With tragedies striking almost daily, it is important to think about how your community would respond. Who would help you manage a major disaster? How could something of that magnitude affect your entity’s bottom line? What insurance policies, protocols, and plans will you need to respond effectively? For risk management professionals, these are pertinent questions on how their public entity would react in the event of a crisis.

Active shooter prevention for public entities and corporations is a relatively new training concept, but a reality that risk managers can no longer ignore. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been an uptick in violent incidents occurring in the work environment, from 65% to 73%. Therefore, training must be comprehensive, encompassing all areas of daily operations and should translate into an opportunity for organizations, by turning a “squeamish” subject into a benefit with a possible return on investment (ROI).

A lot of our most worrisome, current-day risks were not on our radar screens a decade ago.

When I say “a four-letter word,” you think I’m going to say something bad, don’t you?  For many years, risk management took that same approach.  Risk was something to be avoided, transferred away, segregated and minimized.  We worked hard to minimize the adverse effects of losses and claims, transfer or prevent them when possible and finance them when necessary.  We treated risk like a bad, four-letter word and in some instances, we still do.