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Patrick O’Connor took a risk early in his career, when his employer, major construction firm The Walsh Group, asked him to switch from being an attorney to managing company risk. Unsure how he’d do, he knew he would need to “manifest my role in a new way,” and move beyond the simple practice of insurance procurement.
The department he ran needed to become a fully integrated “risk management department with a number of tools, risk mitigation techniques [and] changes to the department to aid in its mission of helping the company see, understand, and diminish its risk,” he explained.
This meant implementing “a comprehensive enterprise risk management software tool so that I could have all the claims, all the policies, all the financial information, all the location hierarchy, everything in one central repository,” he said.
Centralising all this information meant he could better take a broad view, and detect patterns that might beforehand have flown under the radar. Having access to these “reams and reams of data” means O’Connor can better “separate the signal from the noise and determine: ‘What about this data is counter-intuitive? What about this data is meaningful? How reliable is this data in predicting what will happen in the future?’”
The strategy is to “harness what we already knew” so as to “let it enlighten us further,” he said. The trick, for O’Connor, is to discern the unfamiliar within the familiar, and to constantly adapt and challenge assumptions.
When we asked him if he had a life motto that animates his work in risk management, he replied: “You plan your work and you work your plan.” The act of thorough planning “in and of itself helps you identify what is concerning you.” This is the “plan your work” element. But just as important is to “work your plan” so you don’t get prematurely wedded to a particular method or strategy.
“Re-planning, reorienting your plan consistently and constantly,” he explained, is essential as analysis deepens, and new avenues and thoughts open up. More than anything, planning your work and working your plan “gives you a purposeful operation going forward” – allowing you to maintain structure while also admitting the kind of flexibility that overturns old assumptions.
So what does the future hold for risk management?
Speaking about the construction industry, O’Connor points to the increasing role to be played by technology in risk management. This, he thinks, “is going to be the competitive separator for construction companies. Who gets the best technology? Who’s an early adopter of that technology? Who is aware of the marketplace?” While he notes the potential for “pretty substantial” increases in efficiency and productivity, he also cautions of the potentially “dangerous risk” that can be involved in choosing to adopt an expensive new technology.
For his own company, he foresees that it will “deepen our data mining to discover those indicators that can help us best understand ourselves, what we’re doing right, and what we’re doing wrong.”
Importantly, O’Connor believes that technological solutions will enable The Walsh Group to “mitigate risk in the field - both in the area of bodily injury and property damage,” especially crucial “as the company grows larger and projects grow larger.”
The basic trend, as he sees it, is to continue the trend away from simple “risk transfer or insurance procurement” towards a “greater focus on risk identification, mitigation, and management.”
In this way, risk management becomes an integrated part of the whole company process, moving further towards mitigation and management over and above old-school risk transfer.
It’s this proactive approach to risk management that will save The Walsh Group, and companies like it, unwelcome problems down the road – and allow them to proceed boldly with new projects with the confidence of superior knowledge and foresight.
And with his still undimmed passion for solving complex problems, Patrick O’Connor will doubtless remain at the cutting edge of risk management innovation.
