Risk Leadership - Searching for Core Competencies

The concept of risk leadership has arisen in the last few years to address a problem that has emerged from broader forces of change in the field of risk management.

To understand the overall nature of that change one must understand that most areas of management contain specialised or technical knowledge and practices, but also possess a more non‐technical, integrative face. Put another way, risk management has existed almost exclusively as a technical function (really, as many technical functions), and heretofore has not been understood as an integrated aspect of general management.

But why has change occurred? To a significant degree it may be due to the simple  maturation of the field. However, beginning in the mid‐1990s, a number of developments occurred that sped up the process. While all these developments have a degree of independence from one another a common thread has emerged, which is that key stakeholders expect organisations (both public and private) to practice risk management and that the nature of this risk management is broad, comprehensive, integrative and strategic.