- Micromodule: "What is risk? Not the scary bit."
- Diagnostic surveys distributed and baseline data collected
- Brief reflective prompt: a personal failure story (250 to 300 words) to surface attitudes

Week 1, Workshop 1 (half day, face to face)
Module A: The Psychology of Risk, Foundations
- Introduction: A brief, 10 minute challenge. Opinion: "You can't outsource creative risk, leaders need to own it." Some will bristle. FINE
- Interactive lecture: Risk perception vs objective risk; why our brains cheat.
- Activity: Bias lab, teams go through five vignettes and name the biases.
- Tool: Bias checklist (for immediate use).
- Outcome: The desired outcome is for participants to produce a short commitment, one bias they are going to challenge this week.

Week 2, Virtual Session 1
Module B: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Cognitive Frames
- Short teaching = ambiguity tolerance, framing effects, loss aversion.
- Breakouts = Reshaping real Company problems (submitted by the participant).
- Deliverable to each team: reframed problem statement and an "assumption map".

Week 3, Virtual Session 2
Module C: Neuroscience of Risk and Reward, applied
- Fast introduction to prefrontal cortex, amygdala, dopamine and what they have to do with decision cycles.
- Practitioner tool: "pause points", little micro interventions that enable reflective decision making.
- Exercise: Stake based decisions simulation; notice the emotional hijack in action and practice a pause point.
- Takeaway: A 3 step neuroscience informed decision checklist.

Week 4, Virtual Session 3
Module D: Small, Smart Experiments
- Teaching: hypotheses, minimal viable experiments, learn fast metrics.
- Case work: participants design a 2 week pilot (budget under $2000).
- Output: Each participant leaves with a completed pilot plan template.

Week 5, Workshop 2 (half day, face to face)
Module E: Psychological Safety & Innovation
- Experience: vulnerability exercise (controlled, carefully facilitated).
- Teaching: The link between safety, risk taking and performance (using Google's Project Aristotle data).
- Activity: Teams draft a "safe to fail" charter specific to their context.
- Roleplay: Practice having difficult conversations about failed experiments.
- Commitment: Public declaration of one pilot to launch within 30 days.

Week 6, Virtual Session 4
Module F: Scaling What Works, Killing What Doesn't
- Teaching: signals for scaling vs pivoting vs stopping.
- Case studies: Real Australian innovation successes and failures.
- Planning: 90 day action plan with accountability partner.
- Celebration: acknowledge courage and learning, not just success.

Between Session Activities (microlearning)
3 × 10 minute modules per week:
- Video case studies
- Bias identification games
- Reflection prompts
- Peer feedback exercises
- Quick wins checklist

Success Metrics
Short term (30 days):
- Pilot launch rate (target: 50% of participants)
- Manager reported behaviour change (qualitative)
- Bias recognition improvement (pre/post quiz delta)

Medium term (90 days):
- Pilot outcomes (learnings captured, decisions made)
- Team psychological safety scores (survey)
- Number of follow on experiments initiated

Long term (6 to 12 months):
- Number of scaled pilots, budget approval, ROI where possible/verifiable.
- Culture metrics: psychological safety (captured in pulse surveys).

Scalability & Customisation
- Bespoke editions for out of office teams (shorter, with more emphasis on quickfire experiments).
- Senior leader briefings (off the shelf 2 hour overview for C suite)
- Industry slides: finance, healthcare, retail, swap out examples and case packs.
- Train the trainer module (building internal capability).

Common Barriers & Mitigation Strategies
Barrier: Risk of failure
- Mitigation: Safe to fail charters and sponsor backed guarantee. Visible leader support.

Barrier: Lack of resources.
- Mitigation: Prioritise on inexpensive experiments and redistribute existing resources.

Barrier: Bias blindness.
- Mitigation: Formalised pre mortems, and forced assumption checks for every decision.

Technology & Platforms
- Synchronous: Zoom for virtual sessions with breakout rooms
- Asynchronous: Miro for group collaboration (real time mapping, templates)
- LMS hosted microlearning, quizzes and resources
- Assessments hosted within LMS
- Manager validation occurs via a short web form.

