Neil Cantle, principal and consulting actuary, Milliman
Cantle's activities at Milliman include ERM, mergers and acquisitions, product development, longevity and corp-orate restructuring. A major contributor to research in his field, he also leads the development of Milliman's CRisALIS, a methodology for analysing and quantifying enterprise risk.
Who do you most admire in the field of risk management?
Nature – it never ceases to amaze me how often solutions to problems of complexity have already been solved somewhere in nature, and usually rather elegantly.
What have you learnt about communicating risk?
Risk communication is a conversation not a broadcast. Risk is relative and perceived – just because you think something is terribly important and risky it does not follow that others will agree. The communication therefore has to resonate with different perspectives and take care to explain the journey that you took in reaching your conclusion that something is a problem. That way, others have the opportunity to conclude likewise or to explain to you why their view differs.
What are the major challenges ahead?
The increasingly interconnected nature of things tends to mean that new disasters escalate and spread quickly. Most companies simply are not set up to react that fast and commercial pressures often drive behaviours which remove flexibility. A different mind-set and organisational structures are needed to achieve the required resilience.
What will be the next big development in risk management?
Embracing complexity and therefore accepting that you cannot continue to apply "command and control" methods. Faced with complexity you need to move to formal decentralised models of influence coupled with good enterprise-wide information so that local decisions are made while being cognisant of the bigger picture. Acceptance that many things remain unknown and unknowable in detail will also drive a trend towards formally planning for resilience. This will necessitate an improvement in detection and monitoring for non-linear patterns and the ability to extrapolate from them. All of this will increase the pressure on risk management to move further from oversight towards insight as its main role.
What are your other interests?
With a busy work life it is nice to spend time with the family. We are fortunate enough to live in pretty part of the countryside so we can go out and enjoy that when we aren't dashing to the usual array of riding lessons, sports fixtures, etc. I would also have to confess to a slight weakness for cars.