When you’re capturing risks, a useful model to use is “Because of X, there is a risk that Y.”

In this example X is the cause of the risk and Y is the risk itself. These two commonly get confused and can lead you to focus on the wrong thing when you’re mitigating.

When you’re talking to stakeholders about risk, you should include two more elements – the impact and the mitigation.

So in your report, a really well-written risk would take the form “Because of this cause, there is a risk that this happens, which would mean this impact to the project. I am implementing this mitigation to reduce the impact.”If you can get all your risks framed in this way you will be able to have much more meaningful conversations around risk management with your stakeholders.