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The Case for Strategic Risk Management

At last week’s RIMS 2019 in Boston, a group of risk professionals got together for the panel session “NextGen ERM: Strategic Risk Management” to discuss the advantages of strategic risk management (SRM) and the challenges to successfully integrating it into organizations.

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The panel examined several major organizations that have taken shortcuts with training or even rushed to out-duel a competitor, failing to consider the long-term impact on strategy, reputation and market-share. Blockbuster, Kodak and Sears failed to innovate, and these once-thriving name brands are now prime examples of SRM’s benefits.

“Blackberry is one such company, but there are countless examples of organizations that have overlooked the long-term strategic impact of their actions,” said Marian Cope, owner of CopeRisk LLC.

Despite recent corporate missteps tied to failures in long-term strategic analysis, as recently discussed in Risk Management, risk professionals still face resistance to their SRM initiatives. “Demonstrating the value of SRM has to be a priority for risk professionals if they hope to gain buy-in from leadership,” said Rick Roberts, director of risk management and employee benefits at Ensign-Bickford Industries and a former RIMS president.

One of the value propositions of SRM—and an easy one for leadership to support—is the focus on taking advantage of risks that can accelerate the achievement of strategic objectives. “Artificial intelligence is an example of a disruptive technology that is impacting many industries. But, if your organization is aware of it, understands its usefulness and has developed a plan for it, it can give you a competitive edge,” said Marian Cope, owner of CopeRisk LLC.

But the case for an SRM initiative should not just be made with cautionary tales of organizations that did not use SRM. “Don’t just share failures, it’s also important to share SRM successes,” said Ellen Dunkin, senior vice president, general counsel and chief risk officer at Amalgamated Life Insurance Co. “Even Amazon and their business model that gives consumers almost instant access to their purchases has adjusted its strategy and started to open brick-and-mortar shops.”

According to the panel, the risk professional should ideally be involved in strategic planning from the get-go. “Some organizations have a chief risk officer that participates in the preparation as well as the strategic planning and decision-making discussions. Unfortunately, that’s not the norm,” Cope said.

The panel identified the next-best option for risk professionals, which is to work from the strategic objectives established by the organization. From there, they need to analyze the business model, identify, assess, and prioritize the risks that can derail or accelerate achieving the strategic objectives, facilitate the development of appropriate risk responses, and then align such objectives, risks, and risk responses with operations.

An effective SRM program will incorporate plans for a risk strategy, communications strategy, implementation, and training with the goal of integrating strategic risk management into decision-making processes. “The risk professional is going to require support from others in the organization too.

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They’re going to need risk champions to vouch for them, as well as a final presentation that includes achievable and measurable deliverables that demonstrate the value of the process,” Roberts said.

SRM can be a stand-alone program or a component of ERM. Regardless, the panel noted that SRM is vital to the long-term success of organizations as alignment of strategy and operations results in the identification of opportunities to accelerate achievement of strategic objectives and prevents operational blunders that will trigger strategic risks (e.g., substantial reputational harm). Accordingly, SRM as a stand-alone program allows risk professionals to add more value while streamlining the process.

“SRM is the next generation of ERM and identifies external and strategic risks as opposed to the more granular view for ERM. It allows the team to bring the top 10 key risks to leadership, with a focus on the top two to three as opposed to overwhelming them with the full risk register that could include 100,” said Ellen Shew Holland, higher education practice leader for Hanover Stone Partners LLC and president of Strategic Risk Frameworks LLC.

Ultimately, the group agreed, SRM will help fully integrate risk management programs into an organization’s business model and the value should be evident in each positive step the business takes toward achieving its strategic objectives.

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How a Strong(er) SRM Program Could Have Helped Boeing

A strategic risk management (SRM) program is designed to assist organizations in identifying, prioritizing, and planning for the strategic risks that could impair or destroy businesses and reduces the chances of these kinds of crises. And while hindsight is 20-20, an SRM program – or a more effective one – could have helped Boeing avoid some of its recent high-profile crises.

