Improving risk assessments by leveraging collaboration methods and tools 

It’s a process that all risk management professionals are familiar with — conducting a risk assessment. Whether you are planning for an enterprise risk assessment, an internal audit risk assessment or diving deep into potential information technology (IT) or environmental related risks, the methodology employed to conduct a risk assessment is similar. 

Organizations usually gather risk insights from a vast set of stakeholders and must also sort through a myriad of external risk information. How do you choose the right method to ensure you gather the right data at the right time? How do you navigate the challenges presented by limited budgets and stakeholder availability? How do you avoid defaulting into the echo chamber methodology of, “It’s what we’ve always done”? 

Is there a better way to conduct meaningful, accurate and impactful risk assessments? Is there a missing or underutilized element that could enhance the value of both your risk assessment process and the data it produces?  

We believe there is: the use of collaboration.   

Using collaboration methods  

In the context of risk assessments, collaboration means gathering chosen stakeholders from across the organization to work together on identifying and prioritizing the organization’s risks. This may include large or small group discussions, facilitated sessions, or even the sharing of risk information across stakeholder divides. The key to driving value from collaboration is discussing different viewpoints and sharing risk information to collectively agree on the top risks facing the organization and improving the organization’s resilience.    

Collaboration is invaluable when identifying and assessing risks for the following reasons:   

• Diversity of perspectives: Collaborating with various stakeholders brings diverse perspectives to the table. Each individual or team may have unique insights, experiences and knowledge related to specific risks. By pooling these perspectives, organizations can identify risks more comprehensively. 
• Holistic view: Risk identification often involves looking at various aspects of an organization, including operations, strategy, compliance and external factors. Collaborating across functions ensures a holistic view, allowing organizations to consider risks from multiple angles. 
• Avoiding blind spots: When risk assessments are conducted in silos, blind spots can occur. Collaborative efforts can help to uncover risks that might be overlooked by individuals. For example, operations teams may focus on process related risks, while compliance teams may highlight regulatory risks. 
• Effective risk prioritization: Collaboration enables prioritization. Teams can collectively evaluate risks based on their impact, likelihood, current mitigations and strategic importance across a variety of backgrounds and experiences. This holistic input ensures prioritization of key risks to the organization as a whole, thereby allocating resources to address the most critical risks. 
• Enhanced risk culture: When risk management is a collaborative effort, participants naturally consider not only the risks but also the mitigation of risks (whether currently in place or needed in the future). This broader understanding of risk helps foster a risk-aware culture across multiple stakeholders and encourages proactive risk management and increased ownership of risk mitigation. 
• Early detection of emerging risks: Collaborative efforts facilitate the identification of emerging risks. By staying informed and sharing insights, organizations can detect trends, anticipate risks and adapt their strategies accordingly. 

But while collaboration is crucial, it can introduce new hurdles to completing risk assessments in a timely manner while still gathering the needed insights from a broad set of stakeholders. So, what’s the solution? Effectively leveraging collaboration tools to address these challenges while further enhancing your risk assessment process. 

Leveraging collaboration tools 

Traditional risk assessment methods involve interviews and/or surveys to gather risk information and insights from within an organization to help identify and prioritize key risks. Interviews are time consuming for both the risk practitioner and the participants. They can also be cumbersome to fit into the schedules of executives and senior management, leading to further delays, timeline extensions and loss of momentum.   

And while surveys may reach a broader audience and drive quicker results than interviews, issues persist — including non-responsiveness and ample time and energy devoted to continuous follow-up. Additionally, it can be difficult to develop a concise and effective survey designed to gather each participant’s unique perspective on risk while remaining aligned with a common definition of risk. 

For example, many individuals have different understandings of risk context, description and breadth of impact within the organization. This can lead to discrepancies in the responses or misinterpretation of survey results, both of which can negate the benefits of using a survey to gather risk data. Surveys are also one directional with limited follow-up opportunity (particularly if the survey is anonymous).  

But what if you could conduct risk assessments more quickly, with less effort, across a broader set of stakeholders while also including collaboration methodologies to drive better insights and gather a more robust overall view of risks to your organization? Leveraging collaboration tools may help produce a higher quality risk assessment output while remaining efficient and cost effective.  

Collaboration platforms drive real-time input from a large number of stakeholders simultaneously to identify or assess risks. Using these tools can decrease or eliminate the need for interviews while increasing the number of stakeholders who provide input. Typically, collaboration tools gather risk data virtually while also leveraging a facilitator to provide necessary context as to the purpose and perspective of risks. With these tools, stakeholders view results in real time and can discuss and consolidate risk themes which decreases repetitive or similar risks. 

Collaboration tools can provide the benefits of multiple stakeholders’ simultaneous input while minimizing the time and resources invested to gather such data. Collaboration tools can include the following: 

• Remote collaboration: Web-based solutions enable teams to collaborate remotely in an effective manner. Compared to traditional risk information gathering exercises, the remote capabilities of collaboration platforms allow for easier scheduling and inclusion of a larger set of stakeholders — even when spread across multiple locations and time zones. This can enhance the value of the risk identification exercise by enabling more data points and enhancing diversity of thought on the organization’s key risks. 
• Anonymous input: Collaboration tools can capture risk information in either an anonymous environment or while including attributes to track identification. Sometimes organizations will choose to track how risks are assessed by function, department or operation to provide further insights into differences in risk viewpoints. However, there are organizations where strong personalities or internal politics may hinder the gathering of important risk data. In those cases, the anonymous capabilities of collecting risk data via collaboration tools drives diversity of thought by offering a voice to those who may not otherwise provide input. 
• Real-time collaboration: Employing technology in risk assessments can help to automate repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on outcomes. Collaboration tools can provide real-time results to participants in the risk assessment process, indicating where there are similarities and differences in risks. The tool’s ability to immediately show this analysis in a risk assessment session provides an opportunity to the stakeholder group to have deeper risk discussions, thereby increasing understanding and alignment on key risks. Therefore, the participants become more invested in the entire risk assessment process due to their high level of input in shaping the key risks in the context of the organization. Since many of the participants in the risk assessment process are organizational leaders, their associated buy-in to the process and risk assessment output drives them to foster risk ownership and focus on risk responses and outcomes. 

Quite simply, properly leveraging collaborative tools can help enhance both your risk assessment process itself and the quality of the risk data it produces. These tools can be further leveraged to automate risk reporting which can provide more up-to-date data for decision making by management and executives. Organizations should leverage these tools to foster effective collaboration and proactively manage risks.