Risk know-how at Lloyd’s Register Foundation Safer World Conference in May 2022

The Risk Know-How team hosted a plenary session at the LRF Safer World Conference on Wed 11th May 2022. We presented our findings and insights from the project so far and convened a panel of experts in statistics, risk literacy and risk communications to discuss how official bodies and major information providers could better support people navigating complex data and information at the community level.

Michael Blastland, renowned broadcaster and board member of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, delivered a keynote on how understanding risk should help the public. “Is data improving our risk assessment or are we just making the same mistakes with more gigabytes?”, he asked the audience of international thought leaders from research, academia, business and government.

Further to introductions to the risk know-how framework and the discussions we have been having with community practitioners, our other panellists Sarah Cumbers, LRF Director of Evidence and Insight, Olivia Jensen, Lead Scientist at the LRF Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore and Tracey Brown OBE, Director of Sense about Science, joined Michael Blastland for the panel discussion. There was a strong focus on the need to sensitise institutions to the needs of the communities they work with and the challenges they face in everyday decision-making.

Can information providers internalise this user group? Can they start thinking of themselves as answering people’s questions rather than producing data?

Tracey Brown, Director of Sense about Science