Engaging the business in risk management to improve decision making

I am going to do some reverse brainstorming inspired by my Christmas present to self from Pip Decks.

🚩 Problem: How might we engage our business areas in risk management to improve decision making processes?

❓Anti-problem v1: How might we disengage our business in risk management to improve decision making processes?

OR

❓Anti-problem v2: How might we engage our business areas in risk management to degrade decision making processes?

Now, we think of the anti-solutions.

Anti-Solutions

Start with identifying behaviours and practices that would lead to disengagement in risk management. Consider what actions could degrade decision-making processes if risk management was involved.

1️⃣ Set ambiguous roles and responsibilities disconnected from your strategic goals. Keep it motherhood-y.

2️⃣ Don't share things that set the organisations expectations, goals, tone from the top and guardrails (like the RAS, accountability scope or strategic objectives). That’s not their role.

3️⃣ Make no effort to link the role of a risk manager/advisor to the organisation’s customer. The customer is too far away from their day-to-day anyway.

4️⃣ Failure to invite the right people into the room - or even to know who they are - to have a conversation. Talk only to those who you know will validate your opinion.

5️⃣ When an issue is raised, first start by working out who to blame. There is got to be someone you can pin this on.

6️⃣ Focus on the documentation first, before you have had any business context or ‘so-what’ conversation. You will be in audit finding hell if you don’t.

7️⃣ Use fear of being caught out by the regulator as the only reason for acting. It’s too hard to find a good business or customer reason for everything anyway.

8️⃣ Ensure you don't waste valuable time understanding context or analysing what could go wrong and get straight to the decision making. Time is money.

9️⃣ Ensure you cast the net wide to consider EVERY conceivable risk, irrespective of materiality and have lots of super granular risk information to “help” the business. A big risk register is a good risk register.

🔟 Do not share information that would help your stakeholders. Information is power.

You get the idea.

The next step is turning all the anti-solutions into real solutions… I will leave that to you...!

Or ... if you would like to discuss a real risk engagement problem, let's reverse brainstorm it together! The team at August Advisory are here to bring their 🧠 to your ⛈ .