Opportunities in risk management: how to identify and capture the upside of uncertainty

The other side of uncertainty: what are opportunities in risk management?

In risk management, opportunities are the potential positive effects of uncertainty, which can help an organisation achieve its objectives or exceed them. Managing them involves identifying opportunities, assessing the possible benefits, choosing actions that make those benefits more likely, and monitoring the results.

Does risk always mean a threat? In the vocabulary of most organisations it does, and risk registers are in practice a catalogue of things that could go wrong. Risk management inherited this habit from insurance, where nobody asks how a fire might turn out well. Current standards relate uncertainty to an organisation’s objectives instead, recognising that it can move the organisation away from them or bring it closer.

A dispute over words: are “positive risk” and “opportunity” the same thing?

The term “positive risk” entered the risk management vocabulary mainly through project management. The PMBOK Guide (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, published by the Project Management Institute) treats risk as the overarching concept and uses “positive risk” for the favourable side of uncertainty. To anyone outside project management, the phrase sounds close to a contradiction in terms.

In this article, risk means uncertainty that affects objectives, while threats and opportunities are the two directions of that effect. A threat can materialise whatever the organisation does, whereas an opportunity usually has to be actively pursued, often within a limited time and at the cost of new exposure. A materialised threat also leaves a trace in the incident log, while a missed opportunity leaves none. Nobody opens an inquiry into revenue the company never earned.

The effect of uncertainty on objectives: how does ISO 31000 treat risk and opportunity?

ISO 31000:2018 defines risk as the effect of uncertainty on objectives. A note to the definition explains that an effect is a deviation from what is expected, and that it may be positive, negative or both.

The direction of the effect depends on the objectives, which a strengthening złoty illustrates well. An exporter invoicing in euros sees its margin shrink, while a company that imports components and sells in Poland finds its costs falling. The uncertainty is the same for both, and each firm’s objectives decide which way it cuts. The standard also states that the purpose of risk management is the creation and protection of value, and the process it describes applies to both directions of uncertainty.

The cost of excessive caution: why manage opportunities as well as threats?

An organisation that analyses threats alone tends to conclude that the safest course is to change nothing. Postponing a project or staying with an ageing but familiar supplier then looks like prudence, although either can cost more than the losses it was meant to prevent.

The second argument concerns resources. Mitigating threats and pursuing opportunities draw on the same budget and the same management attention, and the two kinds of spending can only be weighed against each other within a single process. Managing opportunities does not eliminate uncertainty; it aims at deliberate decisions that improve the odds of a favourable outcome.

From protecting value to creating it: how do opportunities fit into enterprise risk management (ERM)?

When COSO (the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission) published its first enterprise risk management framework in 2004, events with a negative impact were classed as risks and those with a positive impact as opportunities. Opportunities were channelled back into strategy and objective-setting, while the assessment of inherent and residual risk applied to negative events.

The 2017 framework, Enterprise Risk Management: Integrating with Strategy and Performance, ties ERM to strategy and to the creation, preservation and realisation of value. Opportunities and risks are analysed together there, since the same strategic decision usually carries both. Read more here: Enterprise Risk Management: from strategy to execution.

One change, two effects: where do an organisation’s opportunities come from?

Opportunities often arise from the very change the organisation has already logged in its register as a threat. The change may be technological, regulatory, market-driven, economic, social, political or organisational, or it may lie in customer behaviour or the supply chain.

A good example is Poland’s National e-Invoicing System (Krajowy System e-Faktur, KSeF). It became mandatory on 1 February 2026 for businesses whose 2024 sales exceeded PLN 200 million including VAT, and on 1 April for most others. In risk registers, KSeF appeared mainly as a threat related to implementation costs and deadlines. Some companies, however, used the rollout to automate the handling of purchase invoices, since data in a structured format can be processed without manual re-keying.

Investment in compliance with the NIS2 Directive, which sets EU cybersecurity requirements for essential and important entities, works in a similar way. Entities covered by the directive must vet their suppliers’ security ever more closely, so a documented security posture becomes an argument in tenders. Read more in our previous article: NIS2 and Supply Chain Security, or You Are Only as Secure as Your Weakest Vendor. An opportunity can also open up when a competitor shifts its attention to another market segment and leaves customers in the old one less well served, or when a change in the law favours a business model the organisation already uses.

Different questions, different answers: how do you identify opportunities in the risk management process?

A risk workshop run to the usual script tends to produce a long list of threats, with a few vague opportunities added at the end. Opportunities call for different questions, and often a different occasion, such as a strategy review or a trend analysis. The cheapest method is to go through the existing register and ask, for each threat, whether the same uncertainty has a favourable side.

Questions that help identify opportunities:

• Which change in the environment would let the organisation reach an objective faster or more cheaply?
• Which new regulation will cost competitors more than it costs the organisation?
• What work done manually today could a tool take over?
• Which contract would the organisation renegotiate if market conditions allowed?
• What are customers asking for that the organisation does not yet offer?

More than a slogan: how do you describe opportunities and link them to strategic and operational objectives?

The entry “AI development” turns up in opportunity registers surprisingly often, even though it is hard to assess and harder still to assign an owner to. It names a trend without describing an opportunity.

A three-part description proposed by David Hillson helps bring order: a certain cause, an uncertain event and its effect on a specific objective. The AI entry could then read as follows. Because document classification models can now handle the language of Polish contracts (cause), the organisation may be able to automate the initial review of supplier contracts within two quarters (event), which would shorten review times and let the legal department clear its backlog (effect on objective).

A link to a specific strategic, operational, financial or project objective is a condition of entry into the register. If nobody can name one, the idea belongs in an ideas log. The objective also later determines the indicators used to track whether the benefit has been realised.

Likelihood and benefit: how do you assess opportunities and build an opportunity matrix?

