Seeing risk before it strikes
On 2 July, senior operational risk, safety and resilience leaders from across HSE, Risk, Operations, HR, ESG and Regulatory functions came together in London for the first session of the Operational Risk Management Community of Leaders.
Three patterns ran through the day: the exposure organisations worry about most is usually already sitting in data they hold; the incentives and governance structures in place often work against surfacing it; and Boards are rarely equipped to ask the right questions of what does reach them. What followed wasn't a presentation. It was a mirror, and the room spent the rest of the day working out what to do about what it saw.
When polled* at the outset, the room made that instinct concrete: asked which risk their board was least prepared for today, 75% of leaders chose governance failure — the questions we never pursued — ahead of reputational collapse (17%), personal liability (8%), or even the human cost of people harmed under their watch (0%). The gap, in other words, was not in awareness of what can go wrong, but in whether the right questions are being asked before it does.
*The poll drew twelve responses from the senior leaders present.
The uncomfortable questions of the day
The questions put to the room by dss+ UK Director Paul McNeillis, hosting the event, were twofold: firstly, with budgets tightening everywhere, how do you make a powerful business case for investing in truly pro-active operational risk management, particularly when, judging by lagging indicators, “nothing appears to be going wrong”? Secondly, when you do have the attention of the Executive and the Board, how do you marshal evidence and insight to communicate with them in a way that enables them to make well-informed decisions, such as which risk mitigation measures to prioritise and what investments to make. “In times like these, risk professionals need help in sharpening their case,” McNeillis explained, drawing on dss+ interactions with its UK clients and wider risk networks over the last 12 months.