Management consultant, Maud Avevor, delivered a compelling keynote at the African Business Management Conference, urging organisations to abandon siloed strategies and embed risk thinking directly into growth planning. This conference, which took place virtually, had over 100 business leaders in attendance. Drawing on her experience diagnosing organisational performance and designing governance solutions, Ms. Avevor framed integration as essential for both survival and scalable expansion.
“Risk and growth are two sides of the same strategy,” Ms. Avevor told a packed hall of executives and practitioners. “If you plan for growth without stress-testing it against real risk scenarios, you’re building on hope. Integrating risk and growth planning lets leaders choose opportunities deliberately and scale with fewer surprises.”
Ms. Avevor, formerly an Assistant Manager in the Management Consulting Unit at KPMG Ghana, emphasised that leaders can run cross-functional sprints where growth hypotheses are validated against legal, operational and financial risk scenarios, quantify mitigation costs in business cases, and assign clear decision rights so risks are managed at the right level. Her remarks reflected a career focused on helping organisations “survive and scale by diagnosing what’s working, revealing hidden risks, and designing practical governance and capability solutions.”
Conference attendees heard Ms. Avevor explain how integrated planning shortens the feedback loop between pilots and full-scale rollouts, reduces the likelihood of regulatory setbacks, and improves investor confidence. She also warned against treating enterprise risk management as a compliance ritual. “Stakeholders value growth that’s sustainable, the kind built on tested assumptions and known trade-offs,” she said.
Panelists following Ms. Avevor’s keynote noted a rising appetite among African companies for governance models that support rapid expansion without exposing firms to disproportionate operational or reputational harm. Ms. Avevor closed with a call to action for boards and CEOs. She said “make risk a founding assumption of every growth plan”.
Her message resonated as organisations across the continent navigate fast market changes and complex regulatory landscapes, a reminder that deliberate, integrated planning can be the difference between scaling successfully and scaling into crisis.
