Five minutes with: New Airmic board member Colin Barker

How does feel to receive the news that you are now a board member of Airmic?

I feel very honoured, and hopefully I will be able to fulfil the role as intended. I expect to lean on the existing board members for experience and wisdom and I’m expecting to learn the role as I go along and get more involved as the time goes on.

There’s been a lot of discussion at this year’s Airmic conference around the future of risk – how risk and the role of the risk manager is changing. How do you feel the role has changed?

If you go around this conference and you asked risk managers to tick box all their roles and responsibilities, you would find a massive range of responsibilities: you could go from health and safety on the one hand, through security, obviously insurance, education, training, awareness, all sorts of things. There are no two risk managers who do the same sort of job and I think that is one of the fundamental problems in defining the role of the risk manager.

It’s more about how they impact a business – are they advisors, are they consultants, are they responsible and accountable people and that would differ from culture to culture. What risk managers do more and more is raise awareness of the value of risk management. They’re empowering fellow members of the organisation to take calculated risks and make sensible decisions. I think over the next few years, the risk manger role is probably going to be more around raising awareness of key issues, the upside of that risk and building a good risk culture.

What will risk management look like in 10 years time?

If you go back to the 1960s, the risk manager was a health and safety manager, an inspector who made sure you weren’t doing certain things.  If you look at how the safety manager is trained now, to a large extent, they are trained to educate people on what to do, not what not to do. So they don’t say, for example, ‘do not walk in this area’, they say ‘walk between the yellow lines’. It’s a more positive approach and that’s basically how the industry has changed.

As we get more enterprise risk-focused it becomes more about how we do things. And Airmic is great with that, is shares best practice with its members by writing practical guides and through its Airmic academy.

What are you looking forward to most as board member at Airmic?

To be honest, playing a part and just learning what particular experience I could bring to Airmic. I’m very pleased that the board is made of people of a variety of industries and backgrounds.

As the new kid on the block, so to speak, I’ll probably do more listening than talking initially, catch up to speed on where things are at the moment, and then I’ll start contributing and learn, as you do as a new inductee.