2020 is changing the way we 'Do Risk and Resilience' forever

You are the CRO. Responsible for measuring risk impacts due to not only the pandemic, but multiple uncertainties ranging from disrupted supply chains, economic impacts to historic wildfires and hurricanes.

How you and your teams do risk and resilience management is transforming today and will evolve tomorrow and every day into the future as we adapt to these crises. We are compelled to raise risk management to a new level.

As organisations deal with this unprecedented global emergency, leaders must plan, act, and adapt to ever-widening repercussions on a near-real time basis. A simple and clear way to look at this is through a Plan-Act-Adapt framework.

• PLAN - Know your hot spots to prioritise action plans and execution efforts
• ACT - Keep a tight handle on the right actions to take through dynamic risk and resilience intelligence
• ADAPT - As a crisis unfolds, know how and when to shift resources and adjust business processes

But for now, let’s focus on how your risk team’s mission role has changed in three critical ways –Velocity, Agility and Interconnectedness – and how we can use technology to support this transformation in our rapidly evolving digital world. 

Your Number One Mission: Get critical information on your organisation’s risk and resilience response to the right stakeholders.  As the CRO, you need to provide this information quickly to help your stakeholders make the decisions that make the difference.

How to do this?

1. Drive High-Velocity into your Risk program: Velocity of response will drive your organisations’ resilience.

Risk management teams now need to know in near-real time the context and relative impact of new risks. This is becoming more and more crucial when prioritising efforts for response and remediation that strengthens resilience. Speed in visualising and communicating trends, trajectories and metrics that predict scope, impact and preparedness are now table stakes for informing day-to-day operations.

To drive high velocity into your risk program, second-line processes need rapid alignment and integration so that risk management, information technology, human resource, compliance and crisis management teams across the organisation can focus on hot spots, make decisions on high priority remediations and be able to pivot on a dime – all while working from home in a new digital, cloud-based eco-system.

Technology helps by automating digital processes and mapping the universe of processes, people, and projects into an accurate, common view of the overall situation. Technology helps by monitoring incidents reported by employees and your extended enterprise vendors and partners. Technology is the only way we can drive higher velocity into our risk programs – allowing us to effectively traverse the risk landscape and related organisations, policies, projects, vendors, employees and business resilience status. 

2. Make Agility a Critical Success Factor: The ability to act decisively is the difference between riding the wave and being ridden by it.

Leaders now need to act swiftly and smartly with response strategies tied to specific action plans. At the same time, teams need a single place stay on top of and informed by the global picture. Who needs to know what information? Risk teams now need to help discern when and how to bring in incidents, observations and issues from the front line, and quickly volley back new processes, policies and procedures. What’s the latest revision of the playbook based on what works?

Technology helps with common platforms and integrated apps that can adjust the picture with critical, real-time access to dashboards and feeds from agencies such as the WHO, CDC, national, regional, and local health and industry organisations. Technology helps with workflow-driven communications which is essential for governance, accountability and transparency. Technology helps with chatbots embedded into our day-to-day work apps to receive and triage inquiries and reported incidents, and clearly communicate policy and procedures detailing how to respond. Technology helps deliver the right information to key stakeholders: employees, customers, the board and senior management, stakeholders, first responders, partners and others.

3.  Interconnected Risk Intelligence: Co-relating multiple risks is required to see the overall trajectory

Business leaders now need to understand how these new risks interconnect with shifts in national, local industry, health and security risks. It’s the combined impact of these factors that shift the trajectory. Risk teams need to measure and predict many risk is concert - workforce changes, logistical delays or challenges in arranging alternative supply chains. When could/should the organisation expect a change – is an office, critical supplier or region rising to a peak or recovering with increasing containment? When will this shift? What are the factors – what other risks could affect the timing of moving much needed resources? How will you adapt?

Technology helps by synthesising and correlating factors from your organisations’ digital universe – customers, vendors, partners and the front line – in order to understand the overall risk to affected business units, locations, facilities, customers and products - for example when an office/region needs to shut down or when the supply chain breaks. Technology can leverage analytics to proactively assess and provide scorecards on third parties, vendors, and supplier ecosystems – as well as specific processes over the cloud or on mobile devices.

The bottom line 

Risk and Resilience containment programs require an unprecedented increase in Velocity, Agility and Interconnectedness to support the decisive intervention needed to flatten the curve, keep front-line employees safe while continuing to serve customers, and align with vendors, suppliers and third parties. With the help of best practices and technology, risk teams can rise to the challenge and make that happen.