MET’s Faculty Angle: Hurricane Season through the Eyes of a Risk Manager
Mark Carroll knows something about risk.
Not only did he found Metropolitan College’s Enterprise Risk Management program, he’s worked in related roles in financial services, manufacturing, and consumer products as well as in risk, recovery, business continuity, and disaster recovery throughout his career. What’s more, he’s based in Florida—where Hurricane Milton recently left a trail of devastation in its path, including in his own neighborhood. But as he explains, no small part of risk management is recognizing the conditions associated with a given environment. “[T]hat’s what happens in Florida. They get hurricanes,” he says. “Now, that’s not unique. Every geographic area of the country has its own weather events, and no matter where you are, you get something.”
Which is to say, anywhere you go, there are risks—making preparation paramount, wherever you are.
Like so many who teach at BU MET, Carroll is a seasoned expert in his field—in this instance, risk management; the practice of managing and preparing for unforeseen developments and their potential costs. And in the first installment of The Faculty Angle, MET’s new series spotlighting significant issues through the perspective of College instructors, Carroll joined to discuss the ways Florida’s response to Hurricane Milton evidences capable risk and recovery standards.
According to Carroll, local workers have done a good job picking up the pieces in Milton’s wake. “Florida Emergency Management does a great job with this,” he says, crediting their success to folks’ preparedness. “Those are seasoned individuals who spent years in disaster recovery, emergency management, continuity, et cetera, and learn their trade, learn the disciplines on the job and as a result, now I can focus on simply my environment in my own home and making sure that it’s okay.”
A major component to effective risk management is planning and recovery, which cannot forestall disasters but can mitigate the harm they do. “Risk and solid risk planning cannot eliminate the need to recover any more than we can stop the hurricane,” he says. “But effective recovery is actually within our grasp if that risk planning is done effectively.”
That planning is a job that falls to the risk managers. In the event of a crisis, risk managers will conduct advance drills and exercises to confirm that their organization is duly prepared. Their first priority? Protecting what Carroll calls “human capital,” which entails enacting safety measures to protect people. Next comes business vulnerabilities, which might include power or communications capabilities—technology. Here, Carroll cites the ERM course Disaster Management (MET AD 614), emphasizing the central role tech plays in recovery efforts. “In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to identify an activity that does not center around technology directly or indirectly,” he says. “The recent hurricanes provide a great example. Localities are relying on information technology to identify simply who is entitled to fill sandbags in that town or in that county.”
But while risk management is hardly a new field, as Carroll describes, it is still in its youth as an academic field of study. “As a result, we’re constantly learning and deploying [new] example[s] into the classroom,” he says. This creates novel opportunities for students to learn about the practice of risk management through a wide variety of sources. “When you step back and you look at what’s happened in the climate, weather, industry, et cetera, there’s always something … what they call a ‘black swan’ where you say, oh, I never saw that before.
“You put them through a lens that says, I’ve never seen this, I’ve never dealt with this, but I know how to deal with concepts around this. So, I’ve got an approach that’s going to benefit me in the future for this,” Carroll says. And while those “black swan” events might be new and unique, they are likely to relate to something with precedent. “So, although we’ve never seen it, I know how to approach it,” he says.
Watch the video above for more from MET lecturer Mark Carroll on risk management, Hurricane Milton, and his own personal experiences. And stay tuned for more installments of The Faculty Angle, where MET instructors use the real world to teach you distinctive lessons about their area of expertise.