The next phase was to look at the risk involved in this type of venture, then I remembered that I had previously written an in-depth analysis of risk management inside collaborative initiatives so I thought I might go back and evaluate what I found. Since I wrote this paper during the time the DEL program was introducing some of the collaboration concepts, this paper became extremely valuable to the challenges I may face going forward as it contained a framework for risk assessment. Some of these risks are described below.

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This artifact is my 750 in-depth paper on risk management, and it addresses outcome #5.

In the 750 in-depth paper, I chose to dive into the literature on the topic of risk management in collaborative initiatives, through secondary research, I reviewed the major themes and framework presented from recent studies. What I found was that issues in collaborative relationships tend to arise in the gray areas of responsibility, building relationships between organizations, and being presently attentive. Traditionally risk management frameworks practiced assertive acts of avoidance or shifting the risk to one organization that is better qualified to handle it, but this approach is not successful while focusing on large-scale social issues. After much consideration about my plans of collaborating with local nonprofit businesses to provide first-time, non-violent, drug offenders an opportunity for employment and skills training, it was determined that risk management is extremely important in this context. Moreover, such a controversial and stigmatizing problem such as “providing opportunities to convicted drug users”, it will require extreme attention to mitigating risk for the sake of all businesses involved. Current risk management research inside collaborative relationships identify that risks multiply at the boundaries between parts of the system (Archer, Cameron, 2013), so I singled in on the relationship-based model of collaborative partnerships in which the complex risk between organizational boundaries is no longer being looked at as “someone else’s problem.” Instead, this model of consensus decision-making is tied to a no-blame culture; one that focuses on “adaptive learning,” transparency, mutual dependency, and accountability. If this collaborative initiative were to undertake the challenging issue of reintegrating people back into society post-conviction, then it would require an approach to risk management that reduces ambiguity and uncertainty.