The Human Element of Risk Management

Over the past decade, risk management became more about quantitative models and less about behavioral models. Unfortunately, as we discovered during the recent financial crisis, even the best quantitative models cannot predict the result of misguided behavior. In this week's edition, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine provides a special focus on risk management with interesting viewpoints such as this:

As business has grown more complex, we have developed elaborate protocols, systems, frameworks, and approaches to manage risk. A consequence of putting science at the forefront of these risk management systems has been a stripping of human behavior out of the risk model.

The future of risk management lies in an ability to incorporate and inspire more of the behaviors we want, finding new models to map, monitor, intervene, support, and react to the behaviors of individuals and groups—both the behaviors we want to encourage and those we'd like to avoid. Critically, this taking account of behavior means we need a much sharper comprehensive strategy for corporate culture, so that our models are founded on the way "things really happen around this place."

Examining the human element of risk management is a key part of Wheelhouse Advisors' upcoming workshop, Navigating Risk: From Crisis to Innovation. To learn more about the workshop and enroll for this groundbreaking event, please visit www.oldedwardsinn.com/navigatingrisk.

Missed Opportunity on Stress Tests?

When the Federal Reserve Bank ("FRB" or "Fed") conducted stress tests of the 19 largest financial institutions back in 2009, many viewed it primarily as an exercise to restore the public's faith in the financial system. Now that the FRB has requested the financial institutions to perform the same tests again, some are wondering if the tests should be redesigned to be more realistic.  One of those raising questions is Sim Segal, an ERM expert who wrote an article on the subject this week in Forbes magazine. Here's his view:

....to be meaningful, the Fed stress tests must be changed to include (1) multiple simultaneous risks events, to capture the biggest potential threats, (2) all sources of risk, particularly strategic and operational ones, which represent the bulk of risks, (3) a full quantification of risk exposures, measuring the impact on value rather than on capital, (4) examination of the largest companies in all sectors that can threaten the economy, not just banks, and (5) worst-case scenarios provided by company insiders, to test each firm's most vulnerable spots.

Mr. Segal raises some very good points that should be considered by not only the FRB and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, but also the individual financial institutions.  For those financial institutions and other companies that are not performing stress tests in the manner suggested by Mr. Segal, it could represent a missed opportunity that could prove fatal.