Risk Behaviours & COVID-19 - Elizabeth Arzadon & Kerrie MacAlister

An Information Innovation @ UTS Seminar Series Production.With a Masters in Organisational Psychology, Elizabeth Arzadon started her career at McKinsey & Company, helping companies understand how culture could help drive financial performance. Then the GFC hit. For the past decade she has worked in, or for a range of financial institutions and regulators around the world, developing capability and insight on how culture helps and hinders not only performance, but effective management of risk and sustainable results over the long term.Kerrie Macalister started her career as a Chartered Accountant in the late 1990s. After becoming disenfranchised with corporate culture she embarked on a new career in Psychology. Kerrie splits her time working in a University gambling treatment and research clinic helping problem gamblers understand risk and consults for one of the world’s largest end-to-end IT services companies, specialising in digital risk culture.Show Notes:- The risks we face are not necessarily new. They are exacerbated by the turmoil caused by COVID-19 and our responses to it. Additionally our capability to monitor and manage risks has decreased.- People are under a lot stress which leads to mistakes being made. Our cognitive capacity is lowered.- Groups respond to a novel situation using their existing patterns. The ability to raise issues in psychological safety is critical. Example: The walking meeting.- Risk managers need to be prompting managers and leaders that there are escalation channels and that they are being used.- There is a raised threat from opportunistic attacks that risk managers need to pre-empt.- We need to give ourselves and each other a break.- The crisis does give us an opportunity to reconfigure how we work.