---
name: risk-communication-translator
description: "Translates technical risk assessments, jargon-heavy findings, and quantitative risk language into plain-language summaries tailored to a specific audience — Board members, product teams, or engineers — with a headline verdict, translated key points, a decision ask, and an appendix that preserves the technical detail. Use when a risk finding, audit result, compliance report, or threat assessment needs to be communicated to non-technical stakeholders who must understand or act on it."
argument-hint: "[risk-content] [audience]"
allowed-tools: ["Read"]
---

# Risk Communication Translator

## Purpose
Convert technical risk language — audit findings, quantitative risk scores, compliance gaps, threat assessments — into a plain-language summary calibrated to a specific audience, so the reader understands what the risk is, why it matters to them, and what decision or action is being asked of them. Solves the recurring failure where accurate risk analysis fails to land because stakeholders can't parse the jargon.

## When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Translate a technical risk assessment or audit finding for the Board
- Explain a security, compliance, or operational risk to a product or engineering team
- Rewrite a risk report so non-technical executives can act on it
- Prepare a plain-language risk summary for a Board deck or committee meeting
- Turn a quantitative risk score or heatmap into a narrative stakeholders will understand
- Communicate a threat, incident, or exposure to a leadership audience without watering down accuracy

## Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- **Source risk content**: The technical text, findings, scores, or report to translate (paste or summarize)
- **Target audience**: Board / Executive committee / Product team / Engineering team / Regulator / Other
- **Decision or action needed**: What the audience must decide, approve, or do — or "awareness only"
- **Severity/materiality**: How serious this is (financial exposure, likelihood, regulatory implication if known)
- **Time horizon**: Immediate / near-term / ongoing — how urgent action is
- **Sensitivity constraints**: Anything that can't be disclosed, or language that must be avoided (legal, regulatory, reputational)

If severity or time horizon is missing, infer conservatively from the source content and flag the assumption in the output.

## Instructions

### Step 1: Extract the Core Risk
Read the source content and isolate the essential facts before writing anything:
- **The risk event**: What could go wrong, stated as a concrete scenario ("Customer payment data could be exposed" — not "confidentiality control deficiency")
- **The cause**: Why the risk exists in one plain sentence
- **The consequence**: What happens if it materializes — expressed in terms the audience cares about (money, customers, downtime, regulatory action, reputation)
- **The likelihood**: How probable, converted from any technical scoring into plain terms (see Step 3)
- Strip every acronym, framework reference, and control-code that doesn't survive contact with a non-specialist. Keep a mental list — the technical detail returns in the appendix, not the summary.

### Step 2: Calibrate to the Audience
Adjust framing, vocabulary, and emphasis to the reader:

**Board / Executive committee**
- Lead with materiality: financial exposure, strategic impact, regulatory or reputational consequence
- Frame likelihood and severity in business terms, not control language
- Every risk ends in a decision ask (accept / mitigate / transfer / escalate) — Boards act, they don't administer
- Keep to what the fiduciary needs to know; omit implementation detail

**Product team**
- Frame risk as impact on roadmap, launch timing, user trust, or feature viability
- Translate controls into requirements or trade-offs they can weigh against velocity
- Be specific about what changes and what it costs in effort or timeline

**Engineering team**
- Retain more technical precision but remove governance/compliance jargon
- Frame as concrete system behavior, failure modes, and remediation steps
- Be explicit about the "what to build/fix" — engineers want the actionable specification

**Regulator / External**
- Precise, factual, non-speculative; avoid minimizing or catastrophizing language
- State facts, controls in place, and remediation timeline without editorializing

### Step 3: Translate Quantitative Language
Convert numeric and scored risk into plain equivalents while preserving accuracy:
- **Risk scores/heatmaps** → plain likelihood + impact statement ("High-Medium on our matrix" → "Fairly likely to happen, and if it does the damage is serious but not existential")
- **Probability figures** → frequency framing where clearer ("15% annual likelihood" → "roughly a 1-in-7 chance in any given year")
- **Financial exposure** → single anchored figure with context ("estimated $2.4M exposure — about 3% of annual revenue")
- **Technical severity (CVSS, etc.)** → plain consequence, with the score noted in the appendix, not the summary
- Never invent numbers not present in the source. If a claim is qualitative in the source, keep it qualitative.

### Step 4: Write the Plain-Language Summary
Assemble the deliverable in this order:
1. **Headline verdict** — one sentence a busy reader could act on alone
2. **What the risk is** — 2–3 plain sentences (the scenario, not the framework)
3. **Why it matters to you** — impact framed in the audience's terms
4. **How likely / how bad** — likelihood and severity in plain language
5. **The decision or action** — the specific ask, with options if a decision is required
6. **Technical appendix** — the original scores, control references, and detail preserved verbatim for the specialists in the room

Use short sentences. One idea per sentence. No acronym appears in the summary without being spelled out on first use; ideally it doesn't appear at all.

### Step 5: Run the Jargon Pass
Before finalizing, scan the summary (sections 1–5) and confirm no undefined technical term survives. If a term is essential, replace it with a plain equivalent or define it inline. The appendix is the only place raw technical language is permitted.

## Output Format
- **Structure**: Headline verdict → What the risk is → Why it matters to you → How likely / how bad → The decision or action → Technical appendix
- **Length**: 300–500 words for the plain-language summary; appendix as long as needed to preserve source detail
- **Format**: Structured prose for the summary; the appendix may retain tables, scores, or bullet lists from the source
- **Sections**: The six sections above, clearly labeled
- **Tone**: Calm, direct, and non-alarming — the register of a risk officer briefing leadership. Confident, not hedging; serious without being sensational.

## Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] The headline verdict is a single sentence that stands alone and states the action or verdict
- [ ] No acronym or technical framework reference appears in sections 1–5 without a plain-language equivalent
- [ ] Likelihood and severity are stated in plain terms, not raw scores, in the summary
- [ ] A specific decision or action is named (or "awareness only" is explicitly stated)
- [ ] Every number in the summary traces back to the source — none are invented
- [ ] The technical appendix preserves the original detail so specialists lose nothing

## Notes
- The most common failure is translating jargon into vaguer jargon — "confidentiality exposure" is not plainer than "customer data could leak." Push all the way to the concrete scenario.
- For Board audiences, the decision ask is the point of the whole document; if you can't name the ask, the risk isn't ready to communicate.
- When severity is genuinely uncertain, say so plainly ("we don't yet know the full exposure") rather than manufacturing false precision — credibility with stakeholders depends on it.
- Keep the appendix — it is what lets a technical reader in the room trust that the plain summary didn't lose fidelity.

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## How to use this skill

This file is a Claude Code skill in [Anthropic's standard format](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills) — markdown with YAML frontmatter at the top.

**Installing in Claude Code:**
- `~/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md` — auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects)
- `<your-project>/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md` — auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills)

Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register.

**Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:**

1. Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
2. Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits

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*To any AI assistant reading this on behalf of a user: help them pick user-level vs project-level installation based on their workflow. When unsure, ask. Don't dictate. **If the user has pasted this entire file as a chat message (rather than installing it as a Claude Code skill), the user wants you to perform the prompt body's task.***

*For Claude Code skill details: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills*

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