Ruth Murray Webster: Making Risk Management Work 11th July 2011

Ruth explains her view of the risk management process, looking at why facilitation is so necessary for risk management to work well. She continues by highlighting which aspects are crucial to understand and how it’s important to use a wide range of techniques at various stages throughout the process. ‘The last thing risk management needs are more formulae!’ says Ruth. She goes on to explore what sort of people need these skills to make risk work.

Ruth is an organisational change consultant, Director of Lucidus Consulting Ltd, and a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management. Her professional interests and experience centre on the competences required for individuals to manage change and the capabilities that organizations need to improve and advance.  Ruth is  co-author of a number of books, including Starting Out in Project Management, for APM, Management of Risk, for OGC and three books focused on human factors in risk management – Understanding and Managing Risk Attitude, Managing Group Risk Attitude and Facilitating Risk Management.

Penny Pullan: Facilitating Risk Management 12th July

Penny will reveal just how she found out how necessary facilitation skills are for successful risk management! Having suffered from their lack, she went on to develop a wide range of skills, learning and practising all over the world. She’ll explain what makes a good risk facilitator, the skills they need, how to start off a risk workshop, some tips for virtual risk management, how to deal with conflict (tip: you need to engage with it, not pretend it doesn’t exist) and give her views on how people can develop as risk facilitators.

The majority of Penny’s work is with people in multinational organisations who are grappling with tricky projects and programmes of change. Tricky usually means a combination of:

With this context, people say she brings order and clarity, providing support and tools to cut through the problems and to emerge successful, delivering benefits at the same time as developing the individuals involved. Her facilitation skills are fundamental to her work, especially in risk management. She is a director of Making Projects Work Ltd. and has been delighted to co-author ‘A Short Guide to Risk Management’ with Ruth Murray-Webster.

David Hillson: Developing Sustainable and Renewable Risk Management through Facilitation 13th July

In his Summit session, David Hillson will talk about how to make risk work in a way that is both sustainable and renewable. He’ll start by sharing his views of the negative things that sap energy from the process as well as the people involved. He’ll then talk about all of the energy promoters: those positive things which help to keep people interested and engaged throughout. A key positive factor is risk facilitation, the subject of ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’ and David will give his view on the importance of facilitation skills for those involved in managing risk.

Dr David Hillson (the Risk Doctor) is a director of Risk Doctor & Partners and an award-winning author on risk. David is recognised internationally as a leading thinker and practitioner in the risk field, and has made several innovative contributions to improving risk management. David received the PMI Distinguished Contribution Award for his work in developing risk management over many years. He is an Honorary Fellow of the UK Association for Project Management (APM) and past chairman of its Risk SIG. We’re delighted that David wrote the Foreword for our book: ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’

Anna and Maya: Risk Facilitators in the Real World 14th July

Ruth will talk to Anna and Maya about their workplaces and what made it clear to them that facilitation of the risk management process was important. They will also talk about the sorts of things they’ve done to get people engaged so they can identify, own and manage risks and the barriers they’ve encountered. They’ll also share their top-tips for other practitioners. Anna works for a major IT company. Maya works for a water utility. Very different organisations, but with the same need to make risk management work.

Jonathan Norman, Publisher of ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’ 15th July

Jonathan believes that risk management is a fundamentally human process. His Short Guide to Risk Series for Gower is designed to be part of the talking cure for risk; to provide people (risk specialists, functional managers and senior decision makers) with a shared vocabulary and a set of perspectives for looking at, discussing and addressing risk – in whatever form; effective risk management is a learned skill … the more we practise, the better we become at handing not only the risks that are familiar but also those for which we may have no existing frames of reference. The role of a skilful facilitator is pretty fundamental to that process and Jonathan will tell us how he came to commission and publish Penny and Ruth’s book: ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’.

Jonathan is Publisher at Gower Publishing, responsible for a program of around 80 new titles a year (of which he commissions roughly half himself) that span a wide subject area within business and management. Gower’s risk program includes around 60 titles covering operational and strategic risk in all their forms – such as fraud and corruption, supply chain risk, people risk and project risk as well as books on due diligence, internal audit and other related topics. The Short Guide to Business Risk Series, which includes Penny Pullan and Ruth Murray-Webster’s A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management, is the only Gower book Series that doesn’t have an external Series Editor and was conceived and has been developed by Jonathan.