The Think Tank
As Risk Managers we are tasked with the objective to embed a risk management culture into an organisation, or words to that effect. This objective seems to be posing more questions than answers currently. To assist both ourselves, and risk managers in general, we facilitated a think tank involving a cross section of experienced risk managers across several different sectors from health to project risk.
The group grappled with a few key questions:
- What does a risk culture really look like?
- What are the things that influence the risk culture?
Two further questions emerged from this:
- What should risk champions be?
- What do we do if we don’t have senior management buy-in?
We would like to thank those involved in the Think Tank. This paper aims to summarise the thoughts and inputs from the group and provide some guidance for risk managers in general.
1. What does a risk culture really look like?
For an organisation to strive towards a risk culture, it needs to have a Vision of the Future to strive towards. So do we really know what it is we are aiming to embed in organisations? What does it look like or feel like when there is a Risk Culture? What do we see?
Interestingly enough, the first question triggered a completely separate question – “what is culture?”. For the sake of completeness the following definition or description of Culture is provided.
Culture
Culture is a difficult concept to define. We all intuitively know what we mean, however it is a very complex concept.
Some definitions include:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems” Schein, 1992.
“the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.“ Hill and Jones, 2001
The Think Tank group defined Culture as “ the acted out values and behaviours and personality of an organisation, or the way an organisation looks and feels – internally for employees and externally for clients and stakeholders.”
The challenge is how to describe the current culture of an organisation.
The Roshan Institute suggests that Culture refers to the following Ways of Life, including but not limited to:
Language : the oldest human institution and the most sophisticated medium of expression.
Thought : the ways in which people perceive, interpret, and understand the world around them.
Arts & Sciences : Most advanced expression
Spirituality : the value system expressed through language and actions.
Social activity : the shared pursuits within a cultural community
Interaction : the social aspects of human contact, including the give-and-take of socialization, negotiation, protocol, and conventions.
This definition tends to provide a more tangible set of lenses to look at a culture.