A Practical Guide to Master Communication of Risk Information & Enable Effective Risk-Taking

Synopsis

The recent financial crisis illustrated the fact that even when there are risk management systems in place in organizations, they can still fail in many ways.  And one possible often way relate to the challenges of communicating about risk issues. Indeed, once all the relevant risks that your organization faces have been identify and properly assessed the job of a risk manager does not stop there. He must to ‘get the message across’ to the decision-makers to enable them to have a clear understanding of the risk/return balance before they make the decisions. The subprime crisis highlighted the issue that occur when risk management become aware of significant risk issues but even though the risk assessment was communicated, it was not properly taken into account by the senior management in their decisions and led to catastrophic consequences for the organizations concerned.

This workshop will give you an understanding of how the influence of various psychological biases such as ‘Group think’ and the Abilene paradox and many more, influence the way we make decisions, and will provide you with the techniques to master the art and science of communicating about risks with the various groups of internal and external stakeholders at all time in order to ensure that that what you say will be taken seriously helping proactively anticipate on risk issues and prevent crises or if a crisis is inevitable, to limit and overcome the damage it creates.

Learning Objectives

After attending this session, you should be able to:

• Understand how effective risk communication can help prevent risk becoming crisis
• Learn when and how to communicate about risk issues (Known risks and black swans)
• Conduct is a risk perception & communication vulnerability audit
• How to understand how your stakeholders will perceive your communication
• Recognize and respond to different types of communications risk situations as they develop
• Learn the seven steps to creation a risk communication strategy

Workshop Outline

• Risk Communication: the Importance of Communicating effectively about Risk issues
• Psychology of Risk Perceptions and Decision-making in Organizations
• The concept of Social Capital and how Risk Managers can develop the Social Capital they need to succeed
• Cultural Risk Maturity of Organisations and how to assess it
• Understanding & Leveraging on Social Networks to communicate effectively

Tool Box: A Case Study

• Turn a risk communications strategy into a workable action plan
• Take part in a risk communications simulation exercise
• Develop Checklists, how-to procedures/reminders and templates
• Sample key communication messages
• Social Mapping guide

Testimonials

“Fantastic workshop, a real paradigm shift for me, it helped me understand why it is so hard to ‘get the message across’. Now I have the knowledge and tools to be much more effective in my job”. Corporate Risk Manager, Telecom group