Checklist Designers
Bryan Whitefield
I empower leaders to cultivate high-performance teams making faster and better decisions | Recognised expert in strategy and risk | Expert facilitator and trainer and sought-after mentor | MAICD, MRMIA & CCRO
One of the worst insults you can throw at a risk practitioner is that you are merely a “checklist designer”. Chapter 6 of my book Risky Business: How Successful Organisations Embrace Uncertainty is titled Designing Success. When I run the RMIA’s Enterprise Risk Management program we discuss the level of maturity of the organisations that participants work in using the scale from “compliance” to “leadership” as I described in this recent blog. And then we discuss the level of influence a practitioner has in organisations at various levels of maturity. And the lowest level of influence is in organisations that treat risk as a compliance activity which makes the risk team simply “checklist designers”.
One step up are organisations that require risk to provide “comfort” to the audit and risk committee or the board or a regulator. The risk team is then seen as “framework designers”. Look no further than these quotes from the APRA report into the culture in CBA to reinforce the perceptions of some risk teams as checklist or framework designers:
“… over 100 respondents expressed the sentiment that risk management activities are ‘onerous’, ‘complex’, ‘time consuming’, and ‘really achieves very little other than as a form filling exercise.’”
“The risk function was also described as focusing on policy writing and correctness of frameworks over implementation and engagement with the business.”
Ironically, framework design is critical to growing a strong risk culture. The problem is that many, many designs are overly complex, overly onerous and overly long! If you want to design a great framework, grab a copy of my book and come to the next RMIA ERM course!
Stay safe!
Risk Practice Lead at Senscia
4 年People do activities which maintain, perpetuate the status quo, or fail to add value, all the time. I don't think I'd feel criticised if someone said I was doing a "filler" activity like that at some point in my career. But if someone thought I was being unintelligent, a "muppet" or "dipstick", well that addresses how I go about my work. As a tactical insult, I think that has far more mileage...? But of course, this is LinkedIn. Everyone plays nicely here :-D Back to the OP, there's no whiteboards in a airplane cockpit. Intentionally designed and tested checklists, subject to many revisions from diverse stakeholders, sometimes even built into the cockpit control panels; they are the best tool for rapid problem solving - a proven solution. We can learn from aviation.
Group Head of Risk, Insurance and Internal Audit
4 年Are you sure risk management framework still makes sense as a concept? Also the worst insult is RM1 ))))))
Transformational Nonconformist-It is time to Think Differently about Risk. "It didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different" Jackie Robinson
4 年Or a "Template filler" !