For the past two years, I’ve run an organisation for chief risk officers and heads of risk to collaborate on global risk issues and enterprise risk management. I run the Sydney team. The network was founded about six years ago through discussions with chief risk officers who felt there was a need for the major global corporations to validate their risk programs directly with each other, to move risk management forwards and prevent the kinds of catastrophes which could threaten industries, communities and global safety.

I joined the organisation after being invited to participate in a discussion on risk culture board reporting, and could immediately see the power of the network for helping organisations to be more outward looking, allowing leaders in the field of risk to build on lessons learned which have shared from others, rather than operating in isolation. There is an urgent necessity for risk managers to look beyond their organisations to find instances of positive deviance they can build on for the success of their own programs. Having worked on risk culture programs across five organisations, I could draw on a broader view than most, and could see how benchmarking against peers was what gave me the greatest openness to my initiatives. Moreover, risk management is too important a topic to move slowly; it needs to move forward to protect workers, to protect investors and protect the people that organisations can harm.

Previous to RLN, I led the risk culture board reporting program at an Australian financial institution. I also worked for a big four consultancy on risk culture with a focus on board reporting, developing internal audit, interviewing capabilities and analysing the self-assessment insights in a major big four Australian bank.

I worked for an Australian financial institution as part of a team delivering performance, talent and reward programs, which involved reviewing bonuses against incentive schemes and driving management to engage with these programs.

I also managed the human resources intranet, with a focus on user centred design to simplify policies and get to know all the leaders across the people space and their programs. Previous to that, I have consulted in communications and learning. I worked in an instructional design agency briefly, where I learned how to develop general site safety inductions for major resources companies, and also learned the principles of adult learning design.

At the start of my working life, I spent three years working at an Australian university teaching writing and research subjects with a focus on narrative screen history and screen writing as well as documentary script writing.

My professional work has given me an opportunity to explore the topics I find interesting and see them in reality rather than in the abstraction of theory. I’m constantly looking for real applications of ideas to learn more about how people think and make decisions, how people learn, and how people can work together to solve important problems, and the power of language to make new and important things possible, to paraphrase Richard Rorty. I expect my work will continue this exploration for many decades.