Most influential risk management articles of 2022 RISK-ACADEMY Blog

Huge thank you to the 210K+ readers who visited the RISK-ACADEMY blog this year (+30% growth). More and more risk professionals come to a long overdue realization that RM1 doesn’t create value for the shareholders, heatmaps distort risk communication, quantitative risk analysis is no longer optional and risk registers rarely help make decisions. The good news is that a lot of quality material is available to risk managers to quickly upskill and apply RM2. Here are some of the most popular and influential articles and resources from 2022.

I first created this article back in 2017 and as I came across more and more powerful risk management books, it is time to expand the list and group the books by subject. For consistency sake I grouped all the books into three groups:

• foundation in risk management and decision making
• advanced risk analysis
• other important books every risk manager must read.

Climate change is a huge issue, environmental pollution is a huge issue, social inequality and everything else typically bundled under the ESG umbrella are important issues totally deserving the management attention. This article is about something else entirely, so keep your system 1 thinking in check and carry on reading. This article is about the very concept of ESG, not the underlying issues.

While working on the project in the Middle East recently the RISK-ACADEMY team came up with what looks like the best risk identification template I’ve seen in a long time. This is what a good risk register should look like, if there was ever a need for one.

Risk assessments are probably the most common activities within the risk management profession and there is a very fine line between being a total waste of time and a useful risk management approach. So what are the most common pitfalls, how to avoid them and how to turn risk assessments into a useful decision making tool.

While I written this post about compliance risks in the past, I later applied exactly the same math and logic to any non financial risk, including intellectual property, legal, environmental, ESG and most other risks you can think of. Follow this step by step guide to quantify most non financial risks or if you want to automate quantitative risk analysis use Archer Insight.

Despite the clickbait title, the messages are in the article are important to the risk profession and are purely practical. First few caveats, corporate reputation is important, even a perception of wrongdoings can affect funding, sales and cost of doing business.  Importance of reputations for both profits and non-profits is not up for a debate. Second caveat is that reputational risk in this article is just an illustration, the same underlying principles apply to all other “marketing” risks like ESG, geopolitical and whatever bs consultants will come up with next.

Ok, the title is obviously a joke, because the alternatives (multiple) have been available to anyone willing to learn for over 50 years. To me, using risk matrices is a question of ethics and professional skills and is totally up to the individual risk manager. The flaws are fundamental to risk matrices design and there nothing a risk manager / business analyst can do to make them reliable. So what are the alternatives?

Couple of years ago I was given the responsibility for corporate, non-life insurance across a $10B group of companies. I welcomed the opportunity to combine risk-based quantitative decision making with insurance. Did it work? You be the judge, a year later the company improved the quality of coverage while reducing the cost of insurance by approximately 40%, which translated to $13M+ savings. How did we do it? Let’s find out together in a series of articles…

In this article I wanted to talk about one important aspect of insurance renewals – the relationship with the broker. So here are the 5 red flags I learned when selecting insurance brokers in US, EU, LATAM and CIS.

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