Learning from losses has real value
The reality of business is that initiatives do not always go as planned. Processes break down and errors happen. Whenever this occurs, it becomes a learning opportunity not just for those directly involved but for potentially everyone in the Company. We need to learn from these experiences because if we make the same mistake again then we are incurring unnecessary losses which impact shareholder value.
A few months ago, Rahim Hirji, our Chief Risk Officer, met with a client who shared their practices in this area. Every morning, at that company's senior management meeting, the executives talked openly and immediately about anything that went wrong in their departments, why it occurred, and what they were doing to fix it. This is a progressive risk management culture and learning organization. They have no fear of discussing losses and the lessons learned because they become stepping stones for future innovation and success.
At Manulife, there are many types of operational risk events that can lead to losses as we operate our business – process breakdowns, human error, privacy breaches of personal information, systems failures, fraud, and compliance failures leading to fines, to name a few. These losses have traditionally been managed and reported within our Business Units. Only losses greater than the $500K threshold were being reported to our Group Risk Management team, which would mine the reports for potential global learnings from these events.
We now have an opportunity to leverage our learnings from these loss events even further. This year, we have lowered the reporting threshold so that all operational risk losses greater than $100K will be reported to the Group Risk team. Discussing these events systematically across the Divisions will better prevent similar incidents from happening in other areas of the Company.
Even with a lower threshold, it is important to track and analyze all operational risk losses, where practical. Some of our businesses already have this down to a fine art. The Investment Division is one area that has a robust loss and incident reporting process, where learning from loss events is a key part of their daily mindset and management process. Many of our Operations areas also have strong loss tracking processes and seek to learn from them.
We must also remember losses can happen even when we do our job right. Correct decisions taken with a 90 per cent probability of success still have a 10 per cent chance of falling short of desired results. While we can never eliminate risk, learning from every loss enables us to better understand and manage the risks in our future activities. It gives us confidence that the amount of risk we take supports our strategic objectives.
Ultimately, to help Manulife become a better learning organization, we want employees to come forward and raise issues related to loss events that they see in the course of doing their jobs. Issues raised should be supported by analysis and have support from leaders in developing a solution.
We want to create an environment where receiving bad news can be good news and using losses as an opportunity to innovate and grow is deeply ingrained in our culture.