Last week I had leadership expert Ingrid Messner present on Wise Leadership to my Risk Leadership group. One of her leadership tips on influencing stakeholders was to apply systems thinking. To develop a mental model of all the pieces of the puzzle that are influencing a person and the decisions they need to make.

The tip immediately reminded me of the benefit of a system map when designing a framework. So that you are clear on the other frameworks, systems and processes your framework needs to integrate with, to ensure managing risk is part of business-as-usual. Something I wrote about two weeks ago in It’s what we do.

The three key tools I use to obtain sufficient context to develop a mental model (or system map) of how decisions are made in an organisation are:

• Stakeholder analysis – Identifies who will be impacted and how significant that is.
• PESTLE analysis – Identifies externalities the framework will need to address.
• Capability analysis – Identifies internal challenges and opportunities for the design of the framework.

You can access samples and templates for these tools via my resources section of my website.

Ingrid was also encouraging the group to use more of their body in understanding their influencing challenge. Another tip she gave us was to write the various nodes of the system map on pieces of paper and place them on the floor, for us then to step into the middle of them and look at the nodes. The act of stepping in and looking around creates a new perspective.

And I can assure you, we need a different perspective on frameworks if we are going to lift our game in the risk profession.

Stay safe!