We have conducted hundreds of risk assessments in a number of sectors from homeland security to pension funds to Parks and Recreation departments. We have a number of hard lessons learned. These are some common mistakes we have made and seen: [Read more…]
How Well Do Risk Assessments Inform Decision Makers?
Guest Post by Chris Peace (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Sometimes, it seems that every newspaper edition, news broadcast or news website carries yet another story about a disaster – an event that might have been avoided by better decision making.
But do we ask whether such decisions were informed by risk assessments? And if so, how effective were those risk assessments for informing the decision makers about the risks? Which techniques were used in the risk assessments? Were the results presented in a way that made sense to the decision makers? Do risk assessors follow a good process and so achieve some consistency in results, or do they just get lucky? [Read more…]
Risk Assessment: What Future are you Planning for?
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Introduction
There exists an overabundance of guidance for conducting risk assessments. Yet, it seems that we still have difficulty in getting risk assessments to reflect the appropriate level of concern for the identified risks that we are assessing. We also tend to view risk in relation to the place where we are employed and the industry that we work in. When we look at risk assessment from this perspective it should be clear that we are missing the point precisely, or at best, are being too narrowly focused, when it comes to assessing risk for our organizations. [Read more…]