LIVE from RISKWORLD 2022: Mark Hoffman, ClearRisk

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting Live from RISKWORLD 2022 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, it’s time for Workplace MVP. Brought to you by R3 Continuum, a global leader in helping workplaces thrive during disruptive times. Now, here’s your host.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:22] Hi, everyone. Your host, Jamie Gassmann here, coming to you from the RISKWORLD 2022 Expo Hall in R3 Continuum’s booth, our show sponsor. And joining me is Mark Hoffman from ClearRisk US Corp.

Mark Hoffman: [00:00:38] Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:38] Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Hoffman: [00:00:39] Thanks, Jamie.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:40] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:00:40] This is fun.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:41] Yeah, it’s exciting. I’m glad you stopped by. I know we’ve been having fun chatting already before, but tell us a little bit about what ClearRisk does.

Mark Hoffman: [00:00:49] Well, no, before I do that, I have to say why I stopped by. It’s because of your producer, John’s light out front that just drew me in, this beautiful on-air light that said, “Man, I got to learn more about that.”

Jamie Gassmann: [00:01:01] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:01:02] But no, seriously. So, I’m here with ClearRisk. I was a speaker at the conference. I spoke yesterday, and we can talk about that a little bit. But ClearRisk is a risk management information system. So, RMIS. We do claims, and incident reporting, and tracking and analytics. And I’m also helping them develop a business continuity module to help companies be more resilient. And we’re here at the conference as well, down at Booth 1918. And it’s been a great experience.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:01:33] Yeah. So, I know it’s kind of the first time back in-person after a couple of years.

Mark Hoffman: [00:01:38] Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:01:39] So, you know, what have you felt the vibe being or the people you’ve been talking to, what are you kind of sensing from the audience?

Mark Hoffman: [00:01:45] Well, the first vibe for me was before I spoke live in front of an audience yesterday, I sort of had those butterflies that you don’t always get when you’re in front of that Zoom screen or whatever. And a lot of the conferences that I spoke at the last couple of years, they have you pre-record it and send it in. And so, it’s very easy for those things to come off really flat because you’re in your office by yourself, and you don’t have that feedback that you get from the audience.

And yesterday, yeah, okay, there were a little — you know, some jitters maybe early on, but I had a full room, standing room only, great eye contact, people taking pictures of the screen, you know, things like that. And you get that interaction with the audience that says, wow, it’s just energetic and it really, you know, charges you up. As far as the conference goes, it’s great to see people. There have been some very clever things to draw people in, the potting contest, some of the walls, the sand sculpture and, you know, the on-air booth over here.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:02:46] Our on-air booth. That’s awesome.

Mark Hoffman: [00:02:48] Yeah. So, well done.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:02:48] Thank you. So, talking about your presentation, tell me, what was the topic of that presentation or kind of dive into the meat of what you were discussing?

Mark Hoffman: [00:02:59] Yeah, I sort of took a different approach, and it’s a risk that everybody’s thinking about, and it’s cybersecurity. And so, I spent 20 minutes yesterday talking about how to effectively communicate if you’ve been the victim of a cyber attack, and really to kind of narrow it down to the main nuggets.

It’s basically three things. If you need to communicate to external stakeholders, or to the public, or even to your employees, it really needs to start with the fact that you have to own it. You have to tell the truth. You have to explain what happened, admit what happened. And this applies really to any type of crisis, not just a cyber attack, but basically just come out and say, “Listen, this is what’s happened,” and tell the truth. Whatever that initial statement is, it has to stand up to fact checking, right?

We live in a world right now where everybody — I was at the ball game last night. I went down to a Giants game and I was sitting next to a woman who said to me, “Oh yeah, I was in Toronto once.” And I said, “Oh, what were you doing?” And she said, “Well, I was filming a movie there.” And so, I said, “Well, that’s kind of cool.” And I asked her what the movie was, and she told me, and she told me what her role was. And then, when we turned away from each other, what did I do? I Googled it, right? Just to make sure that is this woman legit? Like, you know, was she really in that movie? And she was. And it was really kind of cool. So, whatever statement you make has got to stand up to that fact checking, which is, you know, real time.

The next thing is add some context to what you just told me. And then, the example that I used yesterday, company came out, and they admitted that they had executed on an email that they shouldn’t have. But then, they added appropriate context. “Look, our servers were not breached. You know, user data was not compromised in this.” And that’s important context.

