At the recent One Big Thing Webinar on Good Risk Taking in Government, attended by over 800 colleagues, key leaders shared essential insights on risk management and innovation in the Civil Service. The session recording is now available on YouTube.
The webinar’s host, Clive Martin, Head of the Government Risk Profession at HM Treasury, outlined five crucial principles:
- We need to take good risks in pursuit of innovation opportunity: Effective risk management increases the chances of successful innovation.
- Risk affects value for money: Good risk-taking should be integral to value for money calculations. Applying risk insights and analysis which include the use of probabilistic methods, enables departments to evaluate potential outcomes and the chances of different degrees of success or failure.
- Portfolio level opportunity can be embraced: Cohesive consideration of risk appetite at portfolio level can allow for more risk to be taken than would otherwise be the case at individual project/ innovation level. Sometimes it can be okay for things to fail as long as the portfolio is likely to bring benefit overall. We can learn lessons from failure and be sufficiently agile. Portfolio level opportunities can be missed if there is insufficient escalation of opportunity due to over-worry about risk levels.
- Good risk taking means seeking advice and support: Advice and training on legal risk and other aspects of risk management is on hand when choices are being considered, risks taken, and outcomes managed. It also means providing advice, support, psychological safety and rewards to others who have ideas and the energy to pursue opportunity by taking good, calculated risks in a way which is appropriate for the work of the department or public body.
- It’s important to be able to justify the decisions we take: Risk profiling when decisions are made can help us explain (at the time and in retrospect) why we chose action or inaction, even if we had an unlucky outcome.
Panellist Sarah Munby, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, commented ‘We are rightly being asked to drive ambitious and far-reaching change. The discussion really reminded me that well-managed and thoughtful risk-taking is absolutely essential if we want to make bold things happen.’
Caroline Croft, Legal Director General at Government Legal Department, reflected on her experience on the panel: ‘I was delighted to join Sarah and Clive for this webinar and it was great to see so many people had dialled in to share our discussion about how we can support innovation by understanding risk management, so we can confidently seize opportunities. Most of all, coming together across policy, risk and legal functions, it showed how crucial it is to combine our expertise across disciplines in the Civil Service- and how much we can achieve when we do.’
For those wanting to find out more about legal risk, Caroline highlighted two main documents:
- The Attorney General’s Guidance on legal risk is a three-page summary which explains the common framework to assess risk across the Government Legal Profession.
- The Judge Over Your Shoulder (JOYS) is designed for civil servants and is intended to help when advising ministers and government on decision making. It outlines what to expect when working with government lawyers, allowing for effective collaboration and lowering the risk of legal challenge.
You can find out more about One Big Thing 2024 in our recent blog article. If you'd like to find out more about the Government Risk Profession and risk management, get in touch with the team.
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