As we go about our business reviewing your framework, we avoid using descriptors such as robust, agile, or dynamic because it is a framework not a supercar. Like cars, however, we recommend servicing it frequently.
Framework, policy, plan, charter, or program design – whatever you call it, we help ensure that it is designed to add value beyond check-the-box compliance. We can design it from scratch or help strengthen structural elements of your existing enterprise risk activities.
Our common sense approach to standardization allows for flexibility where it makes sense (strategic risks) and eliminates ambiguity where it matters (ethics & compliance risks). In doing so, we keep you from drowning in a sea of acronyms (COSO, ISO, IRM, ANSI, SOX...... the list goes on).
We clearly link strategy with risk and not the other way around. Our approach is carefully structured to add value – both quantifiable and qualitative - shifting your perception of risk from avoidance and aversion to calculated decision making.
We clearly separate the board’s risk oversight responsibilities from actual risk management – which squarely falls with, you guessed it, the management team. We think risk is part of everyone’s job. And everyone includes the board.
With transparent reporting and escalation channels for high-quality/high-velocity risks, we provide deeper and broader confidence to boards and governors. We refocus board efforts on the “big picture” (strategic risks) without losing the “subtle cues” (leading indicators) of key operational risks.
With an easily understandable platform, we help everyone from the chairperson to a front line employee speak the same language (of risk). With explicit executive ownership of enterprise risks and board-level ownership of strategic risks, we engage the entire board to use risk as a smart decision tool.
A board that is engaged at the right level. Looking at the right risks. Forgoing the traditional committee-based risk oversight model, we align board and executive expectations resulting in routine and spirited discussions around risk appetite - for now and in the future.
We make risk practical, rewarding, and most importantly – useful to your operational goals. We give space and voice to most of your employees – crowdsourcing risk intelligence – creating a perfect environment to cultivate your culture of risk intelligence.
Not only do we demystify the differences between risk tolerance, risk appetite, and risk capacity, we also make it relevant for you. Steering away from industry jargon, we help you create your very own internal language of risk consistent with your culture. The goal is simplicity - not proficiency in risk jargon.
We steer you away from base case fallacies, loss aversion, and go/no-go decisions by separating idea, decision, and execution risks. We guard against decision shortcuts compelling your managers to pause and confront cognitive biases. All of this powered by a bit of data + simple math + a team of risk champions.
With consistent understanding of risk appetite across every function, decisions are quick and non-bureaucratic. No need to “run everything up the flagpole”. As risk becomes part of the job as opposed to an add-on afterthought, future leaders are increasingly comfortable analyzing risks individually and in a portfolio - always making risk-enhanced (not risk averse) decisions.
What does your risk program want to be when it grows up? Does it augment your strategy or is it simply a tool for compliance? Our nuanced analyses ensure that your risk resources are allocated just right. Yes, you can overspend on risk. We won't let you.
Detailed interviews with your management team provide qualitative context. We supplant these with our quantitative analyses on how risk is perceived, measured, escalated, reported, and communicated across the enterprise.
Nope. We are against it. It either results in a sense of overconfidence or a comparison that is mostly meaningless, unrealistically aspirational, and often, categorically inapplicable. Yes, we understand the need for it. If you must benchmark, let’s chat and we can recommend a few of our much larger competitors who are very good at it.
Plot twist. With us, you will never reach risk maturity. Risk maturity is not a goal. It is a commitment to continuous improvement. To constantly evolve and modify your own sense of risk maturity inching towards your culture of risk intelligence – with a simple, clear, and realistic pathway.
We facilitate fun and engaging risk workshops where no risk is “too weird” – coups, solar flares, meteor strikes – all real examples. Our resiliency exercises stress-test your failure points along with your sanity.
Our risk workshops go beyond your conventional "identify, prioritize, and report" routine. Driven by your risk appetite, we demonstrate how risk ratings impact resource prioritization in real-time. Conversely, we use risk workshop outputs to fine-tune your risk appetite creating a culture of transparency. Our goal: make risk appetite real.
Designed to help you adapt rapidly to a crisis, we identify and engage your “key stakeholders” (incl. suppliers) helping you "hit the ground running" well before you experience a crisis. We run enough realistic simulations that managing a crisis becomes second-nature. With every simulation, we build your organizational stamina.
Risk workshops that make risk appetite real. Crisis simulations that build muscle memory strengthening your organizational flexibility. Pre-delegated authority (within predefined boundaries) that reduce decision-fatigue for executives. An intended side effect: Board + external communication is always relevant, timely, clear, and unambiguous.
In an industry hyper focused on uniformly defining emerging risks across industries, we are an outlier (pun absolutely intended). With a bit of science fiction infused with plausible yet improbable futuristic scenarios, we go well beyond emerging risks – equipping you to think far in the future while helping you act in the present. Our goal? Institutionalize strategic foresight.
We start with defining what emerging risks mean to you - the time horizons and velocity vectors. Session outputs = leading indicators (early action triggers) and proactive risk intelligence. With built-in circuit-breakers that can alter risk velocity, trajectory, or severity, we help you find comfort when others panic. The result? An evolving mindset where you continuously refine, adjust, and adapt based on changing risk intel.
We engineer alternate realities working backwards from the distant future (10, 20, 30+ years). We help you defy analysis paralysis, discard probabilities, suspend reality, and imagine the improbable. Empowering your contrarians and creatives to think beyond the norm, we help you learn from your future highlighting key inflection points for competitiveness or shift in strategy.
We help you institutionalize imaginative thinking and normalize a futurist mindset. We make strategic foresight part of your organizational DNA as opposed to an exercise at executive off-sites by continuously challenging your assumptions about what the future will or should be.
Diving deep into the world of academics, logicians, and strategists, we pull out some their tips and tricks to help you make better quality decisions. You get none of the academic-speak, some of the best tools, and all of our undivided attention when it comes to making high-value decisions.
A seemingly straightforward exercise that starts with defining the problem and asking the right questions. Breaking away from the traditionally linear model of problem-solving, we challenge you to redefine the problem as broadly as possible. We liberate you from the confines of assumptive presumptions and presumptive assumptions.
A structured process designed to help you find the best alternatives supported by the best available data. We focus on helping you generate high quality alternatives with clear trade-offs designed to highlight uncertainties.
We help you outline trade-offs of each decision against your values. With key participants and relevant "stakeholder" input, we focus your deliberations on explicitly outlining the agreed upon trade-offs instead of seeking positional consensus.
Very clearly separating the decision quality from outcome, we help you avoid "playing the blame game." We map your risk-based decision making process to your strategic objectives ensuring right decisions are made at the right level. In doing so, we refocus your executive efforts on high-value decisions.
We work with your team of in-house and external experts during and after a crisis to quickly deploy + entrench risk-based protocols. With enough board and management support, we can transform this reactionary instrument into a driver of cultural change.
We bring a broad, enterprise-wide perspective helping you look beyond the immediate crisis. Concurrently, we evaluate the long-term impact to your value drivers and by extension, your strategy. While you are busy managing this crisis, we prepare for a multi-crisis event or additional knock-on impacts.
We create a pre-crisis snapshot of institutional culture after a thorough evaluation of program failures (e.g. risk, compliance, ethics, etc.). With an unobtrusive and low key approach free of judgments and blame, we quickly determine whether you are dealing with a crisis created by chance or one created by your organizational culture.
A failure-resistant enterprise risk management program designed to withstand executive turnovers (hopefully intact). We plant seeds to cultivate a culture of risk intelligence permeating deeper into your organization. After all, a culture of risk isn't really a culture if it departs with your hot-shot executive.
