Page 24 - Demo

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INTERVIEW
Our mindset should be that we are a stakeholder at the board table to help with decision-making; to help make risk-informed decisions; to help make strategic, enterprise- based decisions. And we need to be more collaborative within our organizations. Why? Everyone is a risk manager within an organization. It’s not just the risk professional. You have people in the engineering group, communications and marketing, strategic planning, governance and HR,
for example. All of these people manage risk in some
special way. Risk managers should be the conduit to that conversation, pulling people in. When you group all of those people together, you create a “wisdom of the crowd,” that informal Delphi group within an organization. You bloom better knowledge, better collaboration, better innovation, better decision-making within the organization that is risk-informed. You are spending less time just looking at
a checklist of things, or just buying insurance, or telling people that they can’t do something. You are actually adding value to the corporation.
cu | What about risk managers
in smaller organizations? Does this
apply to them as well?
I don’t think scale of the organization is the barrier, the barri- er is the mindset. The mindset of the organization should
be that it wants to evaluate itself in that type of a [collab- orative] framework. It has the humility to appreciate that things aren’t perfect and appreciates the spirit of continuous improvement. For any risk manager, you need to understand what the problem is that you are trying to solve, because you could come up with some pretty brilliant solutions for a prob- lem that doesn’t actually exist for you. Set the context. Once you establish your context, spend some time in that space. Then you can get into risk identification, risk assessment,
and risk evaluation stages. After that, you can start managing the risk. That risk could be an opportunity to enter into a joint venture, create a new product, and enter into a merger or acquisition, or innovation. Value creation is where risk managers should really be spending their time.
cu | You have incorporated the themes of diversity and inclusion into the 2019 RIMS Canada Conference in Edmonton. Tell us how. We are really looking at this conference from a humanities perspective. We are looking at what it takes not only to be good risk managers, but what it takes to be good corporate citizens, good to each other, and even good to ourselves.
We are incorporating a wellness center, we are putting in a gratitude wall, and we are trying to incorporate indigenous art and content as best we can. We are changing the con- versation to think about more than just business, numbers, and insurance. There is actually a human element to what we do. Let’s bring that perspective moving forward. In our concurrent sessions, we’ve asked our presenters to not just put a deck up with a bunch of bullet points. The richness of conversation is amazing. In addition to a wonderful leader- ship panel, Dr. Marvin Washington from the University of Alberta will talk about the human side of change.
PROFILE
CHRISTINE MALIGEC
Title: 2019 RIMS Canada Conference Canada Co-Chair
Employment: Director, Risk Management, Alberta Urban Municipalities Association
Education: Stanford University,
Strategic Decision and
Risk Management; CRM-E, Canadian Risk Management- Enterprise Designation from Global Risk Management Institute (GRMI)
Background: Risk Officer, Alberta Blue Cross (2015-18); Conference Board of Canada, Strategic Risk Council (Volunteer, 2014-18)
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24 September 2019 | Canadian Underwriter