Foresight: Circumspection as to Danger or Risk...

As you walk through your business office or around your organizations campus this week, how will you use foresight?

You have always had the ability to foresee and view looking forward, yet how effective have you applied this ability in your current environment?

The act or power of foreseeing is a skill that you can learn and utilize on a daily basis to your advantage. To increase your safety. To insure your security. To expand your prudence.

Are you operating each day in your work or even family activities without ever thinking about the future?

What if?

Do you ever ask yourself this question as you proceed into your day, your week or the next month or are you oblivious to the changing conditions, people, processes and behaviors externally developing around you?

Reactive people who are constantly surprised and organizations that are less than prepared for sudden change events, are ever more present.

Anticipating the future and using real-time sensory data to your advantage is just the baseline towards more effective individual prudence and continuous business foresight.

"The speed of life or the accelerating volumes of data streaming through the digital veins of your organization, just might have you overwhelmed and even distracted."

How might you and your team develop greater foresight and reduce the significant risks in your business future?

As a Team Leader, the answer begins with finding a very scarce commodity these days.

Time.

Let’s just start with 2 hours, across 4 consecutive weeks so 8 blocks of time.

The difference is, these two hours each week with your team shall be devoted to developing greater foresight.

Your skill and good judgement, in the use of resources while you apply this to caution or circumspection of danger or risk, will create a true difference.

Your facilitation of the process and methodology, insures your teams focus on using and applying foresight, in your particular areas of business operations or your teams specific responsibility.

The teams outcomes shall be applied and tested, measured and recorded to determine the true results. For 4 consecutive weeks, your "Business Foresight" and prudence will be rapidly growing. Now repeat in bi-annual sessions.

Your expanding corporate ability to govern and the discipline by the use of team reasoning will ensure a more safe and secure journey into the future…

Onward!

ORM Tools: So Many Choices...So Little Time

As the software marketplace begins to mature with the newest systems for various facets of Operational Risk, how do you know what software tools are right for your organization?

For starters, there are dozens if not hundreds of specific tools on the market today for helping you manage everything from Risk and Control Self Assessments (RCSA), Supply Chain Risk to documenting processes for SOX 404 compliance. 

"You can benefit from building your structures for processes, business strategy and tests for procedures. This still leaves many choices to evaluate and vendors who will flog you with powerpoints."

There are several key components of the ORM Framework Management that are essential when considering software tools to assist you:  

Policy 

Create security policies, standards and procedures, distribute them online, educate and train employees, and track compliance, exceptions and violations.  

Threat 

Comprehensive and customizable early warning system providing notification of physical and digital threats, vulnerabilities and malicious code to help prevent attacks before they affect the enterprise.  

Assets 

Manage enterprise assets such as buildings, vehicles, inventory, servers, applications or data centers and their relationships to ensure you are protecting your critical assets according to management expectations. 

Risks 

Perform online risk assessments to determine the proper controls to be implemented on specific assets based on their use and risk to the enterprise. 

Incidents 

Report incidents, manage their escalation, track investigations and analyze resolutions.

In evaluating the current information security, regulatory and legal environment, consider these five key flaws with today’s ORM software solution programs:

1. Dependence on inadequate and incomplete technology-based point solutions; 

2. Failure to integrate people, process and systems into an effective operational risk program; 

3. Lack of decision support and an actionable understanding of the threat to the entire spectrum of corporate assets; 

4. Reactive response to perceived problems rather than proactive initiatives based on sound risk management principles; and

5. Cost and shortage of properly skilled IT personnel to suport the programs.

The Gartner Group has identified three major questions that executives and boards of directors need to answer when confronting significant issues: 

•  Is your policy enforced fairly, consistently and legally across the enterprise.
•  Would our employees, contractors and partners know if a violation was being committed?
•  Would they know what to do about it if they did recognize a violation?

If you don't know the answers to these questions then there is much more work to do and much more strategic planning necessary before any software system is implemented for Operational Risk Management...

Bifurcate: Future Missions of Success...

As you plan your next bold endeavor, your next work project or even your next life adventure how will you approach your process for success?

Some would sit down with their blank sheet of paper and sketch out a drawing first. 

Others might use a tool for project management, a spreadsheet or a CRM to assist them in their approach to planning.

You will use the tools and the process you have been taught and learned to use through out your particular life time so far.

Remember that period of time in your life when the people you were working with, decided to go off and use a different process, a different tool or embark on a singular and selfish goal?

Have you ever found yourself recommending a particular process or tool to others for utilization in their team, that is never adopted by them or just ignored?

Your particular success utilizing a method or a process or tool must be articulated to the team with effective past stories.

You must show or demonstrate previous successful outcomes that are relevant to the current mission.

You see, your teams future performance will be more about your own leadership and how you tell the story of your successful past.

The methods and process you introduce, will have far greater adoption since the team sees and hears the evidence that you have tested and adapted, tested and failed, tested and found the correct tool(s), the best process.

The behavior of humans has been studied for centuries. The study of successful teams has been written about and documented for centuries.

What are you missing?

Mission and project success occurs when you realize that your team now understands why these “People”, what is the true “Objective”, why these “Methods” and what “Tools” are proven?

Now let’s go back to the story. How successful has your current story been working for you?

You know it is finally time to bifurcate when the performance curve is now on the unplanned trajectory.

Definition of bifurcate

transitive verb

: to cause to divide into two branches or parts

bifurcate a beam of light

intransitive verb

: to divide into two branches or parts

Break away soon from the main organization. Create a new course, a new path.  "Y."

Design and implement something "NEW".

Your journey ahead will now look so much brighter. You will become curious again. 

Your teams successful outcomes will now be part of your new story...

Onward!