Today I have the privilege of speaking at the 2017 WeDo User Group meeting in Lisbon. Last year’s presentation was about the impossibility of realizing the ‘design’ of risk management when we lack the tools and materials to implement it in practice. Clever people write risk standards but these standards are irrelevant if we do not have the data, mathematical skills, or processing power to perform objective evaluations or maintain sufficient monitoring to address a great multitude of risks. So how will we get the resources we need? We need more investment, obviously. But how do we persuade executives – and their ultimate bosses, the shareholders – that it is worth investing more money in risk management and business assurance? That is not such an easy question. Nevertheless, I will attempt to provide an answer by drawing on three sources:
- How Steve Jobs approached innovation
- What Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman has learned about the way people think
- Recent share price movements and business news headlines
The slides for my talk are below.