
How decisions create and destroy risk
What the global financial crisis revealed about human risk
What human risks actually are
Current research on risk in people management
The risk heat map and how to build one
A worked example of risk management
The fraud triangle and the safety triangle
The people-risk thermal imager and the risk triangle
How decisions are actually made under pressure
Cognitive biases that create risk
Conflict of interest as a structural problem
Examples of human risks in practice
The 4I model and how to apply it
Incidents as a source of data
Risks at individual, company and industry level
Risk management as a discipline
ISO 31000 as the risk management standard
The risk hierarchy and internal versus external risk
Finding, assessing, eliminating, reducing and escalating risk
Management maturity as a risk factor
Top-management dynamics
The role of the CEO in creating or containing risk
Warning signs you can read early
Cultural context and how it shapes risk behaviour
Building a risk-aware culture
Company values under pressure
Trust as a risk control
The three lines of defence model
Practical ways to reduce risk
The high-reliability organisation
Managing risk with the team and auditing culture
Making the invisible visible
Concrete ways to improve decision making
A decision-making checklist you can use immediately
Code of conduct as a working instrument
The job description as an accountability tool
Where personal responsibility begins and ends
Who a troubleshooter is and how they differ from a crisis manager
Problem versus trouble: when troubleshooting is what is needed
The four basic steps: localise, find the cause, propose, implement
Balancing speed and systems thinking without side effects
The common mistake of treating symptoms
From symptoms to substance using 5W1H
SCQA: packaging a problem into a clear request
Logic tree and MECE so nothing is missed
Checking the boundaries of the task
5 Whys as the simplest root extractor
Ishikawa diagram and the 6M categories of causes
Confirming a cause is real rather than plausible
Pitfalls: false roots and stopping too early
The 80/20 rule and finding the vital few factors
Pareto chart: where most of the damage sits
Bottlenecks through the Theory of Constraints
Prioritisation by impact against cost
Brainstorming done right: rules and anti-rules
SCAMPER and Six Thinking Hats for going beyond the obvious
Barriers to creativity under stress
Fast screening of ideas against criteria
The Ideal Final Result and hidden resources
Contradictions: resolving them without compromise
Altshuller's 40 principles with business examples
When TRIZ beats brainstorming
Paradoxical questions for hopeless situations
Psychological inertia and how to break the pattern
Morphological analysis and the focal object method
Building your personal combination of techniques
Moderating a group without steering it to your answer
Script for a collective session: analysis, ideas, choice, plan
Handling domination, conflict and idle talk
Nominal group technique, Delphi and online whiteboards
Profitability: breaking down revenue and costs to find the dip
SWOT and 5P for strategy questions
Lean and Six Sigma for speed and defect reduction
McKinsey 7S, ADKAR and Kotter for implementation
The map of methods from root cause analysis to TRIZ and Lean
Combining techniques instead of looking for one answer
A personal development plan under stress
Reputation, confidentiality and responsibility
What a crisis is and how it hits every people process
Recruiting under uncertainty and below market pay
Attracting candidates to a company full of problems
Handling negative employee reviews and using internal resources
Methods for reducing payroll
Retaining people without revising salaries
Bonus systems funded from value the employee creates
Reducing benefits with the least damage and justifying them
Developing a fair training policy when money is gone
Organising internal training at zero cost
Free courses and a corporate library
Starting mentoring and building development plans without budget
Assessing people quickly and fairly
Choosing who to lay off on defensible criteria
Improving the efficiency of those who remain
Assessing talent and organising careers at no cost
Communicating difficult news to employees
How regular All Hands meetings help
Collecting feedback anonymously
Raising morale and running events on a minimal budget
Managing change in genuinely complex situations
Developing a contingency plan for emergencies
Managing risk across people and business
Restoring the feeling of safety after an incident
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The crisis does not begin on the day everything breaks. It begins months earlier, in a risk nobody wrote down.
What is going wrong right now
Your organisation has no register of what could go wrong, so the first sign of trouble arrives as a surprise. When it does, everyone reacts at once: the loudest problem gets the attention, decisions are made on incomplete information, and the communication vacuum fills with rumours faster than you can fill it with facts. Then come the cuts, made under time pressure and defended badly, and the people you most needed to keep are the first to leave, because they had options. Six months later nobody can explain what actually caused any of it.
What changes after this course
You will see the risk before it fires, because you will have built the register and know which controls sit where. When something does break, you will diagnose the real cause instead of the visible one, prioritise where the damage concentrates, and decide with a structure rather than adrenaline. You will run the company through the hard months — pay, hiring, development, difficult exits — without pretending the money is there. And you will communicate in a way that keeps people with you, because they hear it from you first.
Your instructor
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy, with more than 1.6 million course enrolments and over 150,000 professionals trained. Holder of PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. Built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals through periods of rapid change and contraction.
How the course is built
The course follows a crisis from before it starts to after it ends. It opens with risk itself: what human risk is, how to model it with heat maps and the fraud and safety triangles, the 4I model, and the full ISO 31000 cycle of finding, assessing, reducing and escalating risk, including top-management risk and the three lines of defence. The second block is diagnosis under pressure: framing the problem, root cause analysis with 5 Whys and Ishikawa, Pareto prioritisation, and structured idea generation when the obvious answers have run out. The third block is running the organisation with no budget: hiring, pay, benefits, training, performance and the decision about who stays. The fourth is change leadership through Kotter's eight steps, so the recovery holds. The fifth is communication — segments, channels, bad news and measurement. The course closes with leadership under pressure: styles, motivation, burnout and restoring discipline.
What is included
• Lifetime access to all course materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• Udemy Certificate of Completion
• Practical assignments and real business cases
• A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Why start now
You cannot build a risk register during the emergency, and you cannot learn to communicate badly-timed news while delivering it. The people who get trusted with a company in trouble are the ones who prepared before it was in trouble. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.