On Wednesday, April 26, from 8:30 am – 9:30 am Gert Cruywagen (Director of Risk Management for Tsogo Sun and author of the book “Jungle Risk Management”) and I will be presenting on a subject many risk professionals struggle with: identifying and exploiting the upside of risk for value creation. Because traditional risk management has been oriented around loss events and their pretty uniformly negative consequences, the positive aspect of risk is hardly recognizable. More significantly, opportunities to create value are overlooked or ignored as risk leaders find themselves in a nearly constant “hair on fire” mode dealing with the losses that can consume their teams and their time.
An opportunity is not merely the upside of a downside risk but those standalone opportunities that define an organization's core purpose and add value to its strategic planning. This session will take a look at how the King IV Corporate Governance Code, launched in 2016 by the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa, adds this dimension to risk governance. It will enable attendees to explore the broader definition of your role as a risk leader. It will allow attendees to evaluate the suitability of risk management methodologies for opportunity management and the value that can come from this approach to managing risks. It will examine the many stumbling blocks to both organizational and personal success as well as considering the alternate ways to communicate with and report to your C-suite and board.
The value of risk management is often a question about which the C-suite and business unit management often press for better answers. While Total Cost of Risk (TCOR) is a common and usually well received measure, risk managers need more ways to prove their value and gain management and board commitments to greater investment in managing risk. Over the last decade, practitioners have found new and innovative ways to gain influence, show value, measure success differently and fuel their own personal success as a result. For some this has been the path from middle management to the C suite. This session will review the various ways successful risk managers tell their story, drive innovation in their function, gain deeper commitment to their strategies and the effect it has on not just their organizations but also their career trajectories.
Some of the many topics we’ll cover in this interactive session include: defining and redefining risk; Identifying both threats and opportunities; passive versus active opportunity identification; the various and alternative roles of risk leaders who take this broader view; useful risk management methodologies; and the potential stumbling blocks of taking this approach.
Chris Mandel, SVP and Director, Sedgwick Institute