Integrating Risk into Strategic Decision-Making

Hello, I’m Danny Ralph, Professor of Operations Research at Cambridge Judge Business School and Academic Director of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies. Why am I here? Because the Risk Centre has been working with managers since 2009 to handle threats and opportunities that are systemic. This is about recognising the impacts that the real world has on you and your ecosystem.

Hello, my name is Kishore Sengupta. I’m a Professor in Operations at Cambridge Judge Business School, the University of Cambridge. My current research, teaching, and other activities are focused on managing complex projects, complexity in organisations, and the future of work. I’ve been a faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School for the past 9 years. Before coming here, I was on the faculty at INSEAD in France and Singapore and in schools in the United States and Hong Kong.

In my research and teaching, I work closely with organisations in different sectors, especially in technology and services. Decisions made at all levels of an organisation are inevitably about risk. Every time you launch a new product or enter a new market, the potential rewards are significant, as are the risks. Consider this along with the fact that business environments have become more turbulent and uncertain.

What it means is that managers need to find a way to consider risks in their decisions. They need to be better prepared to anticipate and address uncertainty through a combination of proactive and reactive decisions. That’s what the programme is about. We offer an approach for participants to grapple with these issues and come up with solutions that are effective in the context of their own professional situations.

What does the programme offer?

So this programme offers internally focused and externally directed frameworks for asking what matters and on what timescale, and then how to prioritise your efforts today that go beyond your job description. In terms of strategy, we offer scenario planning. In brief, this is how to make horizon scanning actionable. We also offer 2 organisational frameworks, one for planning and integrating across the enterprise, the other for understanding internal dynamics, mapping complexity of interactions within your firm.

We also include a look at individual behaviours, which the popular press likes to call biases. But we’d like to do this without prejudice. Let’s understand how your experience can be made more useful than pure gut feelings.

Looking at risk from 4 different angles

We cover the topic of risk from 4 angles. The first is that of risks in the here and now, how our decisions and behaviours create risks, and what we can do about that. We examine this from the lenses of biases and heuristics. The second angle is about how risks affect the organisation and how to anticipate them. We look at techniques in enterprise risk management and organisation structure.

The third angle is about the longer time horizon. This is the domain of scenarios and how they are connected with the organisation’s strategy. And the fourth angle is about risks that arise from connections. We consider this from the perspectives of complexity and systemic risk.

Who should attend the programme?

In terms of who should attend the programme, well, this is for senior managers, people whose responsibilities go much wider than their formal expertise and for whom wisdom is not knowledge but constructive engagement. We meet business owners, strategy execs, chief risk officers, product managers, investors, and so on. Our sectors are also very broad– industry, energy, banking, other financial services, technology, food and beverage, retail, etc. The programme is useful because senior managers across the board are having to make more active, indeed, more proactive decisions without necessarily having the appropriate corporate ethos or structures in place. Senior managers need to invent it here.

The content is based on cutting-edge insights derived from research in different areas. The pedagogies are a mix of role plays, exercises, cases, and applications to the participant’s own situations. In terms of takeaways, participants can expect clear frameworks that are derived from research and are actionable in their own contexts.

Let me close with a word about Cambridge. It’s a beautiful city. Cambridge Judge Business School is the perfect setting for taking a strategic look at yourself and your organisation and preparing you for the next stages of your journey. Come join us.