Risk. It’s not a word you’d normally associate with financial people, or at least not in a positive sense.

I recently attended a training course, offered by a company who I’d met whilst networking. I didn’t have any expectations. I guess I was open minded.

As the day enfolded, I was recognising some of the theories and explanations.

Then we played a game. A very simple game. Our group of 6 each had an envelope with flat shaped pieces in. None of the envelopes had enough to make a square individually but collectively, there were 6 squares of the same size to be made. Easy, then. Yes? Well, no, actually. No speaking or communicating in any way was allowed. You could offer one of your pieces to someone else and they could either accept it or not. No expressions allowed, either. And the game would only be over when we had all completed our squares.

I was offered a piece, took it and made my square. So did someone else. We both sat back, arms folded. Job done. Just need these other 4 to work it out now. But I was still being offered a piece. Why? I’d got my square. After a couple of minutes, I realised that my square wasn’t the right size. I needed to do something. I needed to offer one of my pieces to get one back that made a bigger, correctly sized, square. No, 2 pieces. Actually it was 3 pieces. Now I had the right square, as did 3 others. Still, though, 2 people hadn’t. One didn’t have enough pieces and one had too many. They weren’t offering any pieces up. That’s when the rest of us realised (without communicating remember), that we had to give up pieces from our completed squares to get them to move their pieces, so we could complete the game. We did, the other 2 realised and we all completed our squares. 10 minutes that took. That’s very good, we were told. One group previously, had taken 1 hour and 40 minutes!

This was a light bulb moment for me. I realised that even though you may think you’ve achieved something, it doesn’t mean you have and that sometimes, you have to give something up to help others, which ultimately benefits them and you.

Risk. Not a word you’d normally associate with financial people. Only, in this instance, you should.