Editorial - Time for creativity

Editorial

Time for creativity

Tensions between Russia and NATO have escalated quickly and worryingly over what seems like just a few months. At the time of writing, war has come to Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine as Russian troops invade the country.

The impact has been huge. Refugees are pouring out of Ukraine, and financial and political sanctions threaten to reverse the global recovery from the pandemic. Rhetoric of nuclear war has added a potentially existential dimension to the crisis.

One must hope that a peaceful solution can be found soon.

While talk of resilience has been a watchword in the risk management community for several years, the threat of a European war suggests that such an approach is not sufficient to such large-scale disaster. The Oxford dictionary says that resilience is “an act of rebounding or springing back”. It even carries a connotation of “recoiling” from something.

Resilience, therefore, implies that organisations survive best by ending back up at the place they originally started out from. Clearly, we need a more suitable word to capture the concept of adapting to an unpredictable environment in a way that seeks to take us to a better place.

In IRM’s Risk predictions 2022 report, Michael Rasmussen, CMIRM, the Institute’s global ambassador in the United States, suggests that while resilience is necessary, it needs a healthy dose of agility to prevent businesses ending back up at the beginning every time a risk materialises.

“Agility is the ability to understand the environment and engage to advance the organisation and its goals,” he writes. “Organisations need to be agile and resilient.”

Given the unpredictable nature of today’s world, Rasmussen encourages risk managers not just to crunch the numbers but to critically reflect on the risk models they use and, above all, be creative. Risk managers need to see how the variables in the environment – both obvious and abstract – can intersect in novel ways to prevent the organisation reaching its objectives.

“That requires creatively thinking about risk and risk event scenarios,” he says. “This requires us to explore intuitively complex relationships of risks to other risks and objectives.”

One area that such an approach will be needed is the metaverse – the emerging interactive communication system. Alexander Larsen’s feature in this issue of the magazine (Welcome to the metaverse, pp 18-23) demonstrates its potential reach and scale. No business will be unaffected – but how many are prepared? How many boards have plotted their metaverse strategies? How many risk departments have assessed the risks and opportunities to their organisations?

While resilience will always have a place in every organisation’s risk strategy, sometimes leaping into a better future requires some muchneeded faith in human creativity.

Arthur Piper Editor