An opportunity is assessed on the same two dimensions as a threat, namely likelihood and the scale of its effect on objectives, although the benefit may be financial, strategic, operational, reputational, technological or regulatory. The assessment also takes in the effort involved, the time needed to realise the benefit and the risks the action itself creates. For larger decisions, scenario analysis helps by setting possible losses and gains side by side across several ways the situation might develop.

The opportunity matrix is usually built as a mirror image of the threat matrix, on a 5 × 5 grid. The axes can be symmetrical, but the scales should not be carried over unchanged. Most organisations weigh a million złoty gained differently from a million złoty lost, so the benefit scale is calibrated separately, against objectives and risk appetite. The matrix ranks opportunities but says nothing about the cost of pursuing them.

An example interpretation: 1–4, accept and observe; 5–12, cost-benefit analysis; 15–25, priority opportunity requiring a management decision.

Not every opening is worth the effort: how do you prioritise the opportunities you have identified?

Not every opportunity can or should be pursued. Prioritisation means weighing the potential value against the cost, the resources and the risks that pursuing the opportunity would create, while also considering fit with strategy and whether the window will close before the organisation is ready to act. A decision to pass on an opportunity should be recorded with its rationale, so that the next review can judge whether it was the right call.

Four responses to an opening: which opportunity response strategies can an organisation use?

The choice of strategy depends on how much weight the organisation attaches to the benefit and whether it can secure that benefit on its own. Project management distinguishes four basic responses, which work equally well at the level of the whole organisation. The PMBOK Guide adds a fifth, escalation, discussed in the section on the role of the board.

The price of an opening: how does pursuing an opportunity create new risks, and what role does risk appetite play?

Rapid adoption of AI tools can raise team productivity within months, yet it also creates legal, operational and security exposure. The legal risks stem from data protection law and from Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 on artificial intelligence (the AI Act), the operational ones from model answers that are wrong but sound convincing, and the security ones from internal documents pasted into external tools. In the same way, entering a new market brings revenue along with new regulatory requirements, and automation cuts costs while deepening dependence on technology. An opportunity that enters the register should accordingly be linked to the threats it will generate.

This is where risk appetite comes in.

Appetite statements usually describe acceptable losses and rarely say how much uncertainty the organisation will accept in return for benefits. An appetite profile might allow bold experiments with products outside the core business, moderate exposure when entering new markets, and close to zero appetite in regulatory compliance.

From idea to entry: how do you record opportunities in the risk register?

Opportunities can be recorded in the risk register alongside threats or in a separate, linked register. Either way, the entry covers the three-part description, the related objective, the benefit, the likelihood, the owner, the actions, the deadlines, the indicators and the related threats. The choice depends mainly on how reporting is organised and on whether opportunities are to be scored on the same matrix as threats.

The closing window: how do you monitor opportunities with KRIs and KPIs?

Monitoring is the penultimate stage of the opportunity management cycle, and it determines whether the actions taken will translate into value:

Identification → Assessment → Prioritisation → Action → Monitoring → Value realisation

An opportunity assessment usually goes out of date faster than a threat assessment, because its window shifts as the environment changes. Key risk indicators (KRIs) signal whether the conditions that created the opportunity still hold. Here a risk indicator tracks the threat of losing the opportunity, that is, a change in the environment that would close the window before the organisation can make use of it. News that a competitor is entering the same segment, for instance, means the window is narrowing. Key performance indicators (KPIs), meanwhile, show whether the actions are delivering the expected value, such as whether contract review times have fallen.

An opportunity that exists only in a strategy presentation has neither an owner nor a deadline. For this reason, the register entry should include a date for checking whether the benefit has been realised and a condition, set in advance, under which the organisation drops further action.

Missed openings: what is the role of the board and risk owners in managing opportunities?

Missed opportunities never reach the incident log or audit reports, so the question about them has to be asked at board level, for example by requiring every strategy review to list the options considered and rejected. The board also sets risk appetite, and with it the limits within which the organisation may pursue benefits.

Who is responsible for a given opportunity? Its owner usually works in the business unit where the benefit arises and the necessary resources sit. The risk management function keeps methods consistent and challenges over-optimistic assumptions. When an opportunity goes beyond the owner’s authority, the owner refers the decision upwards, which project management calls escalation.

From AI to automated controls: what are some examples of opportunities in risk management?

Each event in the table below can bring a loss or a gain, depending on how it is managed.

Control automation shows this particularly well. Automated testing covers the entire population of transactions, whereas a manual test usually relies on a sample. A misconfigured rule, however, repeats the same error in every test, and the reports may show clean results for a long time. Managing this opportunity therefore requires reviewing rules before deployment and periodically checking the results against a sample.

Threats and opportunities in one system: how does a GRC platform support the management of risks and opportunities?

Opportunities kept in a spreadsheet alongside the GRC (governance, risk and compliance) system tend to be assessed by different rules from threats and rarely make it into the same management report. A GRC platform allows threats and opportunities to be handled in a single process, from identification through to reporting.

That is the approach taken in AdaptiveGRC. Alongside the risk register, the platform provides an opportunity register built on the same model. Each opportunity has an assigned owner and is scored on a separate 5 × 5 matrix, so opportunities can be monitored independently of threats while both registers stay in one system. Actions and deadlines are planned, KRIs and KPIs monitored, and management reports covering both threats and opportunities prepared within the same process.

Summary: what changes when risk management takes opportunities into account?

Taking opportunities into account does not require a new process, because ISO 31000 and ERM already provide a single process for threats and opportunities alike. What it does require is a different set of questions, precise descriptions, and a link between each opportunity and the risks it will generate. In an organisation with a mature risk culture, risk management serves as decision support and a means of creating value, in addition to its protective function.

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