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Understanding Key Risk Indicators from a Personal Perspective

This is part 3 of our video series on "Difficulties in Engaging Staff in Risk Management". David Tattam provides an example of how you can explain key risk indicators to your staff by using an example from their personal lives.

Video Transcription:

Hi, I'm David Tattam, Director of Research and Training at the Protecht Group. The common issue we all face in risk management is being able to engage with our staff in doing risk management. This is critical because they are the ones that are ultimately responsible for managing the risks within the organisation.

One of the ways to overcome that difficulty in engaging is to make risk management relatable. One way of doing that is to talk about risk management in people's personal lives. Now, we've already covered the annual doctor's checkup, looking after the health risks you have in your personal life. In business we call that the risk control self-assessment.

Now there's a long time between doctor's visits, often a year. How do we manage the risk in the intervening period? Well, one of the things we do is to track the symptoms that can be given off by a health risk developing. 

A simple way of doing that is to use the Fitbit, which I have here. What does that do? It tracks such things as heart rate. And one of the risks we talked about earlier, in a previous video, was cholesterol risk. Now, that impact on your heart could be to change the heart rate. Monitoring it, the change of heart rate might indicate something isn't right and we would investigate that, identify what's wrong and fix it before it becomes an incident.

Now in business we obviously call these key risk indicators. We monitor the symptoms of risk and act on it if we see them going outside of appetite. This requires us then to apply a risk appetite to those indicators. Often we use red, amber, green to do that. And when they go outside of appetite, we then escalate and act to create issues, identification, and then actions to fix those.

Please check out our other videos and blogs on making risk management practical and relatable in your personal and business life. See you later. And in the intervening period, take care.

Other videos in this series:

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About the author

David Tattam is the Chief Research and Content Officer and co-founder of the Protecht Group. David’s vision is the redefine the way the world thinks about risk and to develop risk management to its rightful place as being a key driver of value creation in each of Protecht’s clients. David is the driving force in driving Protecht’s risk thinking to the frontiers of what is possible in risk management and to support the uplift of people risk capability through training and content.