Corporate Training in Leadership, Risk & Analysis 

​

 

In-house courses for teams of up to 20, delivered at your premises anywhere in the world, or as live virtual interactive training (VIT). Designed and delivered by Julian Talbot.

 

Every course on this page is about the same thing: decisions that are difficult to make and harder to defend afterwards.

 

Whether to act on the staff member everyone works around. Whether the security spend is proportionate. Which explanation of an incident actually fits the evidence. How much contingency you can justify to a steering committee.

 

The pattern is always the same. You have to act on incomplete information, and later you have to show your reasoning to someone who was not in the room — a tribunal, a regulator, a board, an inquiry, or just a team who watched what you did and drew conclusions about what happens around here.

 

Most corporate training fails the Monday test: it sounds sensible in the room, but changes nothing the following week. These courses are different. They are built from 35 years of managing real people and real risks in government, resources, health, safety, and security, and every one of them is tailored to your organisation before I walk in the door. No generic slideware. No actors reading a deck. Your people, your issues, your case studies, your decisions.

 

The first course is the one I think matters most, and it is the one organisations are usually slowest to book.

 

How it works

 

• Private, in-house delivery only. Your team, up to 20 participants per session, and your real issues on the table — things nobody would raise in a public course.

• Your choice of format. A full day on site, two half-days, or a series of live virtual interactive (VIT) sessions for distributed teams.

• Tailored by default. Every engagement starts with a scoping call, and I adapt cases, examples and templates to your industry and context.

• Useful afterwards. Participants keep the templates and models, and every course includes a follow-up Q&A call 30 days later, once they have tried the tools on real work.

 

————————

 

1 | Back on Track: Performance, Accountability and Difficult Conversations

 

Format: One day or two half-days

 

Who it is for: New and experienced managers, team leaders, supervisors and HR business partners

 

Every organisation has one. The underperformer everyone works around, complains about privately, and eventually promotes somewhere else.

​

The cost is almost never counted properly. It is absorbed by the people who quietly pick up the slack, by the good performers who conclude that standards are optional, and by a manager who spends more hours avoiding one conversation than the conversation would ever have taken.

 

The reason it goes unaddressed is rarely indifference. Most managers were promoted for technical competence and have never been taught how to do this. They are afraid of getting it wrong, of a claim, of the atmosphere afterwards — so they wait, and hope, and document nothing. By the time they act, the case is weak, the person is blindsided, and the process looks like retaliation.

 

This course gives managers two things most have never been taught: the emotional intelligence to read what is actually going on, and the confidence to act early, fairly, and face to face. It covers the full pathway from informal feedback through counselling to formal discipline, with procedural fairness built in — so managers can bring people back on track or, when that fails, manage them out with dignity and without exposing the organisation.

 

What it covers:

 

• Emotional intelligence under pressure: self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy

• Diagnosing underperformance: skill, will or system

• Giving feedback that lands — early and often

• A structure for the difficult conversation

• The counselling and discipline pathway, step by step

• Documentation and procedural fairness

• Rebuilding expectations and performance agreements

• When and how to manage someone out — respectfully and defensibly

• Why promoting problems sideways destroys team trust

• Looking after yourself while doing hard things

 

Your team leaves with: managers who deal with a problem in week two instead of year two.

​

 

 

————————

 

2 | Security Risk Management

 

Format: One or two days, or a structured VIT series

 

Who it is for: Security managers, facility managers, government personnel, corporate risk teams and senior leaders

 

Security spending is easy to cut and hard to defend — until something happens. Then the question is not whether you spent enough, but whether you can show your reasoning.

 

This is the course built on the Security Risk Management Body of Knowledge, taught by the person who wrote it. It covers how to assess threats credibly, design layered protective controls, and argue for proportionate security investment in language executives respect, aligned with ISO 31000 and the SRMBOK framework.

 

What it covers:

 

• Security risk context and objectives

• Threat, vulnerability and consequence

• Credible threat assessment

• Protective controls and layered defence

• Deterrence, detection, delay and response

• Security scenarios and exercises

• Proportionality and cost-effectiveness

• Residual risk and risk acceptance

• Governance, accountability and reporting to executives

 

Your team leaves with: a defensible security risk assessment method and the vocabulary to win the budget argument.

​

 

————————

 

3 | Independent Risk Analysis

 

Format: One or two days, or a structured VIT series

 

Who it is for: Risk professionals, auditors, investigators, project leaders, legal teams and senior decision-makers

 

In high-stakes matters, the problem is rarely too little information. It is too many competing explanations, too many assumptions dressed up as facts, and too much motivated reasoning.

 

This course teaches the structured analytical techniques I use in support of litigation, inquiries and contested decisions — including Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) and control and barrier analysis — so your team can produce findings that survive hostile scrutiny.

 

What it covers:

 

• Framing the decision or problem correctly

• Separating evidence from assumption

• Identifying and testing competing hypotheses (ACH)

• Testing causal claims and identifying missing information

• Control and barrier analysis

• Recognising bias, groupthink and motivated reasoning

• Scenario development

• Structuring defensible findings

• Communicating uncertainty and limitations honestly

 

Your team leaves with: analysis that a board, a regulator or opposing counsel cannot easily pull apart.

​

 

————————

 

4 | Risk Management for Projects and Programs

 

Format: One or two days

 

Who it is for: Project managers, program directors, PMO staff, sponsors and risk specialists

 

Projects rarely fail from bad luck. They fail from unexamined assumptions, optimistic schedules, and risk allocated to whichever party could not argue.

