Message and risk
Political communications, acumen and risk appetite.
Two and a half hours on message and risk: political communications, applied political acumen, identifying and mitigating strategic risk, and setting a risk appetite a board can actually use.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Serving the public
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Councillors, senior officers and board members who take or advise on decisions made in public
Overview
In public life a sound decision can still fail if it is badly explained. Taken from Leading from the front bench, this course treats political communication as a discipline of its own, using Drew Westen on why facts alone rarely change minds, Clive Veroni on ethical framing and spin, and Birmingham's bin strike as a live optics crisis. It applies the toolkit of political acumen, from Mendelow's matrix to transactional analysis, to the Isle of Wight's cross-party budget. It finishes on strategic risk through ISO 31000, the Structured What If Technique and the Airbus A380, then risk appetite, tolerance and capacity with the Wells Fargo case.
Aims
Above all, it seeks to help leaders frame difficult messages with integrity, apply political acumen while it can still make a difference, and own risk properly, with a board risk appetite that people can quote and that actually shapes the decisions they take.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Check a draft statement against its multiple audiences and time pressures, and distinguish ethical framing from spin.
- Compare the Isle of Wight and Birmingham cases to explain where political acumen was, or was not, applied in time.
- Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, a risk matrix and escalation triggers to identify risks and monitor appetite between reviews.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Identify the multiple audiences and time pressures a council statement faces, and check a draft against each before it is sent.
- Select and combine the right tools from the programme to read a live political situation.
- Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis and the Structured What If Technique to identify risks precisely, asking how a process could fail rather than whether it will.
- Distinguish risk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacity and explain why a board needs all three.
- Explain why purely factual messaging tends to fail and distinguish ethical framing from spin.
- Compare a successful and an unsuccessful case and explain where political acumen was or was not applied.
- Assess risks on a likelihood and impact matrix and use it as a conversation starter rather than a verdict.
- Assess whether a risk appetite statement is quantified, qualitative where needed, linked to strategy and set by category.
Built from 2 parts.
2 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Reading the room politicallyPolitical communications and political acumenBitesize · Working in a Political Environment2 modules
- 02How much risk is enough?Risk assessment and board risk appetiteBitesize · Strategic Risk2 modules