Risk Management Lessons from 2020

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

 

Introduction

The year 2020 could be the push factor for organizations to guarantee that their risk management teams are diverse in skills, background, and thought.

When it came to foreseeing what would have happened, almost no one had foresight. In one way or another, even the most refined management environments were blindsided by what happened.

 

Emerging risks

Pandemics are typically once-in-a-lifetime events, which is why organizations wound up being so ill-prepared.

Many professionals in finance figured the disturbance would come from artificial intelligence or digitization.

Some organizations seem to have been a little more aware of the various possibilities than their counterparts in the UK and Europe.

While some firms may have had pandemics and health risks among their threat factors for 2020. The recognition remained theoretical.

 

Disaster preparation

Experts convey that organizations that had anticipated other nature; for example, earthquakes were probably more ready.

Firms situated in tremor zones had moderation designs set up – including plans for working from home and relying on online interactions. They found much of these responses applicable to the pandemic.

Around the time countries went into lockdown, many organizations’ critical needs included liquidity, changing to remote-working, guaranteeing the flexibility and vigor of their IT frameworks, and even applying for external financial support.

 

Company image

Some organizations that laid off staff might have gained negative media mentions if they were aiming to sack them during such a difficult period.

Organizations needed to ensure that their specialists were well versed with communication strategies.

 

Risk as a corporate language

To explore their way through future crises that may be long-lasting, organizations must re-evaluate their risk management teams.

Risk must be wholly considered to the business as an ongoing factor and not merely talked about at executive gatherings. It should be more than just compliance or back-office functions.

Building a company-wide understanding of risk is an essential requirement in achieving growth and sustainability.

Creating a company-wide awareness of risk is a significant basic component. It empowers persons to tackle the relevant issues at hand and is critical for firm survival.

 

Collaborative approaches

Risk appetite frameworks can’t be created and stored in siloes. The pandemic has proven so. Such outlines should be easily understood and supported at all company levels.

Senior management should include workers from across the organization right from the start and enable them to personalize the initiative.

Frameworks should be built for the long term, connected to the corporate mission, communicated through the organization, and ultimately adopted as a dynamic decision-making tool.

If it ends up on the shelves, only occasionally pulled by regulators and auditors, that would be an epic waste of time and effort.

 

Good governance

Successful management needs a company-wide governance structure that makes risk a strong focus for everyone. We quickly note that without strong administration, strategies can be met with not only resistance but failure.

The board has to realize what is to be done in a controlled way and have an adequate advisory group overseeing the related exercises. Management needs to be responsible for identifying all threats across the firm.

A reasonable evaluation of whether your management is healthy from board to employees can include assessing scenarios that were anticipated.

This, regardless of whether they were successfully alleviated, and whether alternate arrangements functioned well.

 

Reversing trends

Rather than burning time on current dangers, boards will need to invest their energy on emerging risks as well. It helps not to be taken by surprise when the unexpected happens.

Yet, as organizations quickly transform, they also need to reprioritize where risks exist. If your business is shifting towards the cloud, then cloud-native threats become number 1 on the risk agenda.

Recent years have seen numerous organizations depending on globalized supply chains, and outsource IT overseas in the primary pursuit of efficiency instead of resilience.

This increases organizational exposure to global systemic risks. Many of these trends may reverse post-2020.

 

Environmental change

There is also a risk that organizations are currently so distracted with the immediate-related issues that they take their eyes off other important issues such as climate change.

There is a chance that companies have cast a blind eye to their ecological, social, and governance initiatives because of the high cost of navigating the pandemic.

Some experts estimate that climate change will wreak havoc on at least 2% of the world’s financial assets in the coming forty years.

Yes, climate financial risk is now a part of the emerging risk conversation.

 

Summary

It is said that the future belongs to risk-takers. The pandemic has shed light on the many loopholes in strategies of many management teams around the world.

While risks may come with silver linings of great value, without proper analysis and management, the outcome can be disastrous.

 

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