The first lecture within the educational project "Ukraine Global Faculty", the purpose of which is to attract the best scientists and teachers from around the world to lecture for Ukrainian students, was delivered at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute on November 16 by David Rubens, the Executive Director in The Institute of Strategic Risk Management (London, Great Britain). The scientist's research concerns the improvement of control systems for the purpose of making balanced decisions in the event of crisis situations.
"There is rationality in risk management," explains Dr. Rubens. "Strategic risk and, as a result, crisis management have their origins in September 11, 2001. It was then that two twin skyscrapers in New York became the object of a terrorist act, during which a huge number of people died. And at that time, there was nothing to resist the plan to destroy buildings using two passenger airliners developed by criminals. Since that day, the concept of "crisis", which is often unpredictable in its nature, has been in the center of mankind's attention. At all rates, this is experience through the lens of history. There are enough challenges: August 2005 - Hurricane Katrina, 2008 - Financial collapse in the world economy, April 20, 2010 - Oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, March 11, 2011 - the explosion at the Fukushima NPP (Japan)... That is why the development of risk management standards carried out by the Institute of Strategic Risk Management, founded in 2018, is more relevant than ever", - states David Rubens.
The lecturer believes that it is time to trust the opinion of specialists and scientists in consulting in the field of development, implementation and evaluation of the functioning of risk management systems. We are talking about experienced scientists who generalize practical experience and have an academic vision of the origins of problematic situations. In their activity, they rely on the fundamental law of risk management: "I analyze the past, I can create today's situational model, I am good at projecting the future."
However, David Rubens, during the study of the "background of the problem emergence", proposes to limit the term of predicting the future for a specific enterprise, economic sector, city, etc. to the period 2023-2025. The solution of climate change problems (in particular, global warming), environmental pollution, forest fires, poverty in many countries of the world, hyper-urbanization, vulnerability of state structures to external factors, theft of top-secret data, computer system failures, etc. are on the agenda in the field of crisis consulting. And this is far from a complete list of modern challenges for humanity. Therefore, Dr. Rubens is convinced that modern students, in particular those who currently study at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, will have a place to apply their knowledge in the future if they devote themselves to crisis consulting.
