Enterprise Risk: General Concepts

Description

Description: This course has been designed to introduce external and internal drivers that can result in a range of operational, financial, and strategic risks manifesting in organisations. This course examines the role of corporate governance and compliance, introducing relevant standards, and suggests methods of developing and implementing appropriate risk management strategies.

This course features dynamic and engaging video with audio narration, infographics and short quizzes to test your knowledge.

Background: The world we inhabit is hugely complex. This is true of the principles that govern our physical environment, and of the way in which we interact with each other and with the other intelligent creatures and complex organisms with which we have co-evolved. Yet somehow we have not merely evolved, but flourished. Our endowment of cognitive, emotional and behavioural capacities has enabled us to find our way around a less than perfectly predictable world and succeed in getting enough of what we want.

Risk is regarded as a central concern in many policy debates.

How can risks be identified and measured?
How can they be managed?
When should they be accepted or rejected?
And most commonly how are they likely to be interpreted or perceived by different people?

These questions arise in areas as diverse as health and lifestyle, hazardous industries, pensions and investments, transport, climate change and environmental protection, and in many other less obvious contexts. An internet search engine recently took 0.18 seconds to find “about 30,400,000” uses of the word risk. This tells us that the term is pervasive. But it would be amazing if it were being used in the same way in each of these 30 million instances.

Different societies, using cultural norms and collective knowledge, have developed national systems to manage events and activities identified as having a risk potential. More recently, organisations such as the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Bank and the International Institute for Economics have broadened this perspective by making concerted efforts to identify global risks and in some instances make recommendations on treatment. Governments are increasingly adopting the view that national risk management systems need to be framed by the global context within which they operate.