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The diversity of culture BY ARTHUR PIPER
Organisations looking to create a single culture to manage risk are on the wrong path. Not only is it impossible but could lead to less balanced risk decisions, as Martha Phillips found out
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f the pandemic served as a wake-up call for organisations to get to grips with operational risk, the conflict in Ukraine has been yet another reminder that large-scale, unpredictable events can happen at any time and anywhere. These sudden shocks have come at a time of increased geopolitical tension globally and burgeoning risks from cyberattack, a failure to digitalise, climate change and shifting social expectations around working practices and diversity and inclusion. “The nature of emerging risks is that they are becoming more difficult to evaluate,” Martha Phillips, head of operational risk at Enterprise Risk
AXA Health and a PhD candidate at the University of York, says. “Companies can monitor threats but knowing how and when to mobilise is challenging and costly. It’s difficult to know which trends will remain, which will accelerate and which won’t materialise at all. We are also facing new risks that humans have no prior experience of managing.”
Forty years of political and economic integration in many parts of the globe have made risks more interconnected than ever so that individual threats have become harder to isolate, she believes. The war in Ukraine has most immediately, for example, impacted business’ supply chains, regulatory and reputational risk, and cyber risk. But longer-term
As risk and control professionals, we can’t just deal with today’s organisation anymore and the issues that we know about 10
