Specialists want us to believe that their knowledge is so arcane that, without years of training, we could not understand it. Finding ways of reducing time spent on conventional tasks frees hours to help lead a new function. Working within internal task teams helps alleviate the turf problem. The real difficulty comes when we are asked to define individual risks. Risk itself is hardly a singularity, yet risks are seldom as discrete as we might like.
Every risk tends to slop over into others, creating a soggy oatmeal, defying differentiation.
An exlosion in a plant can involve property loss, income interruption, employee injury, liability to outsiders, regulatory investigation and even deterioration of a credit rating. That's why insurance, one risk financing tool that tries to pigeon-hole risks separately, has such a difficult time. Just when an underwriter believes that he or she has nailed down a risk in contractual language, a new modification pops up, creating knee-jerk reactions of new exclusions or new policies with separate premiums. What we need is a composite view of risk and its consequences. I wish them luck but doubt that we can easily generate a single financial number to describe the relationship of all risks to an organization's equity.