Risks and mitigations in one table
◈ 5 cardsNo risk without a mitigation and an owner; the top risk named; the strongest counter-consideration acknowledged and answered rather than hidden.
Two lines, one table
The fourth and fifth R-psp-4 lines: acknowledges the strongest counter-consideration and names the top risk and a mitigation. Both are about honesty under uncertainty. A recommendation that lists only its own advantages reads as advocacy, and a client who later hits a risk the analyst saw and did not mention will not commission a second memo. The instrument is a risk table — Smith's cost-benefit table has a comment column for exactly this — with five columns: Risk · Likelihood · Impact · Mitigation · Owner. The rule that gives the lesson its name: no risk without a mitigation, and no mitigation without an owner, because a mitigation nobody owns is a wish.
Worked example — Lakeshore's table
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lease lock-in if large-format volumes fall — the payment does not shrink with the work | Medium — two accounts are already unsettled | High — the lease becomes the most expensive option | Negotiate a 3-year term with an upgrade clause and an exit at year 3 | Priya, with Wren drafting the terms |
| Vendor service response — a maintenance contract is only as good as the response time | Medium | High — downtime is the problem being fixed | A service-level agreement with a response time and a penalty for missing it | Wren to draft; Priya to sign |
| Training downtime — operators learning a new press during production | High | Low — days, not weeks | Vendor training in the first fortnight of January, the quietest period | The two operators; the vendor |
Top risk: lock-in if volumes fall — because it is the one that would reverse the recommendation (L7.1's flip condition), and because its mitigation costs something to negotiate. The table names it as the top risk in words; a reader should not have to infer the ranking.
The strongest counter-consideration
A risk is something that might go wrong with the recommendation. A counter-consideration is the best argument for a different recommendation, and the rubric wants it acknowledged and answered — not omitted to keep the memo persuasive, and not left for the client to raise. For Lakeshore it is the case for buying: over the five-year term the lease costs $290,000 and buying about $337,000 including repairs, but at the end of five years an owned press has years of life left at about $4,000 a year in repairs, while the lease ends with nothing owned. Over a ten-year horizon buying could cost less. The answer: Priya's constraints are cash and debt capacity now, two accounts are threatening to leave now, and the upgrade clause addresses the technology risk that a ten-year-old owned press carries — so the lease is recommended on the five-year figures, with the ten-year case stated so that Priya can weigh it. The memo is more persuasive for having said it, because the reader was going to think of it.
Build the clinic's
For the online-booking recommendation: patient uptake is low (medium / medium — the front desk keys phone bookings into the same calendar, so the no-show and double-booking gains do not depend on uptake; Tomas); reminders reduce no-shows less than expected (medium / high — no-show % measured monthly, and the hybrid or a reminder-only fallback if the fall is under half the expected by the three-month checkpoint; the dentists); training lands on the receptionists in a busy week (high / low — the vendor's onboarding session in a quiet week before go-live; Tomas). Top risk: the reminders under-delivering, because the subscription is justified by the no-show revenue. Counter-consideration: the hybrid's lower training burden — acknowledged, and answered by the go-live timing.
Type the skeleton
The snippet is the five-column header and one row. Type it until the Mitigation and Owner columns are the ones you reach for first, because those are the two a marker checks.