Non-financial Risk Management

A well managed risk can avoid crisis and foster consensus and innovation. Essential to good governance, we ensure that emerging risks appear on your radar early enought for you to act. Knowing who and what to prioritise is key. As well as insight, analysis and engagement, we have tools to help you prioritise and calibrate stakeholders and issues – to know what’s important and what’s not. Increasingly, the risk debate is played out in the court of public perception and opinion. One result: a narrowly legalistic and purely quantitative or financial approach – while having clear value – is likelly to be insufficient on its own.

What We Do
We will scope and prioritise the portfolio of corporate responsibility-related risks for your business - or explore a particular one. Our approach is along the following lines:

Undertake research and internal interviews with key executives and managers to understand their perceptions of relevant risks and their likely evolution, as well as views on the robustness of current risk management systems and external stakeholder engagement – how intelligence from the world outside informs internal intelligence and action.

Benchmark your approach against best practice and, where helpful, provide case-studies of different frameworks and strategies. We would undertake interviews with relevant external stakeholders who can provide valuable insight into a particular issue (e.g. NGOs) or the overall risk management framework (e.g. SRI funds, investors).

This provides us with the necessary inputs to appraise your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We then work with you to build consensus around a clear vision, priorities and roadmap for the future.

Further Information
Our recent report, The Changing Landscape of Liability, looks at the evolution of legal and moral liability and what it means for corporate governance and risk management. Similarly, our the latest in our Global Reporters series, Risk & Opportunity, looks at evolving approaches to reporting of non-financial and broader sustainability issues. Also of interest may be Buried Treasure, which looks at the business case for corporate responsibility.

Most of our work relates in some way to more effective risk management for an organisation, moving it from the back to the front foot. The case studies of our work for Shell, Microsoft and Starbucks may be helpful.