Rising To The Occasion

Over the last two decades Risk, Innovation and Sustainability have at various points gained in importance and it has been an interesting evolution for these functions as departments, titles, models for success, and research papers on how they can best operate within existing organizational structures. At points in their evolution, they have struggled to maintain relevance and at others, they have been at the forefront of competitive response. But over the past couple of years, these areas are coming together like never before – accelerated by the disruptions due to the pandemic, without a doubt. There now seems to be a golden opportunity to integrate and leverage their inherent strengths to seek convergence using technology, leading to potentially multiplicative effects in results. I also observe, of late, a number of positions getting created across organizations, integrating at least two, if not all three areas into a horizontal that can expand the scope of action to catalyze the resulting collaborative outcomes into a competitive advantage that can be hard to beat. In this article, I look at the generic views taken by organizations for each of these elements over the years, and ideate on their ability to RISe to the occasion…