CERM® Risk Insights

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

One man’s meat is another man’s poison” as coined over 2000 years ago by the Roman poet Lucretius still rings true today.  In these days of recycling, it’s akin to “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.  But what about toxicity?

Everything is toxic!  It’s just a matter of concentration and tolerance.  Just look at oxygen and water, both are essential to human life, but both can kill if there’s too much or too little of either.  Oscar Wilde, amongst others, is attributed with saying, “Everything in moderation, including moderation” providing a modern-day qualification to Socrates’ original of ‘nothing in excess”.  But moderation or excess are matters of opinion.

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Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure you do things differently from everyone else.
Sara Blakely – Founder of Spanx

Robots are coming is a common refrain in Tech Futures. Robots and smart machines are doing a lot of our work and will do a lot more over the next few years. Take a look below:

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Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Cultures rise and cultures fall.  That’s a fact.  We’ve had the Aztecs and Mayans of Central America, the Hittites of Asia Minor, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs as well as classical Greece and the times of Alexander the Great.  Genghis Kahn and his Mongol hoards created an empire and cultures that once dominated much of the known world. 

In more recent times we’ve experienced a few short-lived cultures.  Some, albeit too politically and morally sensitive to mention, only lasted for a matter of years despite proclaiming that they would last a millennium.

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Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Everyone comes to their workplace with the expectation, and often a clear plan, for an incident/accident-free day. And many times, the day goes just as planned, however 2.3 million people do not return home after work, they are killed by work related accidents and occupational exposures and diseases every single day, this corresponds to over 6000 deaths every single day.

That is only the tip of the iceberg, in addition there are around 340 million occupational accidents and another 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually, many of which are life changing, not only to the victim, but often for whole families

These events are often sudden; someone or something is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at that moment, perhaps only a split second, an incident or accident takes place.

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Guest Post by Howard Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the difference between Agile and business agility and how Agile 2 addresses some of the omissions and failings of traditional Agile.  Both Agile and Agile 2 focus on accelerating digital development; however, the benefits of any Agile approach can be obviated if it is not implemented within an agile management structure.  Addressing execution issues, as Agile 2 does, will not be sufficient by itself to get you where you need to go. 

Achieving business agility will also require that you reformulate your company into an agile organization capable of increasing the iteration speed of the Strategy-Execution Cycle we presented in the previous article.  This article will focus on aspects of what that will look like.

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Lengthy reigns at the top may be the next thing to get disrupted.
Carol Ryan – Wall Street Journal Writer

What’s the CEOs role in VUCA time? What do you think? According to the Wall Street Journal. “Point people to the light at the end of the tunnel” (Crash Course in Crisis Management, Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2020)

Story: The challenge: some CEOs are unfit for VUCA duty. In other words, they are not ‘VUCA or future-ready’. Take a look at what investors say in the Self Disruptive Leader survey from Korn Ferry (BTW: Pre-COVID:

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There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do.
Brad Stone – Journalist & Author

Consulting firms, academics, and consultants are developing Future Of Work models. Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) developed a scenario called the Future of Work: A Journey to 2022. The premise of the study is: “disruptive innovations are creating new industries and business models, and destroying old ones.” (‘The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022’, PwC, 2014).

 PwC outlined three distinct worlds of work: Orange, Green, and Blue.

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Guest Post by Matt Fieldman (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

The NASCAR pit stop – it’s exciting, intense, and can mean the difference between winning and losing a race. Accomplishing the three simultaneous necessities of moving quickly, completing each job with perfection, and having a flawlessly coordinated team seem impossible, yet it happens right in front of your eyes. The feedback is immediate: either the car gets off in less than ten seconds, and the driver can compete for a spot on the podium, or it doesn’t, and your race is over.

Outside of the racetrack, could the NASCAR pit stop be the answer to exciting young people about manufacturing? Could you use lessons from NASCAR to improve your company’s teamwork?

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Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

True risks are often different than perceived risks. Due to human curiosity, the desire to sell news, 24-hour-a-day news blitz, and current trends, some folks have a distorted sense of risks. Most often, people fear the lesser or trivial risks and fail to respect the significant dangers faced every day.

We live in a dangerous world. Yet it is also a world safer in many ways than it has ever been. Life expectancy is up. Infant mortality is down. Diseases that only recently were mass killers have been all but eradicated. Advances in public health, medicine, environmental regulation, food safety, and worker protection have dramatically reduced many of the major risks we faced just a few decades ago.

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I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful.
Elon Musk – Entrepreneur

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots conjure images of killer robots like the Terminator movie.

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Guest Post by Howard Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

If you are running a business today, you probably incorporate digital elements in your products and services.  At the very least, you employ digital technology in the operation of your business.  It’s likely that you have adopted an Agile framework and possibly even DevOps processes.  It’s also likely that you are not getting the productivity boost from it that you should.

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What happens if an autonomous AI robot has preemptive authority to use deadly force to ensure its safety or the public’s safety ?  We are not too far from this when autonomous robots will have risk based, problem solving and decision making capabilities and even statutory authorities.

Last week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave the San Francisco Police Department authority to use killer robots.  The vote was 8 to 3 to approve robo cops.  San Francisco is the most liberal city in the United States. Oakland and other cities are thinking the same.

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There are several risk management solutions that organisations can implement to strengthen their organisational culture to create a positive ‘risk culture’ outcome.

These organisational practices include:

1. Create an accountable organisation.
2. Implement the appropriate organisational design.
3. Create awareness of the strategic benefits of risk management.
4. Create an effective risk governance structure.
5. Create an effective risk function.
6. Hire the right personality to head the risk function.
7. Create a just and psychologically safe culture.
8. Formalise informal risk communications.
9. Create clear escalation and reporting pathways and trigger points.
10. Simplify risk management tools, activities, and processes.

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Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Seeing eye dogs, or guide dogs, are so well trained that they know right from wrong.  Even though their ‘master’ gives an order the trained canine won’t obey unless it’s safe; and that’s what we call intelligent disobedience.  The dog is praised for exhibiting such behaviour.  However, in corporate and project management circles, and despite the need for human intelligence enhanced through training, qualifications and experience, such behaviour is often branded as just plain disobedient.

Many organisations have some set of rules and regulations which govern expected norms of behaviour.  They form part of an organisation’s culture and such ‘expectations’ become some form of ethical standard.  Great…when there is ‘business as usual’.  But in a crisis standard operating procedures tend not to apply.  These situations, as well as people, can become heated and with heat can come fire and the tell-tale smoke that things aren’t quite right.

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Guest Post by Alex Sidorenko (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In 2021, risk team implemented a quantitative risk-based approach to insurance renewals which resulted in reducing the cost of insurance by 60% and improving the quality of coverage across all insurance lines. This approach allowed us to save, or rather pay a fair price for insurance across the globe. Key to success was not to rely on market “best practices”, but on testing various hypotheses in the market and relying on data.

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