Between October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes involving the Boeing 300 737 MAX 8 models resulted in the loss of 346 lives. Since then, Boeing has:

  • had a possible criminal investigation commenced against it,
  • lost $22 billion in market value in the week following the Ethiopian Airlines’ crash in October,
  • had more than 300 737 MAX 8s grounded worldwide,
  • sustained significant reputational harm,
  • received demands from airlines seeking compensation for lost revenue,
  • been sued by crash victims’ families, and
  • had sales orders cancelled or suspended.

This is a crisis from which it may be difficult to recover.

One could trace back some of the risks to its decades-long rivalry with Airbus and an effort to remain viable.

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When American Airlines indicated it was close to finalizing an exclusive deal with Airbus for hundreds of new jets, Boeing sprung to action. The New York Times reported that Boeing employees then had to move at “roughly double the normal pace” to avoid losing “billions in lost sales and potentially thousands of jobs.”

An SRM program would have required an assessment of the business model and the associated risks, including competitors, long before the call from the CEO of American Airlines. The risks would have been prioritized and this information would have been factored into strategic plans that would have included responses to material risks.

During the scramble, Boeing mirrored Airbus’ operations and mounted larger engines in existing models.

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 The objective seemed straightforward: Make minimum changes to avoid the need for training in a simulator, decrease costs, and build the redesigned model quickly. But a risk was that mounting larger engines changed the aerodynamics in the aircraft, requiring a consequential need for new software, a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) which was supposed to prevent stalling. Boeing’s view was that pilots did not need to be trained on the software and federal regulators agreed.

However, in an effective SRM program the C-Suite would have been advised that the strategic and life safety risks were material and that training for pilots was indeed necessary.  In addition, all such risks would have been assessed to determine whether they could be used to obtain a competitive advantage.

For example, including vital safety features in the base cost of aircraft (as opposed to charging extra for them) and requiring a focus group of pilots with no financial relationship with Boeing to test the newly designed 737 MAX 8s and the MCAS system would have been a way to solidify Boeing’s reputation for safety first.

An SRM program, which monitors progress in achieving strategic objectives with a focus on continuous improvement, would have looked at the Indonesian Lion Air and the Ethiopian Airlines crashes as an opportunity to confirm that Boeing puts safety first by grounding the aircraft. Instead, Boeing urged the U.S. to keep flying its jets until after 42 regulators in other countries had grounded them and appeared to care more about economics than life safety. Only seven months ago, Boeing was synonymous with efficient jet planes and commercial aviation – it was a reputation that took decades to build. Now, the company has a long, uphill climb to resolve its many challenges and rebuild its brand.

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An SRM program cannot succeed without full support from the C-Suite as it has to be integrated into the business model and decision-making processes in order to be effective, and in time we will learn more about what risk management protocols were followed across Boeing’s organization.

At RIMS 2019, Marian Cope will lead a panel of industry experts in discussing reasons to transform an ERM program into a SRM program or develop a SRM program in NextGen ERM:  Strategic Risk Management. The session will take place April 29th at 1:30 pm.

RIMS Risk Maturity Model: Performance Management

In the study measuring effects of enterprise risk management (ERM) maturity—as  defined by the RIMS Risk Maturity Model (RMM) assessment—no attribute had a more meaningful impact on bottom line corporate value than Performance Management. The correlation is not an accident. While many organizations say they have an effective handle on risk, their ability to execute the policies and procedures they’ve put into place are severely lacking.

The sixth RMM attribute of ERM Maturity, Performance Management, measures the ability for an organization to execute vision and strategy through the effective use of a balanced scorecard.

Balanced Scorecard

The root of the balanced scorecard concept lies in the desire to turn complex but passive strategic plans into marching orders and commitment that can be executed on a daily basis. The methods of accomplishing this result are familiar to risk managers: developing standardized criteria, prioritizing activities, and monitoring results.

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To execute the Balanced Scorecard concept, corporations typically have a whole host of measures for monitoring control activity effectiveness, but what is consistently lacking is a means to measure the effectiveness of how the control activity is addressing performance goals. Risk bridges this gap.

