Effective risk management a combination of prediction and planning

There is no such thing as a bullet-proof risk management program, but careful consideration of potential risks go a long way to bettering the speed and quality of a response, said Richard Worzel, futurist, told delegates during an Ontario Risk and Insurance Management Society (ORIMS) session.
Worzel is a futurist — not someone who predicts the future, but someone who helps people plan and prepare for uncertainty. “Which is exactly what risk management is,” he said, during the Oct. 21 seminar in Oakville.
Risk management, from a futurist approach, is “the process of asking the right questions about what might happen in the future and then preparing the best plans you can to meet the events that might occur,” he said. “If the plan that you create works reasonably well, then you have, in fact, adequately managed that risk.”
I very much doubt that any contingency plan, no matter how well you prepare it, is going to deal with everything that happens, he said. You will always find aspects of the future that you didn’t prepare for, that you didn’t think through, or that catch you by surprise.
“One of the things that also applies, is that every time you come through an event for which you had risk management laid out, you should always stop and do a lessons learned afterwards to pick what could have been done better,” he said.
“Your task is both to prepare to cope with the problems as they arise and be prepared to change your plans when new, unexpected events occur,” he said.
He offered up three comments about risk management:
1) The best kind of risk management forestalls problems rather than solves them. For example, successfully promoting condoms for safe sex is better than having an effective means of dealing with an outbreak of AIDS.
2) Risk management can’t always allow you to stop a problem from happening. You can’t stop a plane crash, but you can ensure that all the senior executives in your organization aren’t travelling on the same plane.
3) Not all risks are negative. We tend to think of disasters when we talk about risk management, but in fact, there is always a risk that you do not capture an opportunity and therefore lose the potential benefits that come with that opportunity.