Your organization’s risks are right there in front of you—so why are you ignoring them?

Aug 31

Try a 30-Minute Exercise to Kick-Start your Thinking.

Sometimes just getting started is the hardest part.

Especially these days—when working from home means that the intersecting, urgent obligations seem to crowd out that all-important, but non-urgent, time to just simply think.

For those of you who are struggling to focus and get some organizational thinking started, here is a 30-minute exercise to try that will get the juices flowing, and get your strategic thinking started.

I first published this on LinkedIn. If you’d like my help with this exercise, please get in touch.

Exercise: If you need to think about your organization’s risks

This exercise is for those of you struggling to focus and get some organizational thinking done during these difficult times.

Take a pen and a piece of paper. Draw large square. Divide it into the following quadrants:

High likelihood, low impact
Low likelihood, low impact
High likelihood, high impact
Low likelihood, high impact

Next, as its leader, think about what worries you most about the organization.

Brainstorm a list of the top 10 things that keep you up at night (finances, IT dependability, staffing, quality of service, lawsuits, etc.) Plot them on the grid.

Finally, ask yourself, do you have a contingency or mitigation plan for each of those items that are in quadrant two (high likelihood, high impact)—as a place to begin?

Congratulations! You’ve just started some thinking on which you can begin to build a risk management plan.

If you’d like my coaching help to push this exercise into a fully-realized plan, please get in touch.