July 2026 Webinar

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and Decision Science (DS) are two disciplines that have both developed to support leaders to handle fundamental strategic issues. So why don’t they talk and how does that fail leaders and the organizations they serve?

DS and ERM have very different mindsets and that has created a chasm between the disciplines that keeps them operating in silos. DS tends to focus on maximizing upside risks - opportunities with potential to create value, achieve the organization’s strategic objectives, and support health and provide a handsome return on the assets entrusted to the organization.

ERM has focused on minimizing downside risks – potential losses that can destroy value, prevent the achievement of strategic objectives, and threaten the health and long-term sustainability of the organization. While each discipline has gained some traction, neither has become universally adopted as a standard operating practice the way other management approaches have - think generally accepted accounting practices, board governance, audit, quality management, strategic planning, etc. Given that DS and ERM each only solve half of a leader’s strategy issues, it’s little wonder that adoption is a challenge for both disciplines:

•  Risk frameworks without DS produce compliance theater — risks are logged, scored, and reported, but the underlying decisions that create or resolve those risks are made poorly.
• DS without risk frameworks produces well-reasoned decisions that then lack ongoing stewardship — the uncertainty modeled at decision time isn't monitored and adjusted to reflect how the business environment evolves over time and causing strategies to underperform or fail altogether.

In this webinar we will explore the opportunity to integrate these disciplines by treating uncertainty as a continuous thread running from initial framing and surfacing of assumptions about how uncertainties will drive risk, through decision-making, risk mitigation planning, execution monitoring, and finally organizational learning — rather than handing off between two disconnected disciplines.

We’ll start by sharing two case studies that illustrate how reorienting to the business questions leaders want answered can drive the integration of the best of these disciplines. We’ll show that when executives and boards learn how to have meaningful and timely conversations about uncertainty and risk they can meet their biggest strategic challenges with confidence.

Before opening the floor for an interactive discussion, we’ll share our insights on the lessons gained from the case studies.