time to rethink risk management: surviving future global crises

The purpose of this book is to change thinking about crises and risk. Risk management is today both a great success, an impressive achievement, and a notable failure. It works, and it doesn’t work. It saves lives and property, and it fails to save lives and property. It helps and it hinders. Like all such management approaches, this has a lot to do with how it is employed and practiced, but in the case of risk management there is also a much more fundamental issue. The risk management framework, the risk management model, is wrong. Many organisations today treat all risks as point events, when the real risks involve systemic threats inherent in the global economy, and the uncertain nature of global society.The book argues that risk management has come a long way, but that evidence of its more recent failure is now all around us and that it needs to now change dramatically if it is to accommodate current realities. Whilst there is a clear need for us all to manage risk through a crisis, there is a lack of understanding of the nature of crises that is impeding progress. As well as providing a conceptual basis for changing the way risk management is undertaken, the book provides a blueprint for managing at organisational level through a global crisis, and, to a more limited extent, at government and other levels; how to prepare, what to do when it’s happening and how and when to emerge into the post-crisis world.