Issue 9 2021

Acquisition International - Issue 9 2021 11 10 Acquisition International - Issue 9 2021 Jul21139 Risk Management and Organisational Effectiveness Magnifor Consulting is an innovative risk leadership consultancy firm working shoulder-to-shoulder with its clients to maximise the value of uncertainties. It does this by addressing both risk management and organisational effectiveness in parallel. Adopting such a holistic approach assures that risk management principles are embedded throughout the organisation, creating long-term value for all stakeholders. Acquisition International magazine has recognised the company for being the Best Risk Management Consultancy – 2021, so we take a closer look at the company. agnifor’s consulting services are different in many ways. Firstly, it focuses on balancing risk and opportunity as the two sides of the coin that underpin uncertainty. Most leaders understand that a core responsibility of leadership is avoiding or mitigating risks that jeopardise organisational goals. At the same time, leaders also know that they must take calculated risks if they want to grasp opportunities and get breakthrough results. Therefore, it is important to embrace taking the right risks at the right moment to open up the organisation to possibility. Effectively balancing these two realities will result in extraordinary success. Secondly, Magnifor brings bottom-up insights to risk and opportunity registers frompeopleacross theentireorganisation. Thegoal is tomove from informed compliance to risk awareness, engaged compliance and critical thinking. Ultimately, this leads to an organisation regarding those on the frontline as professional partners who identify and point out risks and opportunities, providing the organisation’s leadership sufficient time to be proactive well before threats harm the company, employees, customers, or other stakeholders. It also allows them to seize opportunities well before they slip away, potentially becoming a competitive advantage for rivals. Thirdly, Magnifor supports risk managers moving away from being siloed in solely managing risks from a top-down perspective in isolation from the rest of the organisation. Even with all that is known today about leadership and management, one of the most untransformed areas of business is risk management. Riskmanagersarestill perceived tobe the ‘grey suits fromheadquarters’ unaware of the real issues of the front line. The COVID-19 crisis has further increased their separation from the frontlines, as most of them were forced to work from their home offices. Expectations of the discipline ensure their accountabilities are set up to fail. While risk managers are equipped with sophisticated tools and technology, it is absurd to expect them to provide an always-on radar, scanning the emergence of risks and opportunities at all levels of the organisation. Currently, Magnifor observes leaders interested in having all their employees be de facto risk managers. There is a growing interest in M Risk Management and Organisational Effectiveness having all employees enabled to monitor the actual level of risk and opportunity rather than rely on a static shot of what risk was identified during a risk workshop. The post COVID-19 era offers risk managers a profound opportunity to make a difference and take leadership in guiding their companies forward in the roaring twenties of our time. Magnifor’s intent is to empower them to do just that. So how does Magnifor make all employees risk manager? Its approach is through crowdsourcing – an increasing well-known platform in the innovation space. Magnifor has deployed that proven practice into the space of risk management and has built its proprietary system, Risk Focus™ to make the process of crowdsourcing easy and enjoyable for clients. Why? Because there was nothing available in the market that served these goals and so, Magnifor had to invent it. Its cloud-based digital solution, Risk Focus™ supports companies in crowdsourcing risks and opportunities. Having and utilising a few simple screens in everybody’s pocket will stimulate the sharing of uncertainties, potential issues or simply observed anomalies. It allows each individual to raise their voice and identify uncertainties that might have a potential impact on their organisation’s objectives. As some clients shared, Magnifor “democratises risk and opportunity insights”. Risk Focus™ makes organisation-wide sharing easy and enjoyable. Uncertainties are logged in less than two minutes, which encourages all employees to contribute. In addition, the workflows enable integration into companies’ business strategy, operations, and compliance processes to drive enhanced learning and risk-informed decision making. The system automatically aligns uncertainty management processes to the organisation’s specific goals and makes risk and opportunity identification systematic. Risk and opportunity analysis is done continuously rather than only having a static risk picture quarterly or less. The result is a dashboard on which management can see the actual level of risk and opportunity daily. Risks don’t rest, and opportunities don’t wait. And so shouldn’t risk management practices.