The Role of Risk

Every business faces the challenge of cutting costs and making changes. After all, all activities are critically important to someone. So how do you assure that the greater good of the organization gets prioritized?

Linking risk to performance for a risk adjusted decision addresses this challenge.

Examples of performance management in the absence of a risk-based Balanced Scorecard are widespread. BP knew back in 2002 that a lack of pipeline maintenance could result in “catastrophe,” but management instead prioritized the short term operational budget in the interests of cutting maintenance costs. More recently, the U.S. government has dealt with criminal investigations into the Veterans Health Administration’s inability to deliver care to U.S. veterans, due to “significant and chronic system failures.” In the case of the VA scandal, monitoring metrics were improperly controlled and focused on the wrong measures of success.

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The result was falsified reports created in the interest of demonstrating compliance with policy, rather than execution of strategy.

A Seat at the Table

Involving risk in strategic decision making is the essence of performance management. In every failure we’ve documented, the risks were known, but rarely given a seat at the table. Organizations with mature enterprise risk management (ERM) programs have empowered their risk managers to take action and use ERM tools to support and provide transparency to the organization’s strategic plan.

To learn how Enterprise Risk Management adds transparency and discipline to an organizations strategic planning and performance management process, watch our webinar, “What is Strategic ERM.

The Many Paths to a Career in Risk

Over the years, I’ve had no shortage of people ask me how they can get my job as a senior risk leader. They see the possibilities and get a strong sense that risk management just might be a pretty interesting career track. Oftentimes these folks are sitting in some insurance related sub-function within the broader industry, anything from claims to loss control to underwriting and brokerage. Interestingly, many people who have had this experience (who are essentially developing specialists in these sub-functions) have frequently found that skill transferability from these specialized areas, to their “profession,” was often fraught with hurdles.

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I have seen a parallel mind-set throughout much of my career in various industries in which I sought alternate employment. Most commonly it was in the manufacturing or health care sectors that insisted that any leader in their ranks, most especially a risk manager, needed to come from within their industry. They were the true believers and were typically inflexible about this minimum requirement.  They believed their industries were just too specialized and unique for a risk manager from another industry to succeed. They would argue that they didn’t want to invest in allowing the development of the full skill-sets or that their world could or should be learned by those coming from other industries, especially for a mid- to senior-level manager.

Needless to say, I disagreed vehemently with this view and with others in the insurance industry holding these inflexible positions, often to their detriment. Happily, in the last five years, some more progressive leaders in certain industries like health care are beginning to revise these positions in favor of seeing the value in having the new eyes, ears and perspectives that can only come from those experienced in industries other than their own. A good trend indeed.

As a practical matter, I have to mention that my most recent career move into a more strategic, brand enhancing role with a third party administrator has flummoxed a few peers and friends. These folks saw me as moving in the wrong direction, when in fact I was taking a substantive leap forward into long term strategic contributions that have, in fact, been the perfect segue to where I’d wanted to move at this point in my risk career. Coincidentally, my forte since 2001 and the future of the discipline, enterprise risk management, calls for a very specific move in a strategic direction that aligns with the long term interests of enterprises and their commitment to mission accomplishment.

So is there a preferred best strategy to preparing for a career in risk management? The truth is that while many of us developed the skills and experience that have been most valuable by rotating through the various insurance industry disciplines, there are now myriad ways to find your path into risk management and make it a career. From finance to legal to audit and especially spending time in operations, all these experiences pave part of the way toward success. They are a portion of what risk leaders need most to succeed in this era of a broader more diverse practice of risk management, call it enterprise risk management, strategic risk management, international risk management or just plain risk management, as I prefer.

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In fact, a successful risk manager is one who needs a broad exposure to most core functions common to almost all entities of any complexity. At the end of the day, it’s hard to go wrong in preparing for a risk career, no matter where you spend time getting knowledge about the many sources of exposure that must be “risk managed.”