Anette and Kurt presented RiskTalk at the seminar series of ETH Risk Center to a group of academics and risk practitioners. The lively discussion included questions such as how RiskTalk is different from other incident reporting systems; comments its scalability and reflections on the possibilities to deploy it in crisis situations such as the current Covid pandemic.
Risk management needs to be part of the daily lives of all employees up, down, and across an organization. Here’s how the Swiss electricity network achieves that.
No matter how good their risk management systems are, companies can’t plan for everything. Some risks are outside people’s realm of experience or so remote no one could have imagined them. Some result from a perfect storm of coinciding breakdowns, and some materialize very rapidly and on an enormous scale. These novel risks, as the authors call them, cannot be addressed by following a standard playbook. (more…)
Anette’s last piece for Oxford Answers was referenced in the Financial Times. ‘In many ways, lockdown is intellectually easy . . . as a remedy it is clear-cut. The exit strategy is much less clear,’ she was quoted. This is her latest piece for us addressing that issue.
In organizations (and societies) with competing cultural values when it comes to risk, how should our leaders create and manage consensus? And how do we define what is it we are prioritizing today versus tomorrow? These answers go right to the heart of leadership and strategy. Leaders must acknowledge the existence of multiple values at risk and foster a process that allows continuous discussion to take place about competing and conflicting priorities. Such processes need to have certain characteristics. Previously, we talked about psychological safety – we now extend that with the notion that it is important to wipe the slate clean after each “priority contest”. Particularly in situations such as the Covid-19 crisis, when organizational action, by necessity, becomes a series of temporary compromises. Leaders must not alienate any of the “cultural tribes” within their organization, standing up for one value or another. Their job is to keep these voices in dialogue, and tend to an uneasy equilibrium by fostering as series of compromises. Tools such as RiskTalk can facilitate the process of successfully “shifting with the sands”.
Low threshold, blame-free speak up tools – such as RiskTalk – are at the heart of responding to crises and the Problem of Switching between the normal and the crisis world. Our latest article was published in Oxford Answers today.
Particularly at times of unprecedented crises, leaders must listen intently to their employees and outsiders in order to learn fast and navigate uncertainty. In this presentation, Anette Mikes highlights the importance of processes and tools (such as RiskTalk) that leaders need in order to safeguard psychological safety and encourage people to speak up.
In these unprecedented times, leaders, risk and crisis managers around the world are rising to new challenges. Never has the role of effective bottom-up communication been more important. We need rapid innovation – good ideas often come from unexpected corners. We need to stay alert to anomalies – again, only people “in the trenches” will notice these. Leaders are expected to create an environment of “psychological safety” in which people are motivated to speak up, and provide tools to enable constructive dialogue. RiskTalk is ready to help them.
Gareth Byatt, Principal Consultant at Risk Insight Consulting interviews Kurt Meyer, Co-CEO, RiskTalk about drones and safety management.
As part of ‘PwC 2019 Global Risk, Internal Audit and Compliance
Survey’, PwC Switzerland interviewed Kurt Meyer, risk management expert and strategic consultant at RiskTalk. In an interview with Marc Buser, expert in governance, risk and compliance at PwC, he explained his approach as to how digitisation combined with the company’s feedback culture can lead to greater transparency.
Kurt and Anette share the latest findings from research and our experience of implementing a solution to Switzerland’s probably most critical infrastructure provider, which has transformed not only risk communication but also risk culture across the organisation.