Redstone Risk visits Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) to deliver a guest lecture on operational and strategic risk management.
This month we left the snowy South West to travel to sunny Glasgow to give a guest lecture on ‘our take’ on operational and strategic risk management to 4th year BA and MSc students.
We framed the discussion around our ethos of making risk information useful to decision-makers, challenging the group to view operational and strategic risk as two sides of the same coin rather than two fundamentally different concepts.
By presenting two real-life case studies demonstrating that risk management isn’t about managing risks at all; it’s about enhancing performance by embedding risk thinking into business decisions, we were able to show that risk management is most effective when viewed through a strategic lens. In other words, to be genuinely useful as risk managers we need to have a strategic mindset. We need to understand the objectives and intended benefits of both the project and wider enterprise and help decision-makers make better informed decisions by delivering easy to understand, visually engaging, quantitative risk information at the point of need.
We didn’t want to just present nice words and good-sounding theory – we wanted to provide practical advice to the next generation of risk professionals. Our case studies helped explain the significance of the ‘data journey’ in risk management and how we can support the effective communication of risk information to the executive. We then put this into practice by facilitating a group consulting exercise that challenged the group to think like risk consultants, which generated some great discussions.
So, what was the key takeaway from the lecture? … We are not operational or strategic risk managers; we are enablers and facilitators of strategic decision-making. It’s a matter of mindset.
