My year as Chair: Lynda Lucas

What have been your highlights as the chair of Airmic?

My background is in company secretarial, not risk or insurance management, and one of the things that I particularly wanted to encourage was more diversity and inclusion. Not only gender diversity but also ethnicity; and diversity in the organisations and industries represented by our membership. Not everyone involved in risk management has ‘risk’ or ‘insurance’ in their title – and we are seeing that diversity improve, too.

And this led to the most pleasing thing of all: when I went to the fastTrack forum in February, the room looked different. You could see more younger people, but also a wider variety of professionals and a good gender balance, too. To go to an event and hear people make comments like, “I walked into the room and I felt comfortable.” That was amazing 

What is the biggest challenge you have had to overcome during that time?

I didn’t have enough time to do everything that I wanted to do! Everyone imagines that being Airmic chair, you simply pitch up to the board meetings, present at the Airmic dinner and the annual conference at the start and end of your tenure. But it is so much more than that – Airmic is engaged in such a wide range of activities and I found it a real challenge.

If you were going to give Tim one piece of advice as the incoming chair, what would that be 

I’ve already done it: one of the things that I’ve said to him is to get your diary out now. Get the events in which you want to participate diarised, because I know his diary is probably even more frantic than mine.

Tell us a secret about your time as Airmic Chair?

It did take a long time to learn how to work the Airmic coffee machine. That takes a bit of getting used to! Otherwise, there aren’t many Airmic secrets – it’s a well-known beast.

Tell us something about you that people would never guess?

I have driven around the Nürburgring circuit in a TR6. It’s the old German Grand Prix circuit and my husband and I were lucky enough to drive around it in 2001. That was very memorable and we were very glad that we got round in one piece. I overtook a Mercedes on the final straight and according to the speedometer, I was doing more than 100 miles per hour!

Working in risk, did you do a risk analysis first before going round the circuit?

I did insist on a roll bar being fitted before we did it.

What needs to happen for risk management to thrive?

It’s not good enough to just be resilient – you must reinvent yourself and evolve in order to be successful. You need to have a lifelong love of learning and continue looking for the opportunities to update your knowledge and your skillset.

There will be a learning hub at this year’s conference, with TED-style talks, which people can dip in and out of, in addition to the usual workshops. There’s also fastTrack, the business excellence programme, the Cass leadership development programme and the academies.

We’ve also developed the ‘tech hub’ at this year’s conference. It is evolutional of the conference to have a dedicated section for technology that is relevant to risk management.

There is also a need for trusted thought leadership, and I don’t want to steal Tim’s thunder, but there are plans for a digital library, which will bring thought leadership together in one place next year.

If you could change one thing for the future what would it be?

I would like to break down silos. The solution to a lot of our problems is in working together. And extended ERM is part of that. That’s is, extending ERM into your environment, your suppliers, customers, maybe even into your competitors. And working together rather than working alone.

If you could pick up a national newspaper tomorrow and see any headline that relates in someway to the world of either insurance or risk management, what would it be?

All organisations mandated to have climate change in their risk register.