Risk or resilience?

In October’s Airmic News technical director Paul Hopkin suggested that Head of Resilience might be a better title for a senior risk manager as it accurately describes the benefits the position can bring to an organisation. One member wrote in to differ.

From Simon Whittaker

Dear Sir. 

Aside from believing that we all worry too much about what we are called, it seems to me that to most people the word resilience in our titles would categorise us along with business continuity or disaster recovery professionals - whereas those disciplines are only aspects of the risk management role.  This is in the same way that to many the term risk manager means that we just deal with health and safety.

Unfortunately, the word resilience has similar negative connotations to the word risk. Neither term adequately reflects the upside of what we do (for example, ‘opportunity management’), and I think little is to be gained by rebadging what we do in this way. 

My dictionary defines resilience as the state or quality of being resilient.  The word resilient is further defined as being capable of regaining original shape after being deformed or recovering easily or quickly from shock.

If we must change from being called risk managers (or similar) perhaps we should simply revert to being called general managers as those that managed both the upside and downside of their businesses used to be called 30 or 40 years ago!

Simon Whittaker, Group Risk Manager, Dawsongroup plc

Anyone else wishing to comment, please email mark.baylis@airmic.co.uk

Editor’s comment: Many years ago, when he was chief executive at Lloyd’s, Nick Prettejohn said he could see no difference between good management and good risk management – sentiments echoed in the final paragraph of this letter.