Leaders & Sponsors Actions
- Attending 1 module at a minimum.
- Publicly support the team charter.
- Protect budget for one small pilot.
- Feedback in 90 days follow up meeting.

Deliverable Templates (examples included in workbook)
- 1 page pilot plan
- 1 page safe to fail charter
- Assumption map template
- Bias checklist
- Neuroscience pause point card
- Sponsor one pager

Two Opinions That Might Annoy People (but matter)
- Structured risk frameworks don't kill creativity; they channel it. Without constraints, you have noise, not novelty.
- Failure can be more informative than success. That's uncomfortable, but true. Many teams learn nothing from success because they don't look.

Everything that goes back to participants
- Final report with cohort findings
- Customised action plans
- Roleplay feedback scores
- Suggested next steps for leadership

Optional Add Ons (priced separately)
- On site sprint coaching for pilot launch day
- Executive 90 minute briefing and Q&A
- Deeper psychological profiling (optional psych tools)
- Follow up half day workshop on scaling successful pilots

Risks to Programme Success
Half baked sponsorship, if senior execs don't protect the experiments, they die. Track record building, you are not a training factory. Poor follow through, workshops alone don't change behaviour; we need accountability. One dimensional content, it needs to be grounded in the local context.

Why this works
Because people make decisions. Strategies, models and tech matter, but if the human system isn't aligned, innovation stalls. This programme pokes a hole in that system: awareness, skill, practice and leader backed permission. It's behavioural engineering with kindness.

Agenda Guidelines for Face to Face Workshops

Half day workshop structure (4 hours)
- 09:00 to 09:10, Welcome & provocation
- 09:10 to 10:00, Bias lab
- 10:00 to 10:20, Neuroscience primer + pause points
- 10:20 to 10:35, Break
- 10:35 to 11:25, Safe to fail charter design
- 11:25 to 12:00, Roleplay & commitments

Virtual Session Structure (90 minutes)
- 00 to 10 minutes: Kick off and recap
- 10 to 35 minutes: Short input + demo
- 35 to 60 minutes: Breakout exercises
- 60 to 75 minutes: Share back and discussion
- 75 to 85 minutes: Planning and commitments
- 85 to 90 minutes: Wrap up and next steps

Costs & Value (pilot pricing)
- $495 incl. GST per person, includes all materials, two face to face workshops (client provided venue is excluded), access to LMS and 2 facilitator days.
- Value proposition: for the price of lunch a team leaves with tangible pilots designed to de risk ideas and speed up validated learning.

Post Programme Support (two weeks)
- 2 hours of office hours for trouble shooting pilots for participants (across 2 calls, of 1 hour each)
- Peer cohort channel to share progress and challenges.

Final Deliverables (what sponsors receive)
- Executive one pager on cohort results and recommended next steps.
- Aggregated cohort report with the baseline for bias, pilot level metrics, plus changes in psychological safety.
- Three month roadmap for scaling suggested.

What good looks like (sample measures)
- Working pilot active with users in 30 days time
- Managers report a lift from their teams' ability to surface risky assumptions
- 3 documented learnings for every running pilot, regardless of results

A grain of realism
Not all pilots will be stars. Some will teach you nothing. Others will pivot the Business. Both matter. Keep the noise down, make the learning explicit and ego less of a part of the experiment, that's true on degrees as well as among already qualified teachers. We'll provide the facilitators, tools and the smug confidence that this will influence how people actually act. You supply the authority, the time and the first messy problem to try.

Sources & Notes
- Australian Bureau of Statistics. Business Indicators and Innovation surveys. You choose the time period. Current ABS business innovation datasets suggest that less than half of all Australian businesses reported that they did engage in innovation activities when surveyed. (ABS publications and datasets, 2018 to 2022).
- Google re:Work, Project Aristotle. Research on team performance featuring psychological safety as the most important factor in successful teams (project findings compiled by Google's People Operations research).
- Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. (Concepts referenced for cognitive biases.)
- Neuroscience nuggets: Read practitioner friendly overviews on dopamine, prefrontal cortex and amygdala to guide applied pause points (popular science summaries / reviews).
- Understanding risk management in modern workplaces
- Change management training for innovation leaders
- Embracing chaos for innovation and fluid change approaches