The BELRIM prize

Belgian risk management association Belrim has moved to address any potential skills shortage in its profession through a competition that invites students to submit the best risk management-themed paper. CRE spoke to Belrim president Sabine Desantoine about the value of the annual Belrim prize and the merits of this year’s winning submission. We also caught up with the winning student, Marius Kamto Kenmogne, about his paper.

CRE: How long has the Belrim prize been running?

Sabine Desantoine (SD): This is the third edition of the Belrim prize, and again we received high quality papers from students pursuing bachelors and masters degrees, as well as PhDs. The competition is held every two years. It is open to students that have finished their thesis during that timeframe and are supported by their professors or tutors at university.

CRE: Why is it important?

SD: Belrim wants to promote the importance of insurance and risk management in Belgium. We do it for our members, who are mostly risk and insurance managers in companies from all sectors. Another aspect of Belrim’s work is to make a link with the academic world, and we do it through our scientific committee. The scientific committee aims to facilitate the connection between the academic/theoretical world and the practical/enterprise world, so to speak.

CRE: Is risk management becoming a more important and popular subject among universities and students?

SD: Management of risks is getting higher on the agenda in the economic world and I think universities are also following the same path.

CRE: What were the judges looking for from the winning entry?

SD: Lots of the submissions were of very good quality. That’s also why they are proposed by their professors, who have already scored the theses on a more academic basis. The criteria for the Belrim jury is slightly different. One criterion of great importance is the translation of the theory into practice and the added value it can have for a risk manager.

Marius Kamto Kenmogne

CRE: What was paper your about?

Marius Kamto Kenmogne (MKK): The problem that the thesis tries to answer is how to improve the safety performance of organisations. It is based on the assumption that in addition to ensuring the reliability of the equipment, the ergonomics of the workplace and reducing the risks of human error, it is necessary to develop a safety culture to further improve safety performance. This is an a priori safety performance rather than an a posteriori performance measured by the statistics of negative events (accidents, incidents, dangerous acts, etc). The safety culture is therefore analysed both as a means to improve safety and as an indicator of the a priori safety level. Our objective was to provide professionals with a tool to measure their level of safety culture and a method of steering to develop and maintain the safety culture. We then developed a questionnaire and three indicators to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the safety culture in any type of organisation. The application of this questionnaire in university laboratories makes it possible to identify the factors determining a high level of safety culture in this context. Similarly, we adapted the European Foundation for Quality Management model to transform it into a model for steering safety performance, called the European Foundation for Safety Management. Through this model, we relate safety-related ‘variables’ with organisational and cultural factors as ‘inputs’.

CRE: Why is it an important issue?

MKK: Many accident analysis reports, including the infamous Chernobyl accident, refer to the failure of safety culture as one of the main causes of accidents. But culture is not only important when dealing with the risks of accidents or industrial disasters. In companies of all sectors, we speak more often of risk culture rather than safety culture. But these terms refer to a similar reality. This involves taking into account all the organisation’s characteristics (values, attitudes, perceptions, skills and individual and group behaviours) and all of the risks that the organisation prioritises because of their importance.

A company can put in place all the human, physical and organisational controls it wishes to prevent and mitigate risks, but as long as individuals and the organisation do not make risk management a priority, these mitigation measures can’t function effectively. This is what has led COSO, CAS and ISO 31000 to present risk culture as an essential determinant of enterprise risk management effectiveness. Continuously building a culture of risk is the way to continuously improve how each person in an organisation responds to a given risk situation to mitigate, control and optimise that risk to the benefit of the organisation.

CRE: Why is risk management important?

MKK: The current corporate environment is characterised by increasing political uncertainty, including government instability and the arrival of unconventional leaders, as well as rising tensions over geopolitical plans. On the economic level, there is a sovereign debt crisis in Europe and the use of austerity in many developed countries. On the social level, there is a massive influx of refugees fleeing conflict zones, a multiplication of terrorist acts and a growing number of social demands in certain countries of the European Union.

These examples serve simply to illustrate the nature of the macro environment in which firms operate. In such a climate of uncertainty, business survival is more than ever dependent on their ability to anticipate, adapt continuously to changes in the environment and manage crises in order to continue to function. In the field of risk management, this is called organisational resilience and is essential for the survival of the company in a more unstable and uncertain environment.

I am convinced that the best-performing companies of tomorrow are those that will have developed their resilience potential. It was the motivation for us to apply for funding from the Walloon Region for the First Spin-Off SeCuRiMet project, carried and supervised by Didier Van Caillie (HEC Ulg, CEPE) and conducted daily by myself.

This future spin-off is intended to design and implement metrics to measure the level of risk and safety culture present at a given moment in organisations with a high level of expected reliability. For example, in the industrial world of chemistry, aeronautics, petroleum, energy, nuclear, agrofood, pharmacy or biotechnology, or in the hospital and healthcare sectors.

SeCuRiMet wants to be ‘the smoke detector of the safety management system’ for this type of company which, in general, has naturally implemented integrated safety and risk management systems that are often sophisticated, to anticipate adverse events through a multitude of barriers (physical, human and organisational controls).

Yet there is a risk of catastrophic events developing in a sneaky way and at any moment they may materialise in a crisis, with serious consequences that could jeopardise the continuity of the organisation’s activities. SeCuRiMet strives to strengthen the organisational resilience of these companies by providing them with tools and methods to identify when the organisation operates within its safety margins, to better manage potential crises and to get the most out of new knowledge and learning, thus enabling them to enter a virtuous circle of continuous learning of safety and risk management.

CRE: What inspired you to enter the Belrim prize?

MKK: University research is not meant to remain in laboratories but must be at the service of companies. For me it is important that more people know what we are doing. Participation in the Belrim prize is hence an opportunity for me to communicate about the tools I have already developed concerning safety management and about the activities of my First Spin-Off. I think I will need the support of those companies with an interest in risk management just as they will need me. It is therefore essential that we establish a forum for our mutual benefit.

We agreed for instance that in the coming months I will come to one of the Belrim workshops to present a summary of my thesis as well as my projects as part of SeCuRiMet. It will be a real pleasure to do so.

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