BIE’s latest NED Networking event was a fireside chat hosted by Simon Moore. Moving away from the formal dinner, attendees were encouraged to network, whilst light food and drinks were served in the Drawing Room at the Covent Garden Hotel.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Risk today has become both bigger and smaller. Bigger because of its speed, complexity and interconnectedness; smaller because it can now be triggered by a single oversight, a cultural blind spot or a moment of poor judgement amplified across social media in seconds.
For today’s Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) – often balancing several board roles – this shifting landscape demands more than governance experience. It calls for curiosity, constructive challenge and a willingness to disrupt the comfortable narratives that can settle around a board table.
This was the focus of BIE’s recent NED event with Simon Laffin and John Baxter CBE, two industry leaders whose careers span financial crises, operational disasters, global engineering challenges and high-stakes decision making. Their stories – and their warnings – were a powerful reminder that risk is rarely where you expect it to be.
Simon opened with a provocation: risk is not something separate from strategy; it is strategy. The moment a board discusses growth, transformation or investment, it is already making judgements about uncertainty and consequence.
The danger, he argued, is when organisations treat risk as a parallel process – something captured in a register or addressed at a quarterly review. That separation breeds complacency, which Simon described as the most consistent companion to every major disaster he has studied.
His experiences at Northern Rock, Safeway and across dozens of boardrooms have made him wary of neat classifications and probability tables. Rare events feel improbable right up until the moment they happen. The financial crash, climate-related shocks, systemic cyber failures, reputational implosions – none were genuinely unpredictable, but many were institutionally unthinkable.
Simon’s challenge to the room was to move away from abstract discussions and ground risk in real, tangible events. Asking “what if we lost our headquarters?” prompts a very different level of thought to “what if a plane crashes into us?” Concrete scenarios bridge the gap between data and judgement, helping leaders to confront what they would actually do, and what they might later wish they had done sooner. His call to “run a pre-mortem – imagine the worst possible outcome, then work out how to avoid it” landed strongly.
Where Simon challenged the analytical side of risk, John focused on judgement and intuition. With roots in nuclear engineering, five decades in the global energy sector, and on-the-ground experience in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, he has seen how culture and capability become the determining factors long before any technical failure is visible.
When John joined BP, he asked a simple but powerful question: Are our people proud of what they do? Pride – or its absence – is one of the earliest indicators of whether an organisation is managing risk healthily. Processes can be replicated but culture cannot be faked.
Reflecting on Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history, he described challenging the new Chairman by asking: do we have the right people – and enough of them – on the most critical tasks? In high-risk environments, he said, you may have just seconds to react, like a pilot responding to an emergency. Those seconds depend entirely on whether the basics, such as capability, clarity and resourcing, were set up correctly in advance.
John had a clear message for the NEDs in the room – look beyond the board papers and speak to people across the organisation, especially away from headquarters. Build trust so that people will hint, quietly and early, if something is wrong. And never underestimate the damage of what he called “industrial psychopaths” – brilliant performers who erode culture, silence dissent and create hidden pockets of danger.
A lively plenary discussion explored a challenge familiar to many NEDs: with so many risks in the system, how do boards stay focused without being overwhelmed?
Both speakers agreed that risk becomes tedious when treated as a standalone topic, but energising when it’s woven into everyday strategic thinking. Leaders stay engaged not by reviewing long registers but by exploring credible scenarios, testing assumptions, and asking what would happen if.
The conversation also highlighted how easily boards can become detached from the lived experience of employees. Engagement surveys increasingly act as a proxy for culture but, as several NEDs observed, they rarely surface the quiet truths. Direct conversations, informal visits and open questions often reveal much more – both the problems and the strengths.
If there was a single thread running through the evening, it was the need for NEDs to keep challenging themselves as much as their organisations. To question probability, resist the urge to gloss over uncomfortable possibilities and recognise when something “doesn’t feel right” long before it becomes visible in the metrics. While you can outsource expertise, analysis and reporting, you cannot outsource judgement.
Risk is not a box to tick; it’s a way of seeing. And in a world where reputational crises unfold in seconds and “rare” events are becoming disturbingly common, the boards that succeed will be those with NEDs willing to ask the harder questions – and to listen closely to the quieter answers.
NEDs attending the event shared powerful reflections on the conversation and the value of hearing directly from Simon Laffin and John Baxter CBE:
“A thoroughly insightful fireside chat with John Baxter and Simon Laffin. An intimate atmosphere encouraged thoughtful discussion on risk management, amongst other topics, and made the networking especially valuable. A well-curated event, a testament to the excellent hosting by the BIE team.”
“The event had a great atmosphere and excellent content – the high-level risk oversight and the hands-on experiences in managing risks.”
“The evening…triggered some thinking for me about how to both think about and talk about risk.”
“Key takeaway: risk is strategy”.
“Seeing risk management through the eyes of the event, rather than the risk itself… getting further into the organisation, the reading pack will only tell you so much.”
“For me, it was a good timely reminder around risk. I really liked Simon’s approach to looking at the event rather than all the possibilities.”
“Another excellent event with two highly relevant speakers. A whole new light was shone on the subject of risk. I came away reinvigorated about how I could make risk an interactive part of the Board meeting, rather than an add-on agenda item a couple of times a year.”
“A big thank you to BIE for another very thought-provoking and interesting evening”.
“The questions during the fireside chat and the subsequent discussions over wine and canapés reminded me that NEDs across a spectrum of industries face surprisingly similar issues and we can all learn from one another. Thank you BIE for giving us all a safe place to talk about when it all goes wrong – and then gets much worse!”
“What a great evening! BIE did a wonderful job hosting us all. We had a fascinating discussion about risk: How it’s the key question for every strategy and indeed for everything we do, with plenty of real-life examples from the group. Who would have thought a discussion about risk could be so interesting?”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you’re interested in finding out more or joining our NED IMPACT Community, please get in touch with Lisa Vigurs or Simon Moore.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Simon Laffin is an experienced chairman, non-executive director, mentor and author. He has served on both public and private boards, as well as having worked in private equity and been a FTSE-100 CFO. Simon is passionate about making boards work better, for directors to learn from their own and others’ mistakes, for greater diversity at all layers of management, but especially in the boardroom, and for regulators to participate in helping boards make better decisions. He has published a book on how to be a board director (“Behind Closed Doors: The Boardroom: How to Get In, Get On, and Make a Difference” ) and is a mentor to senior business leaders. Simon is currently writing his second book on why companies fail.
John Baxter CBE is currently a Non-Executive Director on the board of Drax plc, and an advisor to a French company pioneering a new type of nuclear fuel. He has worked in the energy industry for over 50 years, covering nuclear, electricity, and, latterly, oil and gas.
John trained as a Royal Navy Engineer Officer serving at sea on nuclear submarines. He worked for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), where he was involved in all aspects of the nuclear industry, including running the Dounreay and Windscale nuclear sites and Atomic Weapon Establishments. He was also a UKAEA Board member, Director of Nirex Ltd, and head of engineering for the UK electricity utility, Powergen plc, followed by a similar role at BP plc.
