Having gained a pretty sound understanding of some of the main issues facing Defence during my former career as an RAF Officer, there were a range of activities where I felt that the private sector can learn from Defence, but none so much as risk management.
Defence has one ultimate goal – to protect the Nation’s interests at home and overseas. If we were to consider this in more detail, it becomes clear that this is a hugely broad field with numerous parallels and countless influencing factors that result in immensely complex programs of activity. After all, how can Defence be asked to protect the Nation’s interests, if we don’t know what they will be in 20 years time? How can Defence operate amongst a rapidly changing, unpredictable, and chaotic global-community?
In short, the answer is that Defence succeeds due to its agility, flexibility, and its proactive nature allowing it to be reactive when needed. These are all ‘management buzz words’ I fully appreciate – sorry! The longer answer is that Defence has a well-refined approach to risk management across all levels of its operating environment: it starts through a process where it can guess (not used in a flippant way) what type of future threats may materialise, where they could be, what scale they may be, and what the possible outcomes could be. This is a significant and critical step in the risk management process in which a central organisation considers what type of risks, their likelihoods, and their severity, may face the world over a 50 to a 100-year timescale. By completing this step, Defence can build into its capabilities the means to address the widest range/the greatest severity of possible threats. This therefore influences the long-term Defence strategy over a prolonged period of time.
When we consider the risk management ability of Defence in the short-term, people become the focus; without people, technology, equipment, and machinery are utterly useless. Unsurprisingly then, there is a framework to collaborate thoughts on any range of topics amongst the wider community regardless of rank. Before being able to assimilate all of these thoughts for a given challenge, there is a clear need for diverse thinking – the diversity of thought here sees the organisation consider more possibilities, consider them in more detail, and consider the best risk mitigation for each.
Therefore to me, the most critical step in the short-term ability of risk management, is the diversity of thought; collaborative and engaging true teamwork. To take this sentiment one step further, when Defence increases its diversity of thought, it strengthens its short/medium term risk management abilities. People must think differently to one another, be empowered to influence the decision-making process, challenge the status quo, and operate in a truly collaborative mind-set. Defence relies on the diversity of thought to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity.
In order to build diversity of thought in to an organisation, it would be pointless to demand people to think differently to one another, and so the only viable way is to recruit people from different backgrounds, educational levels, cultures, socio-economic classes, genders – the lot.
Alex Chikhani (alex@sigmapolaris.com) is a Co-Founder of Sigma Polaris, a Human Capital Management technology start-up aimed at revolutionising and vastly improving how people are seen and employed, championing diversity through un-biased data and meritocracy. Sigma Polaris’ recruitment software allows organisations to quickly sift applications based on both hard and soft skills, to build diversity of thought into any organisation.