And then, the third thing is talk about what you learned from it, and what you’re going to do different going forward. And if you can do those things, and it’s so different than, you know, the average celebrity apology, right? You can do those things. This is what happened; we admit that it happened; if necessary, apologized for it happening; add some good context to it. And then, talk about, “What did I learn? This is what we’re going to do different going forward.” That’s a winning formula for communicating effectively.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:05:18] Yeah, I love it. I feel like those are kind of like, you know, the go-to for when you make a mistake-

Mark Hoffman: [00:05:24] Right.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:05:24] … in a way. Like I mean, that’s what I tell my employees. You know, I live by that. I had a boss very young in my career, mistakes are going to happen, issues are going to happen, cyber risk could happen-

Mark Hoffman: [00:05:33] Right.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:05:34] It’s how you respond to it and, you know, address it, accept ownership or responsibility, and then what are you going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen going forward. So, I love that you brought that up into that presentation because I feel like that those are just standards you should live by, but yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:05:49] Right. And it was interesting. Somebody asked a question right at the end and they said, “Yeah, but big corporations lie.” And so, I said, “Yeah, okay, but we need to influence that, right? We need to change that culture. We need to make sure that we come at this from the standpoint that your answers have to stand up to fact checking. Otherwise, you’re just going to make it worse.”

Jamie Gassmann: [00:06:08] Oh, absolutely. When I think of, you know, in addressing a comment like that, it’s like, yeah, but in today’s world, the truth is eventually going to come out.

Mark Hoffman: [00:06:17] Right.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:06:17] And where do you want to — you know, would you want to be like on the positive side of that or the negative?

Mark Hoffman: [00:06:22] That’s right. Lawyers like to use the term the fact pattern.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:06:26] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:06:26] And the fact pattern is you better be right. You better be on the side of right as you go forward. Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:06:31] Yeah, interesting. So, I understand in talking to you, you also do a podcast, which is exciting. I love having other fellow podcasters on our podcast with us. Tell me a little bit about what you do there.

Mark Hoffman: [00:06:41] Yeah. So, the podcast is called The Resilient Journey. And it is sponsored by ClearRisk. And you can find us anywhere that you find podcasts – you know, Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts and all that stuff. And basically what we do is we focus on resilience, whether it’s business resilience, organizational resilience. We talk about cyber risk and things like that.

But we’re also starting to talk a little bit more here about personal resilience. And there’s some very interesting stories. I’ve talked to some folks who — one of my favorites was a guy called Vince Davis. I love him to death. He’s from Chicago and he’s in the emergency management field. And he talked about racial inequity in the emergency management industry. And he said, “Mark, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years.” And he said, “I know and I can list for you all of the other people in our industry who are black.” And do I have time to tell the story I mentioned before?

Jamie Gassmann: [00:07:38] Oh, yeah, keep going. Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:07:40] He said, “Hey, you know, one of the things you have to realize is the privilege that you have that you’re not aware of,” he said, “When you back out of your driveway in the morning to go to work, you’re Mark, or you’re Jimmy, or he’s John.” He said, “I back out of the driveway in the morning and I’m black. And that’s how I’m viewed on the way to work, at work and on the way home from work.” And it’s things we don’t think about. And so, I’ve interviewed him and I love that one.

I interviewed a guy from the UK who lost a family member and talked about the struggles of trying to come to work with that burden. And it really kind of ties in to what you’re doing. And he wrote an article, you know, what do you do when the resilience person or the continuity person can’t continue? How do you deal with that? And he talked about the first step, the hardest step was needing to say, “I need help. I need a break. I need to stop.”

Jamie Gassmann: [00:08:36] Yeah. And, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of people as well. And, you know, even on this podcast, some that have experienced some really traumatic events in US history. I interviewed a gentleman that was in the Pentagon during 911.

Mark Hoffman: [00:08:47] Wow. Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:08:48] You know, and so hearing those personal stories, I think they’re so helpful in allowing you to be able to connect yourself, so that you’re not just assuming you think you know how somebody feels, but you’re actually learning from somebody what that feels like.

Mark Hoffman: [00:09:02] Right.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:09:02] And that’s so powerful.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:09:03] Right. You know, I interviewed a guy a couple of weeks ago. Sean Vanslyke is his name. He’s the CEO of a company called SEMO Electric Cooperative or something like that. He’s in Missouri. And he does a thing called the Friday Feature. And it’s a one-minute positive little story. And he puts it up on LinkedIn, he puts it on YouTube. And he’s really affected my life. Like, I don’t want to maybe go as far as to say, well, he changed my life, but he certainly influenced me to be more positive.

