Kupor: Federal culture treats risk as binary while ignoring upside
Scott Kupor · The Person Who Runs HR For 2 Million Federal Workers · Oct 2, 2025 · at 7:27
Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, describes the risk-averse culture he observed during his first 110 days in government.
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“We've kind of just embedded in the culture, this idea that risk is like this pass fail thing. Like you either have risk or you don't have risk. And if you have risk, God forbid, like, you should ever go there, basically, and so that to me was like the most eye-opening thing, and I guess I wasn't, I shouldn't have been surprised by it, but it was just almost like a cult of obsession, basically, that anything that involves some element of risk, that was like the primary thing we were trying to do was mitigate risk. There was no concept of either how big or how small is that risk, and then certainly no concept of the world that, you know, you and I, you live in and I used to live in, which is kind of How unbounded is the upside relative to that risk? Like that conversation just never happens.”
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