First speaker for IRM Risk Forum says “NASA - It’s not rocket science”

PRLog (Press Release) – Mar 06, 2008 – The IRM (Institute of Risk Management) today announced Stephen Carver, Lecturer in Project Management at Cranfield School of Management, as its first keynote speaker for the 2008 Risk Forum, to be held from 15 - 17 September 2008 at the University of Hertfordshire at Hatfield. Stephen will discuss risk communication with specific reference to the space shuttle disasters and his keynote appearance has been made possible thanks to generous sponsorship from Axa Corporate Solutions.
Stephen is rated as one of the top three lecturers at Cranfield - one of Europe’s top business schools - and has a reputation of taking complex management concepts and being able to distil them down, into highly informative and fun lectures - often using “storytelling” techniques.

He will be using as his case study the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28th 1986 - just one minute after launch, an accident that had been predicted as being inevitable by the designers for years. Indeed, the day before the key engineers believed that there was “essentially a 100% probability of disaster”.

As a story of the “human factor” undermining probably the most “intelligent” organisation in the world this real case cannot be beaten. Then in Feb 2003 – the space shuttle Colombia burns up on re-entry and the entire crew perish. The chilling fact was that this was a managerial repeat of the Challenger disaster – NASA had not learnt!

His specialist subjects are Project Management (especially in service based organisations) and unusually, for an academic, he has actually spent most of his working life in real business and still undertakes management assignments for many global organisations. His attitude is “if you haven’t done it – you shouldn’t be teaching it!”
For further information on this year’s Risk Forum please go to www.theirm.org/riskforum.

Notes to Editors

The Institute of Risk Management was founded 22 years ago, and is the leading professional education and training body, providing courses on risk management at a range of levels from introductory to expert.

With around 2,000 members in more than 50 countries, drawn from a variety of risk related disciplines and a wide range of industries, the Institute is governed by practising risk professionals and has strong, global links with academia and other risk and strategy organisations.

The Risk Forum is IRM’s annual flagship conference with a programme of speakers and workshops that attracts around 350 risk professionals from around the world for a unique educational and networking event.