And that’s what we need right now, right? There’s so much division in our world, and there’s so much hatred, and anger and frustration. And I was in the Frankfurt Airport a couple of weeks ago, and I was on the phone with my wife, and our granddaughter had gone to the hospital. She had a really high fever. And I was trying to talk to her, and I couldn’t hear her. And I just walked off to sort of a corner area. Well, it turned out, it was one of those entrance areas to the lounges, you know, where the elite travelers get to go. And the guy comes up to me, and he goes, “You can’t be here.” And I said, “I’m having an important conversation and I can’t hear out in the main hallway.” “I don’t care. You can’t be here.” And so it turned into a little bit of an argument.

So, I went somewhere else, and I got off the phone with my wife, and I went back up to him and I said, “Look, I understand about the rules. But you could have showed some compassion there.” And that’s just for all of us.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:10:26] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:10:26] Be better. Let’s be better. Let’s raise the bar, and not look at our neighbor and say, “Jamie, you need to be better.” Look in the mirror and say, “Mark, you need to be better.”

Jamie Gassmann: [00:10:36] Yeah.

Intro: [00:10:36] And that’s where it needs to start.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:10:38] Yeah. It’s like you see a lot of those LinkedIn posts about, you know, understanding that somebody might be going through something that you’re not aware of.

Mark Hoffman: [00:10:45] Right.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:10:45] And how do you show that compassion all the time? Because you might be the difference in somebody’s life that day by just being kind.

Mark Hoffman: [00:10:52] Yeah, you might be.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:10:52] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:10:53] You might be. I had mentioned to you that one of my interviews, a good friend of mine who went through some childhood trauma. And now, after a long struggle — and then attempted suicide. Now, she helps women who have been through similar things. And she told me during the interview, she said that four people have come up to her and said, “You know, I was suicidal, too. I had a suicide plan, but because of my conversations with you, I don’t feel that way anymore.” And, you know, that’s impact, and that’s leadership, and that’s what we’re about, and that’s what we need to try to do.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:11:28] Yeah, I love that conversation. It’s kind of like we can make that difference in someone’s life-

Mark Hoffman: [00:11:34] Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:11:34] … just by being human, and compassionate and caring. So, I love that. Great.

Mark Hoffman: [00:11:39] You know, you like to ask questions just like I do, right?

Jamie Gassmann: [00:11:42] I do, yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:11:43] And you get a charge out of when you ask a really good question-

Jamie Gassmann: [00:11:46] Yes.

Mark Hoffman: [00:11:46] … when a guest says to you, “Oh, I love that question.”

Jamie Gassmann: [00:11:48] Yes. It’s like, “Oh, I did good.”

Mark Hoffman: [00:11:50] Yeah, that’s right or “I have insight. I think I understand what you’re talking about.” I asked Tracy, who’s the guest I’m talking about, and that’s the episode that’s coming up this week, by the way. I said to her, “Okay. Well, I’ve never been through anything like this. What would you say to me? How can I help? What do I do?” And she says, “Oh, nobody’s ever asked me that before.” And that’s how you know, it’s a good question.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:10] Oh, absolutely. You know, I actually had a gentleman on my show one time who had been — he had bipolar. And I asked him, because he talks about when you tell people that you have bipolar, they always go, “I’m sorry.” He says, “That’s not what I want to hear.” My next question was, “Well, what do you want to hear? What can we say because we don’t we don’t know what you feel?”

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:32] Right? Teach us.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:33] Teach us.

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:34] Yeah.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:34] “What would you like us to say?” So, it’s awesome. So, I’m right there with you. I think this is great. And really appreciate you stopping by and joining us.

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:43] Thanks for having me. And now, you-

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:45] Yeah.

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:45] Now, you owe me one. Now, you have to be a guest on my podcast.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:47] Oh, I’d love to. Thank you for the invite. Absolutely.

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:50] Well, we’ll talk about what you do here-

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:52] Yeah, fantastic.

Mark Hoffman: [00:12:52] … and what the conference is all about. Yeah. Because it’s all part of being resilient.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:12:55] Absolutely, it is part of being resilient. And I would be honored to be on your show.

Mark Hoffman: [00:13:00] Awesome.

Jamie Gassmann: [00:13:01] Yeah, wonderful. Thanks again for joining us.

Mark Hoffman: [00:13:03] Thanks for having me.

Outro: [00:13:08] Thank you for joining us on Workplace MVP. R3 Continuum is a proud sponsor of this show and is delighted to celebrate most valuable professionals who work diligently to secure safe workplaces where employees can thrive.