Those of us who are involved in this new profession called risk management are in a lot of trouble.

There is something stirring, the sound of business leaders coming to terms with the new demands of leadership in the twenty-first century.

It is the recognition that business as usual cannot be the business model which delivers future success; that more of the same is not sufficient to provide escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the black hole that drew us into the credit crunch; that as fears of double-dip recession still haunt our nightmares, there must be new behaviours and new areas of strategic focus that need to be uppermost in the minds of business leaders, day by day.

Do you take an interest in your company's culture? Are you given to saying things like, "if only we had a culture of open communication", or "we must develop a culture of quality"? If so, you probably feel the promise is lurking out there that you could design your culture so that everyone in your business would just know how to behave without having to be told.

But how? You want so many things from your culture (gazing into my crystal ball, I see that you want quality, integrity, openness, respect, putting the customer first and meritocracy), so how do you design a culture that does all of these things? It's not software after all - you can't just keep bundling in new features.

Easy. For most businesses, all you have to do is move from a guilt culture to a shame culture.

Most people in western companies work in a guilt culture. In a guilt culture, when Bob in marketing makes a mess of things, it's Bob's fault. Bob takes the reprimands and works through the weekend to fix it. In a shame culture, all of Bob's colleagues are equally shamed or tainted by Bob's errors and they all stay late to fix them.

The shame culture may strike you as unfair, but think of the behaviours it drives. Nobody wants to let the team down, so you do your own work with greater enthusiasm. And when you've finished your work, you see who else in the team needs help. Nobody in the team is allowed to produce inferior work and productivity levels rise as a result.

And how do you move from guilt to shame? By observing one principle: reward or reprimand the team, not the individual. This won't feel natural at first for anyone brought up in the Christian tradition, in which guilt plays such an important role. (Islam places greater emphasis on shame, but I assume you're not reading this for religious instruction).

The shame culture's not for everyone of course. The more your business relies on individual contributors, the closer you should stick to guilt. Imagine the offices of a newspaper in which anxious colleagues read over the journalists' shoulders suggesting alternative wording. But if you value teamwork, go for shame.

It should be time to discuss the big issues which will define the years ahead, notably how are we, as a nation, going to pay our way in the years ahead?