An exclusive 2-part seminar with Prof. Malcolm Sparrow

Organisations that pursue risk-control or harm-reduction objectives traditionally organise their core programs around functional specialties and core high-volume processes. Effective risk-control requires vigilance (to understand new threats), nimbleness (the flexibility to organise around risks that don’t fit well with existing structures) and skill (to fashion and implement surgical and tailored responses).

The field of organisational theory—with its early focus on functional specialisation and more recent focus on process-management—has not said much about how to organise a risk control or harm-reduction enterprise in a fluid and flexible way around the important risks of the day.

Emphasising functional expertise and high-quality process-management (critical though these remain) often seems to pull in the opposite direction and can appear to restrict an organisation’s capacity for fluid, creative, and effective interventions.

This two-part seminar examines the motivation for developing a capacity for risk-based work, and considers a broad range of implications for organisations that want to devote more of their resources and attention to problem-centric operations. The hope is not to displace or de-emphasise functional and process-based competence, but to add a capacity for risk-based work, learn how to organise and support that capacity, and understand how to integrate different forms of work within a single organisation.

Professor Malcolm K Sparrow

Professor of the Practice of Public Management, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Malcolm K Sparrow is a leading international expert in regulatory and enforcement strategy, security and risk control. Malcolm is the Professor of the Practice of Public Management at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government and he is Faculty Chair of the school’s executive program “Strategic Management of Regulatory and Enforcement Agencies”.

Professor Sparrow served 10 years with the British Police Service, rising to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. He has conducted internal affairs investigations, commanded a tactical firearms unit, and has extensive experience with criminal investigation. His research interests include regulatory and enforcement strategy, fraud control, corruption control, and operational risk management. He is also a patent-holding inventor, and dead serious at tennis.