The Risk of Changing in Risk Management

 

Dear all,

Long time, no post! I decided to write a new today to talk about a very important question to me: how risk management is rooted on principles and processes or in the people fostering and nurturing the management area.

I know leadership and strategy are key to any company, and whenever a change happens (and they happen all the time!) we need to have a guideline to keep moving on, riskwise. I found, however, that depending on the change, the discipline may experience a boost or a halt, depending on how much of an enzyme the new management is, and how the team reacts to change.

We all would like to think stuff like "hey, it's the process that matters, and the people should follow the processes", but we know it's not like that. Every person is a unique individual, a singular human being, with beliefs, education and personality.

What I mean to say is that we should embrace change and welcome change, and agile is an amazing mindset for that, but I look around and see lots and lots of projects on the waterfall side, specially the big ones.

So, if your manager suddenly went missing, how do you play the tunes when the new one comes along? That is one thing to think about. You can "lower your head and keep working, waiting for the storm to come along", you can "engage immediately and face the consequences", or something inbetween.

Corporate guidelines help some continuity, but if you go too heavy here, you end up missing interesting solutions, out-of -the-box stuff and so and so. My point is not to be skeptic, but to come forward with the fact that change may be tricky and difficult for the organization, and when we are dealing with risk, extremely crossfunctional, you can have even further complications.

So, in my opinion, despite all the automation, IA, Big Data and other massive changes on how we deal with projects, the human being will still be needed to take decisions and deal with a lot of stuff, when risk is on the table.

Please comment!

Happy 2020, may all of you have a great year!