Strategic Risk Leadership: Data, Empathy, and Assurance

About this course

In this Specialization, you’ll learn to lead risk and internal audit work with a balanced approach: empathy for stakeholder needs, data-driven analysis, and clear governance practices. You’ll start by treating empathy as a professional skill for risk discovery. You’ll learn why empathy breaks down, how stakeholders perceive risk, and how to gather risk signals through interviewing, brainstorming, and empathy mapping. You’ll then strengthen those insights with basic data visualization in Tableau to explore patterns and explain what matters to stakeholders. Next, you’ll build enterprise risk management (ERM) habits that make risk actionable. You’ll work with tools such as risk statements, bowtie analysis, risk matrices and heat maps, key risk indicators, risk responses, and risk reporting—using Tableau to support analysis and communicate findings. Finally, you’ll connect risk thinking to strategic internal auditing. You’ll learn how internal audit can operate as a strategic partner by building risk-based audit plans aligned to strategy, collecting and analyzing audit evidence, evaluating controls using frameworks like COSO, and making defensible recommendations. You’ll also practice audit reporting and stakeholder-ready communication, while considering emerging risks, technology, and ESG as inputs to forward-looking assurance.

Course objectives

• strengthen insights through data visualization
• connect risk thinking to strategic internal auditing
• create risk-based audit plans aligned with strategy