Risk Management
The risk management process should help organisations prepare for things that might go wrong. But it is all too easy for it to become a bureaucratic process that generates work and documentation, but achieves little.
With risk management, the emphasis needs to be on action - the most perfectly polished risk strategy and risk register won’t help you if you don’t act on it.
The first step is to get a clear picture of what the real risks to the organisation are - the things that would have a significant impact on operations going forward. The more genuine that list is, the more genuine will be discussions about what action should be taken - and the more useful the actions will be. The next step is ensuring that issues that are identified are matched to actions that are effective in tackling the problem. It is all too easy to lose sight of these fundamentals. Above all, risk management is a dynamic process focusing on thought and action.
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Risk Management in practice
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I recently reviewed the risk register for a small charity. The register was a jumble of different issues - ranging from the strategic (loss of income from major funders) to the day-to-day (risk that someone would slip on the stairs). I was able to help them to re-orientate their process towards carrying out the actions that were needed - separating genuinely strategic issues for the board to consider, while day-to-day issues were allocated to the appropriate member of the management team.
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I have written risk registers for NHS organisations, charities and private companies, always with the aim of ensuring that they are ‘live’ useful documents, not a bureaucratic form filling exercise.
For risk management to work well it is essential for it to consider how risk is communicated and understood. I have reviewed many risk policies and helped with writing them to distinguish between the things that all staff need to know, from the detail that sits behind it which is of interest to a smaller subset of people. That approach allows organisations to develop general awareness and action, side by side.
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