Risk Management Changed the Landscape of Risk

The use of derivatives and risk management processes to control risk was very successful in changing the risk management Landscape.

But that change has been in the same vein as the changes to forest management practices that saw us eliminating the small forest fires only to find that the only fires that we then had were the fires that were too big to control.  Those giant forest fires were out of control from the start and did more damage than 10 years of small fires.

The geography of the world from a risk management view is represented by this picture:

The ball represents the state of the world.  Taking a risk is represented by moving the ball one direction or the other.  If the ball goes over the top and falls down the sides, then that is a disaster.

So risk managers spend lots of time trying to measure the size of the valley and setting up processes and procedures so that the firm does not get up to the top of the valley onto one of the peaks, where a good stiff wind might blow the firm into the abyss.

The tools for risk management, things like derivatives with careful hedging programs now allowed firms to take almost any risk imaginable and to “fully” offset that risk.  The landscape was changed to look like this:

Managers believed that the added risk management bars could be built as high as needed so that any imagined risk could be taken.  In fact, they started to believe that the possibility of failure was not even real.  They started to think of the topology of risk looking like this:

Notice that in this map, there is almost no way to take a big enough risk to fall off the map into disaster.  So with this map of risk in mind, company managers loaded up on more and more risk.

But then we all learned that the hedges were never really perfect.  (There is no profit possible with a perfect hedge.)  And in addition, some of the hedge counterparties were firms who jumped right to the last map without bothering to build up the hedging walls.

And we also learned that there was actually a limit to how high the walls could be built.  Our skill in building walls had limits.  So it was important to have kept track of the gross amount of risk before the hedging.  Not just the small net amount of risk after the hedging.

Now we need to build a new view of risk and risk management.  A new map.  Some people have drawn their new map like this:

They are afraid to do anything.  Any move, any risk taken might just lead to disaster.

Others have given up.  They saw the old map fail and do not know if they are ever again going to trust those maps.

They have no idea where the ball will go if they take any risks.

So we risk managers need to go back to the top map again and revalidate our map of risk and start to convince others that we do know where the peaks are and how to avoid them.  We need to understand the limitations to the wall building version of risk management and help to direct our firms to stay away from the disasters.

Advertisement

Explore posts in the same categories: Action, Assumptions, Cultural Theory of Risk, Financial Crisis, Hedging, Modeling, People Risk, Risk, Risk Learning, Risk Limits, Risk Management, Uncertainty

Tags: Risk Management

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.