Business Strategy
Risk Management – Innovative Processes for Anticipating and Scaling Corporate Risk
In-Person at the RAF Club, London, & Live-streamed Meeting
For years if not decades, catastrophic events like the risk of a global pandemic or
the outbreak of a major war have sat passively on company risk registers. Few of the
executives doing the risk analysis seriously expected such events to happen and even
fewer spent much time preparing for them.
At the Davos meeting in January 2022, the global business leaders surveyed put ‘Geo-economic Confrontation’ at a distant 10th on their list of severe global risks. Only 15% of the respondents ranked it a severe threat in the next 2-5 years. A month after the conference, Russia invaded Ukraine and the study of corporate risk was reborn.
Clearly these types of risk were ‘foreseeable’, and many have claimed in retrospect to have ‘foreseen’ them. Yet the business world appeared totally unprepared for the devastation that was about to descend. So has there been a sea change in the approach to Risk Management? How will the growing prevalence of these more extreme forms of risk impact on businesses processes in the coming decade. If you cannot predict the
risk, the key is to have resilient processes to react to the risk.
Political volatility, climate change, demographic pressures and economic shocks will continue to impact on businesses over the coming decade. Any alignment of these factors could produce ‘perfect storm’ crises, putting significant pressure on the global economy, on world trade and on business operations. To these we can add the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the ‘Black Swan’ world – and the ‘Green Swan’ risks from a global shift to Carbon Net Zero, the implications of which no-one yet fully understands.
What is the contribution of Risk Management in helping companies successfully to balance the types of risks that will make the difference between thriving, merely surviving or ceasing to exist. Traditional approaches to risk management will be ineffective when faced with the combined and cumulative risks of the future. The scale and speed of future events threaten to leave little room for trial-and-error learning. In this new world order, drawing on the cumulative resources and imagination of the organisation has never been so important. Can the organisation rapidly bring together and deploy the right people to respond to an unforeseen event? This need for organisational capacity and capability takes the anticipation and management of corporate risk into the heart of the HR and Reward profession.
In this session we will hear from experts at the leading edge of critical thinking on risk management. Those who have deep practical experience in developing innovative processes for proactively managing corporate risk.
Speaker
Julia Graham
CEO, Airmic
Julia is the CEO of Airmic, the association for risk management and insurance professionals. She has a background in international insurance, enterprise risk management and compliance, with four decades in a global insurance company and a global law firm. She is Vice President of the International Federation of Risk and Insurance Management Associations (IFRIMA), and Chair of the Risk Committee for the British Standards Institution (BSI). Julia is a Crown Representative for the Cabinet Office, focusing on risk and insurance.
