BarnOwl Info Sharing session: 06 September 2018

Why Risk Management fails

Presented by Mira Butler, Managing Director, Mira Consulting

Thank you very much Mira for your enlightening presentation at our BarnOwl info sharing event held at the BarnOwl offices in Bryanston on the 6^th September 2018. Chris Palm, Chief Technical Advisor of IRMSA was unfortunately not able to present today due to personal reasons. Thank you Mira for filling in for us at such short notice.

Mira’s presentation covered the following top 10 reasons for ‘why risk management fails in organisations’:

• 01. Poor governance and “Tone at the Top”
• 02. Reckless risk taking
• 03. Inability to implement ERM
• 04. Non-existent, Ineffective/Inefficient Risk Assessment
• 05. Falling prey to the “herd” mentality
• 06. Misunderstanding the “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” mind-set
• 07. Accepting the lack of transparency in High-Risk areas
• 08. Not integrating Risk Management with Strategy-Setting and Performance Management
• 09. Ignoring the Dysfunctionalities and “Blind Spots” of the Organisations Culture
• 10. Not involving the Board timeously

In addition, Mira took us through a practical discussion of what we can do as risk and assurance practitioners to embed risk management within our organisation and make it a success:

• Be an enabler for the “tone at the top” to filter down
• Build relationships across the organisation
• Know the business – be a trusted advisor adding value
• Identify the right risks at all levels of the organisation
• Deliver meaningful business decision reporting

What added great value to today’s session was the interactive nature of the audience with loads of questions, answers and debate? Please see attached presentation as well as video link here for more information. The Q&A session is included towards the end of the video clip.

One of the gentlemen suggested that it would be nice to have more case studies / examples of failed risk management. This is a great suggestion and perhaps for a future event we can find someone with first-hand knowledge of how and why a major company has failed. The following are a few articles we have written in the past which include examples and various links to the many corporate and government failures both locally and internationally:

https://barnowl.co.za/insights/counting-the-cost-of-poor-governance-and-reputational-risk/

https://barnowl.co.za/insights/reputational-risk-make-or-break/

https://barnowl.co.za/insights/risk-management-why-the-flags-matter/

https://barnowl.co.za/insights/gm-failure-lessons-to-learn/

https://barnowl.co.za/insights/6373/

https://accounting-degree.org/scandals/

Once again thank you Mira for your time today and for your informative presentation and thank you to all those who braved today’s traffic and attended the info sharing session. We look forward to seeing you at our next info sharing session.

Kind regards

Jonathan Crisp

Director – BarnOwl GRC and Audit software

About Mira Butler:

Mira Butler is highly qualified and has over seven years of Risk Management experience in the corporate environment. Mira’s specialist skills include advisory and implementation at all phases of the risk and business continuity management cycle and can assist in developing your organisation’s risk culture level by providing a proven programme with supporting processes. In addition hereto, Mira’s Governance experience includes providing corporate governance advisory and secretariat services to various organisations. Mira is a member of the South African Risk Manager’s Association (IRMSA).

E-mail: mira.consulting@outlook.com

About BarnOwl:

BarnOwl is a fully integrated governance, risk management, compliance and audit software solution used by over 200 organisations in Africa, Australia, Europe and the UK. BarnOwl is a locally developed software solution and is the preferred risk management solution for the South African public sector supporting the National Treasury risk framework.

Please see www.barnowl.co.za for more information.