Catch up on the ERM Forum
Members who missed Airmic’s annual ERM Forum on 3 November can still catch up on all the content and download the presentations on the virtual platform. Leading speakers from BHP, KPMG, Aon and Marsh were among the experts who shared their knowledge and insight on the challenges ahead for risk professionals.
Titled Accelerating the risk intelligent organisation, the varied programme addressed business and organisational resilience, corporate purpose and risk management in the boardroom.
Robb Eadie, Chief Risk Officer at BHP, provided a keynote address titled ‘The CRO perspective: Reimaging risk’, while Dr Beverley Adams, Consulting Director, Strategic Risk Group, Marsh Advisory, presented on a 3-point winter action plan for flood/climate resilience.
Discussing a topic Mr Eadie says has consumed the past four years of his life, he outlined how BHP has gone through an exercise of reimaging their risk.
“Crisis gives us an opportunity to take a fresh look at the things we think we do well, but which events tell us that we don’t. They hold a mirror up to the organisation,” he explained.
“The first stage in any crisis is response, followed by reassurance and then into recovery.”
In BHP’s case the crisis was the Samarco dam disaster of 2015 in Brazil, which killed 19 people and devastated two villages. In Mr Eadie’s presentation he talked through how BHP used the crisis to reimagine the organisation’s risk and the controls they had in place.
Mary O’Connor, Chief Risk Officer at KPMG, addressed risk in the boardroom saying when you get it wrong it can wreck everything.
“Ultimately, there is no reward or success unless you take risks,” Ms O’Connor told the ERM Forum. “The board is ultimately responsible for deciding how much risk the company takes. Some people call that the ‘risk appetite’, but ultimately it is how you put together your strategy.
“Are you going to have a strategy that requires you to take a lot of risk and then how are you going to go about doing that? Are you going to do that is a risky way, or a safe way? The board is responsible for making sure management is making the right trade-offs.”
The Forum also featured the Great ERM Special Interest Group with special guest Michalle Wucker, a speaker, strategist and author who‘s 2016 book – The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore – has sold over 300,000 copies.
To catch up on all the panels and presenations from the ERM Forum, visit the site here.