Risks

Mitigate assesses how vulnerable an organization is to an issue through examining its contingency plans and helps reduce potential future risks.

Uses of the method

• Risk assessment
• Contingency planning

Benefits

• Insurance against future surprise

Disadvantages

• Potential time and cost to be weighed against the potential future costs of a catastrophic failure

Steps to complete

• Complete the template stretching your imagination as to how this issue could disrupt your organization
• If your existing contingency plans fall short assess the degree of risk
• Determine risk strategy (to prevent a crisis and deal with one should it occur)
• Prepare plan and identify management responsibilities
• Test the plan through crisis simulation
• Strengthen your risk reduction processes as appropriate
• Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization.
• What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
  • How might the future be different?
  • How does A affect B?
  • What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
  • What are the likely outcomes?
  • What and who will likely shape our future?
  • Where could we be most affected by change?
  • What might we do about it?
  • What don't we know that we need to know?
  • What should we do now, today?
  • Why do we care?
  • When should we aim to meet on this?
• Finish by noting your next steps. Next steps could include a further round of iteration, a recommendation on how to get the answers or use of other research and methods such as 'Starburst' to create more vantage points on the issue.

Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.

Click the 'Invite tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input. You can whether or not you want anonymous responses.  These can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.

Further reference

• Managing Risk - Contingency Planning, tutor2U
• What's the difference between contingency and scenario planning?, Grant Space

Contact us
Even with all the advice and tools we have provided here starting a foresight project from scratch can be a daunting prospect to a beginner. Let us know if you need help with this method or want a group facilitation exercise or full project or program carrying out by us. We promise to leave behind more internal knowledgeable people who can expand your initiative for better organizational performance.

Contact us today for a free discussion on your needs.

Are there other enhancements or new methods you would like to see here? Let us know and we will do our best to respond with a solution quickly.

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