Everyday Strategic Risk - An ERM toolkit summary
15 October 2024
After what we’ve experienced during the pandemic, everyone surely appreciates that sudden and unexpected events can throw the whole world into sudden crisis.
But the truth is that most of the challenges facing organisations are not left-field events that grab international headlines and airtime – they’re the ever-present strategic risks that we all face in our day-to-day working lives.
They can be global – like the issues thrown up by climate change, or managing your reputation in our always-online world, where you are on permanent display to an audience of billions.
Or they can be local – from new regulations and governance criteria, to recruiting, retaining and caring for staff, to maintaining funding in an increasingly competitive environment, to dealing with the evolving digital and cyber landscape.
The good news is that some of these risks can be turned into opportunities if you have an effective system of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM).
ERM builds on and takes forward the traditional models of risk management, looking at ways to identify, analyse and mitigate often non-insurable threats which affect not just one area of your business but cut right across the organisation.
The aim is to have a continuous and proactive programme, embedded in your organisational culture and mindset, which ultimately enables you to take informed risks, often to great benefit – rather than taking a more old-fashioned, risk-averse stance, and missing out.
Of course, merely running your organisation can take up more hours than there are in the day.
The good news is that Ecclesiastical’s expert in-house Enterprise Risk Management team, with its wealth of experience in key markets like churches, heritage, the charity sector, and education are here to share the load.
We can help you put in place a rigorous ERM system for your benefit - and the process itself will enable you to better understand your customers and their needs, and build stronger relationships.
We’ve put together a range of tools to guide the way.
The first is our Risk Management Toolkit (available for Ecclesiastical customers – a clear and concise guide to help your senior leadership or, even better, a dedicated risk management working group or risk champion) to start the ball rolling.
If you already operate within an ERM framework, we hope it will plug unseen gaps in your knowledge, spark new ideas, provide fresh impetus, and suggest ways of improving your practice.
It’s laid out in a simple and logical five-step way, leading you through risk identification, analysis, and prioritisation, to mitigation and ongoing monitoring.
It contains a set of helpful appendices which offer practical examples of how to categorise the scale, likelihood and impact posed by any of a series of given risks.
We all live in a VUCA world – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – which can seem daunting… the important thing is to seize any opportunities.
Sarah Pearson, is Head of Enterprise Risk Management, at Ecclesiastical