Transformative Time

Viewing something from a different position cannot help but offer a new perspective. But when that something is the worst flood event ever to hit parts of southern Alberta – prompting insurable loss estimates that eclipse those of the 1998 ice storm – a change of perspective can be transformative.

“For me, those experiences were a transformative time in my life and I will take that forward to all my future endeavours,” Janet Stein, director of risk management and insurance at the University of Calgary, said in accepting the Donald M. Stuart Award at the RIMS Canada Conference in Victoria this past October. The award, bestowed by the RIMS Ontario Chapter since 1979, celebrates outstanding contributions in the risk management profession.

One such contribution took place during June’s flooding in Calgary. Stein was among the many who volunteered in the university’s Emergency Operations Centre, helping transform the usual to the unusual to help those in need. And there was no shortage of those in need.

Flooding that ravaged parts of the city and elsewhere in southern Alberta spurred an exodus of sorts to unaffected (or less-affected) areas. The university was one such place.

In just two days, more than 700 people had signed up to volunteer and do whatever needed to be done. Providing shelter and food to the more than 1,100 evacuees who would arrive was paramount.

“Those residences, the majority of them, actually close in the summertime. So there’s no staff to make beds; there’s no sheets – the students bring their own. They bring their own laptops, they bring their own telephones – none of that is in the rooms,” Stein says.

Staff and volunteers helped make beds; instructors and students in medicine, nursing and social work checked to ensure evacuees were alright; and volunteers helped entertain children and adults alike.

The response to the flooding taught Stein several things: there is a hero in every person; everyone needs compassion and warmth in a crisis; and people must be prepared for anything. Though the university had a lot of training, she says, “we honestly had never run through a scenario where 1,000 people show up on your campus within two days and try to find housing and food for them in the middle of the summer.”

The whole experience provided everyone involved with a different way of looking at things. Consider resources such as faculty and students in medicine, nursing and social work. “You don’t think of a university as being able to produce those resources to help in a time of need. It changed the whole face of what we were,” says Stein.

“To take evacuees in and then build programs to keep them safe and to keep them occupied, and help people out the best we could, was just not where our emergency planning had gone before,” she says.

Some of the lasting good may be a ramping up of efforts by post-secondary institutions to identify how they can best co-ordinate in a crisis, and the creation of “a template of a system to handle a huge influx of volunteers on an emergency basis,” Stein suggests.

PAST EXPERIENCE

Twenty years earlier, in 1993, Stein was working at the U of C, but not in risk management. That did not really exist as an entity then. She was in an administrative position in the executive suite, where she did things like review contracts.

But the vice president then decided to pull together all the bits and pieces to create a more comprehensive and cohesive group dealing with safety, security and risk management. The group “could look at risk from an across-campus, all-encompassing standpoint rather than it just being about property or just about liability,” Stein says.

The prospect piqued her interest. That interest, coupled with her contracts and accounting experience to help understand the ins and outs of claims, lead Stein to go work in the risk management group.

It soon became clear it was a good move. She began taking Insurance Institute of Canada and risk management courses.

Both are important since the insurance courses provide a baseline of understanding of documentations, while the risk management courses are more “big picture thinking.”

At that time, says Stein, no one went to school for risk management. Today, U of C has a risk management program. In its school of business, risk management can be taken as a specialization, she says.

The risk management group and the academic group

regularly interact, says Stein, which she regards as valuable and mutually beneficial. “We’re helping them out with the academic piece of it and they’re helping us out on the operational piece because they have the research background into what’s going on everywhere else. You couldn’t ask for a better combination.”

One of her first tasks in risk management was to look at the U of C’s kinesiology program – everything from gyms to theactivities held outdoors – to analyze, identify gaps and offer input on how to fill those gaps. “Part of it was identification and transparency of risk for the users, as well as identification of risk and filling in those gaps from the university’s perspective. Honestly, that analysis stuff was the stuff I jumped on. It was the most exciting part because it was all new.”

It is an excitement that remains with Stein still. “At the university, it’s constantly like that because we’re doing research in new areas. Because you’re on the leading edge, you never get bored. There’s always something to analyze, something new to learn.”

ALWAYS LEARNING

Stein’s passion for all things risk management may be one reason she has been so involved in RIMS. She has filled numerous leadership positions on local, national and international committees, and currently serves as chair of the RIMS Canada Council Centralized Conference Programming Committee. She also lectures on risk management issues.

Risk must be viewed as a living, ever-changing thing. “Not only are standards changing, but society is changing. And every time society changes, so does risk,” Stein suggests.

“If you sit back and say I’m always going to apply the same risk techniques I always did, it doesn’t necessarily support the societal changes that are out there,” she comments.

“It’s expected, I think, in businesses now that risk management is part of that portfolio, both for shareholders and for the business itself,” she says. “It can’t be this siloed thing where everybody does their own little thing and nobody connects the big picture at the top. You just can’t exist that way anymore.”

Stein sees hope for the future. Recalling the flood, she says more than half of the volunteers were students. “Those people are being left our legacy in capable, capable hands.” 

MORE HONOURS

The recognition of the Donald M. Stuart Award is not the first risk management honour for Stein, but it has proved an emotional one.

“I want to give you an idea of what has helped make me a leader and a mentor,” Stein said in her speech. One by one, she asked people in the audience to stand: her husband, Mark; the people she works with or has worked with at the university; the people she has worked with as part of various RIMS committees; university risk managers across Canada; and all the people who had talked to or just said hello to her at the conference.

Facing a room of people standing, she said: “Now you know what makes a leader. Look at the people around you. That is support, and that’s the future of risk management.”