
In this lecture you take one event that stopped your work and run it through four steps, so an incident everybody has forgotten turns into one control with an owner and a date.
This course is built from five disciplines: risk management, process improvement, open-source verification, knowledge management and the audit playbook.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures from other fields as risk work
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Risk Event Walkthrough and fill it in on one event of your own.
Decision making as the origin of most operational failure
What the global financial crisis exposed about human risk
What people risks are, and why they are counted separately
The current research on risk in the management of people
The risk heat map, and how to score onto it honestly
The fraud triangle and the safety triangle
The people-risk thermal imager
A full example of risk management applied to one function
How decisions actually get made under pressure
The cognitive biases that survive any amount of process
Conflict of interest, and how it hides in plain sight
Real examples of human risk, and what they had in common
The 4I model
Incidents, and what an incident is telling you
Risk at individual level, at company level and at industry level
ISO 31000 as the risk management standard, in plain terms
The risk hierarchy, and internal against external risk
Finding and assessing risk without turning it into theatre
Eliminating, reducing and escalating: choosing between them
Management maturity, and how to judge it
The dynamics inside a leadership team
The role of the chief executive in the risk system
The warning signs that appear before the failure does
Cultural context, and why the same control works differently in two companies
Building a risk culture rather than announcing one
Company values, and whether anyone acts on them
Trust as an operating variable
The three lines of defence model, and the usual confusion in line two
Practical risk reduction
The high-reliability organisation and what it does differently
Auditing corporate culture, and running risk with a small team
Making the invisible visible
The specific moves that improve a decision process
A decision-making checklist you can apply immediately
The code of conduct, and what it must actually say
The job description as a risk document
Naming an owner for every control
What a process is, and the characteristics that define one
The different types of process
What process improvement means in practice
The benefits, stated in terms a manager will accept
The core values behind process improvement
What triggers improvement, and what waste actually is
Standardisation, and why it is the cheapest control there is
Process maturity, the five phases, and where to start
What mapping is, how it differs from modelling, and what it gives you
The map types: stakeholder, relationship, flow, cross-functional, value stream
What a process map consists of
The stages of mapping, run end to end
The process improvement framework
Connecting improvement to strategy so it survives budget season
The phases from planning through to implementation
What process architecture is and what it buys you
Process-oriented architecture
Process modelling, and how to manage the modelling effort
Where to start when nothing is documented
What problem solving means when the problem is systemic
5S, 5 Whys, 8D, the activity network and affinity diagrams
Benchmarking and structured brainstorming
Checklists, the cause-and-effect diagram and the flow diagram
Linear regression and the nominal group technique
The prioritisation matrix
SIPOC and SWOT applied to a process
DRIVE, ICOR and the problem-solving funnel
What culture is, and what a culture of improvement looks like
The phases of culture change, and the components of a good one
Changing behaviour rather than publishing a policy
The role of managers, and the role of the people function
Open-source intelligence techniques, and what they are for
Where verification is used: hiring, marketing and sales, journalism
The ethics of it, and the lines not to cross
The Bellingcat example
Developing a search strategy and stating a hypothesis first
Selecting the sources worth checking
Preparing your machine and choosing a browser
The plug-ins that do the work for you
How search engines actually work
Boolean search and the Google operators
X-ray search
Finding documents, images, video, lists and social profiles
What Google Dorks are
Where to get current reference lists
What is genuinely findable, and what that implies for your own exposure
Searching social platforms, from LinkedIn to Facebook
Searching databases
Searching by nickname
Searching by photograph
Finding an email from a name, a nickname or a profile
Finding a person from a postal address
Phone lookup, and verifying a number
Note: this lesson is taught as a recruiting and sales search technique
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Almost no operational failure starts with a machine. It starts with a person making a decision that looked entirely reasonable at the time.
How the failure actually happens
Someone approves an exception because the client is important. Someone skips a check because the check has never once found anything. Someone knows the workaround and never writes it down, and then leaves. Six months later there is an incident review, and every individual decision in the chain was defensible. That is what operational risk is. It is not a register of unlikely disasters — it is the accumulated cost of small reasonable choices nobody was watching.
What this course covers
Thirty-three lessons in five blocks. The risk framework first: the heat map, the fraud triangle, the 4I model, cognitive bias and conflict of interest, ISO 31000, the risk hierarchy, escalation, leadership-team dynamics, risk culture, the three lines of defence and the high-reliability organisation. Then the place risk materialises — the process: mapping in five different forms, waste, standardisation, maturity, process architecture, and the full toolkit for finding a root cause, from 5 Whys and 8D through SIPOC, prioritisation matrices, DRIVE and ICOR. Then verification: checking a claim, a company or a person from open sources using Boolean search, X-ray and Google Dorks, with the ethics of it stated plainly. Then continuity: capturing what lives in one person's head, running retrospectives on mistakes, and measuring whether any of it is used. Finally the audit: express maturity scoring, a weighted checklist, four data collection methods, the RACI, the gap analysis and a roadmap with a return calculation.
A note on the folder names
Two blocks were recorded for a people-function audience. The risk material is general — ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, the fraud triangle and the high-reliability organisation do not change by department, and the function appears in two lessons out of ten as an example of a risk owner. The audit block demonstrates its method on one function, but the method itself — audit levels, weighted checklists, gap analysis, RACI, payback — transfers to any of them. The verification block comes from a course on advanced internet search, and its last two lessons are taught as recruiting and sales techniques.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 33 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the heat map, the fraud triangle, ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, five map types, 5 Whys, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, the audit checklist and roadmap
A full audit demonstration on a real 200-person company
Where to start
Take the last thing that went wrong in your area and ask which control should have caught it. If you cannot name the control, that is the course. Enrol now and start today.