---
name: assess-reputation-risk
category: start
description: Assess stakeholder trust risk through evidence, impacts, scenarios, and response options. Use when a decision, failure, claim, controversy, partner, or information gap could change whether people rely on an organization.
---

# assess-reputation-risk

Treat reputation as stakeholders' evidence-based willingness to trust future behavior, not a popularity score.

## When to use

- Use for consequential issues spanning conduct, service, governance, communication, safety, rights, or public claims.
- Use a normal communications review when the underlying stakeholder risk is minor and bounded.

## Preconditions

- Confirm decision authority, issue owner, scope, time horizon, evidence access, stakeholder safeguards, and residual-risk authority.
- Obtain the proposed decision, commitments, operations, contracts, research, monitoring methods, and known dissent.

## Procedure

1. Define the decision, issue, timeframe, stakeholders, authority, and operational or ethical outcomes at risk.
2. Build an evidence register separating verified facts, claims, sentiment samples, unknowns, and source limitations.
3. Map stakeholder expectations, relationship, exposure, power, vulnerability, and information needs.
4. Identify trust drivers such as competence, integrity, fairness, care, transparency, reliability, and corrective capacity.
5. Develop plausible scenarios across underlying harm, discovery, amplification, misinformation, response, recurrence, and recovery; preserve scenario uncertainty.
6. Assess severity, reach, persistence, reversibility, uncertainty, and disproportionate impact without multiplying arbitrary scores.
7. Distinguish actions that reduce the underlying risk from actions that only change visibility.
8. Compare prevent, stop, repair, disclose, support, investigate, correct, monitor, and accept options with owners and evidence.
9. Set decision triggers, rights, communication boundaries, metrics, and independent challenge.
10. Reassess after new evidence and verify whether controls and commitments changed stakeholder outcomes.

## Failure plan

- Do not suppress lawful criticism, manipulate sentiment, fabricate support, or target individuals.
- Stop conclusions when monitoring samples are unrepresentative or the underlying facts are unresolved.
- Keep personal, whistleblower, investigation, and security information need-to-know.
- Escalate legal, safety, rights, and regulated decisions to accountable specialists without inventing their conclusions.

## Done

- A sourced risk assessment records stakeholder expectations, evidence, harms, and scenario uncertainty
- A response option record distinguishes underlying-risk reduction from visibility management
- Triggers, owners, authority, and communication boundaries are explicit
- An effectiveness review and residual-risk acceptance are scheduled