 

This course connects risk management to the things project leaders are actually accountable for: objectives, schedule, cost, contracts and the confidence of a steering committee.

 

What it covers:

 

• Linking risk to project objectives

• Schedule and cost uncertainty

• Dependencies, interfaces, assumptions and constraints

• Risk allocation between parties

• Contractor and supplier risk

• Escalation and decision thresholds

• Contingency and management reserve you can defend

• Risk-based assurance

• Reporting to steering committees and executives

 

Your team leaves with: contingency they can justify, cleaner risk allocation, and reports executives actually act on.

 

————————

 

5 | Risk Management That Produces Decisions

 

Format: One day, two half-days, or four live online sessions

 

Who it is for: Managers, risk practitioners, facilitators, internal consultants, and anyone who owns a risk or has to run the session where risks get discussed

 

Two failures show up together often enough that it is worth treating them as one problem.

 

The first is the manager who owns risks nobody ever trained them to manage, and who has quietly concluded that risk management is paperwork. The second is the workshop everyone has sat through: two hours of brainstorming, a heat map, and a list of risks nobody looks at again.

 

They are the same failure. Method without facilitation stays theoretical. Facilitation without method produces a tidy record of a conversation that changed nothing. This course covers both — a working method for thinking about uncertainty, and the practical craft of running a session where that method actually gets used in front of other people.

 

What it covers:

 

• Making risk management useful rather than bureaucratic

• Defining objectives and understanding uncertainty

• Identifying the risks that actually matter

• Causes, consequences and controls

• Assessing risk without false precision

• Choosing practical, affordable treatments

• Designing a session around a decision, not a template

• Getting past generic brainstorming, and eliciting dissent and minority views

• Pre-mortems and scenario analysis

• Ranking risks without wasting the room's time

• Handling dominant personalities and organisational politics

• Assigning ownership and real accountability

• Risk registers and reports that people actually read

 

Your team leaves with: a simple, repeatable method, a sharper risk register, and managers who stop treating risk as paperwork.

​

————————

​

​

What Participants and Clients Say

 

“Julian provided invaluable advice to me concerning risk management. As a result of the advice, I was able to train my staff and successfully implement a management-driven change in business practices.”

— Manager, private sector

 

“His knowledge and experience across a range of security and risk-related fields has been invaluable in the delivery and long-term benefit to the Department of Defence.”

— Security consultant, Department of Defence projects

 

“Julian can be relied upon to provide very high levels of professional advice, guaranteed to be anchored in reality and reflective of the ‘bottom line’ issues which face all organisations.”

— Security manager, Australian government global network

 

“An expert in free thinking and pragmatic problem solving, Julian is a global leader in his field.”

— Managing director, risk management technology firm

 

“A well known authority in the field of risk management… the SRMBOK successfully provides a single source toolkit which is both practical and comprehensive.”

— Security management and GRC specialist

 

“Julian truly is a leader, mentor and pioneer… I highly recommend Julian as a trusted adviser, leader in his field and quality support professional for businesses of all shapes and sizes.”

— Enterprise risk and security executive, former client

 

“He has a brilliant mind and a warm heart and is always on the lookout for ways he can add value to other people and inspire positive change… someone who challenges the norm, and an absolute pleasure to be around.”

— Keynote speaker and trainer, behavioural analysis

 

————————

​

Investment

 

Fixed fees per session — not per seat. Bring six people or twenty; the price is the same.

 

Delivery options and fees (AUD, excluding GST):

 

• Full training day, in-house, up to 20 participants — AUD $3,600 per day (USD $2,400)

• Two half-days, same content, split delivery — $3,600 total

• Live virtual interactive training (VIT), per one-hour session — $600 per session

• Travel, for on-site delivery requiring it — AUD $2,000 per travel day, plus flights and accommodation at cost

 

Scoping, tailoring, materials and the 30-day follow-up call are included in every engagement. Fees can be quoted in USD, GBP or EUR on request.

 

————————

 

Why Train With Me

 

I have been designing and delivering training for over 30 years, and I hold the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment — the national benchmark for training design and delivery in Australia. I have managed people for longer than that, in organisations where the consequences of getting it wrong were not theoretical.

 

I have led security and emergency teams of up to 200 people, and developed and managed international security risk management programs worth $60 million. I have run security for Australia's largest resources project — Woodside's $24 billion North West Shelf Venture — and for the Australian Trade Commission's global network, and led enterprise risk for the Department of Health. I have started over 20 businesses, including co-founding an ASX-listed company, and I have hired, developed, counselled, promoted and dismissed people across all of them.

 

I have had the conversations this course teaches. I have had them badly, early in my career, and learned what that costs. Everything in the material comes from that rather than from a textbook on management theory.

 

I am also the lead author of the Risk Management Body of Knowledge (RMBOK) and the Security Risk Management Body of Knowledge (SRMBOK), and the author of a dozen other practitioner texts used in Australia and internationally. My clients have included the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism, the Australian Department of Defence, the Australian Antarctic Division, Aspen Medical, Woodside and the ACT Government.

 

I hold a Master of Risk Management, and I am a recipient of the Australian Security Medal, a Fellow of the Risk Management Institute of Australasia, a Fellow of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

 

I have designed and delivered this training on five continents. The case studies range from major international incidents such as Deepwater Horizon to anecdotes that can only come from having been in the room.

 

————————

 

Enquire

 

If one of these courses made you think of a specific team, a specific project, or a specific person, you can reach me via the contact form or email julian@juliantalbot.com.

​

​