‘Must-do’s in short: risks and their mitigation
Whenever we want to communicate a concept – be it a strategy related to a case study or the business plan of a start-up – there are certain unavoidable topics that we need to have an answer for. One of the most important of those topics is the risks associated with the concept and their appropriate mitigation.
The so called risk and/or contingency plan is thus an indispensable part of the solution and it comes after the concept in the implementation block of the presentation. This is the topic that the jury – unless we incorporate it – will definitely ask about. Many teams do not mention risks at competitions due to the lack of time but they prepare a separate back-up slide for it. With this little trick we can gain time and control the Q&A part at the same time.
What does it look like?
Practically the risk plan is the list-like visualization of the potential risks of the solution and their possible mitigations. A more professional version of this is when we assign probabilities to the certain risks and link them with their potential impact on the firm’s performance. These are of course difficult to estimate, they require intuition but it is worth doing them as this way we can signal the weights of the different risks. The probability of occurrence and the impact on performance should be visualized with moon chart figures.
But what kind of risks should we name in the plan? Here it is recommended to think like the jury and anticipate the expectable questions. At competitions we often left this slide to the last minutes and so we had to come up with something random. In order to avoid that it is good to take notes of the critics and questions that come up during the brainstorming and solving phases. Basically it is recommended to show the questions related to the operations and the feasibility of the solution. There is no need to think about force majeure situations such as an earthquake or the Apocalypse.
For the mitigation part it is the best to highlight solutions that we have already mentioned in the previous parts of the presentation but it is also possible to bring up something new (in that case, make sure that it does not confuse the audience at the end of the presentation). For the mitigation of certain risks, one can build up different scenarios but that will be the topic of another article.