Risk managers can learn valuable lessons from ancient African stories, a leading expert says. 
Joachim Adebayo Adenusi, executive director of Inspirational Risk Management Solutions (IRMS), and a former director of the Institute of Risk Management, has used the story of a threatened city in ancient West Africa to parallel the characters' fight for survival with handling the risks involved in running a business.
The story has been made into a film, Risk Edutainment – 'Moremi',, which will be shown at a reception at BAFTA for business leaders on February 23, together with a storytelling session by an African storyteller Usifu Jalloh.
Mr Adenusi said: "Human beings are innately storytellers and risk managers, and have always been throughout history. These days, businesses slot it away as a set of fairly dull procedures and processes but it gets to the heart of decisions everybody makes about their lives every day.”
Moremi is the heroine of the story who helps save her city, Ile-Ife, from a threat to its future. Her quest highlights dilemmas of strategy, risk, performance and reward.
The film has already won praise from academics at Glasgow Caledonian University, who called it "an exciting alternative to more traditional approaches to risk management training".
Mr Adenusi said: "Moremi asks questions about how to deal with the threats and opportunities of life and death, existence and destruction - just the same issues faced by businesses right now in an economically threatening world.
"I found in some of my previous roles as a risk professional, that it was a constant battle to find ways of getting staff engaged in thinking about how they handled threats and opportunities at work, which is what risk management is all about. It was in the process of looking for ways of engaging and enthusing staff that I first had the idea of using stories and plays. I'm delighted I've finally been able to make it happen."
The film was written by Gbadero Lahanmi and produced by Deadline Productions.
|
