MyGlasgow News

Denis Fischbacher-Smith, who holds the Research Chair in Risk and Resilience in the Adam Smith Business School, has become the University of Glasgow’s first member of academic staff to be awarded a Principal Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.  

HEA Principal Fellowships are the highest level of award granted by the Academy and are bestowed on those colleagues who have displayed “a sustained and effective record of impact at strategic level” and have a “wider commitment to academic practice and strategic leadership in teaching and enhancing the student learning experience”. There are only around 10 principal fellows in Scotland and 130 in the UK.

What will the Principal Fellowship mean to him in practice?  Denis says: “There has been encouragement from the College for academic staff to apply for Fellowship of the HEA across the range of levels. I was encouraged to apply for the Principal Fellowship and I felt honored to have been given the award following a HEA assessment panel. The Principal Fellowship is based on the UK’s professional standards framework and I had to show how my teaching and managerial career to date meet those requirements.  It will be interesting to see how the University develops its approach to dealing with teaching and learning in the light of the professional standards framework and it could clearly have implications for the ways in which we recruit and develop academic staff.”  

‌Denis hails from Merseyside, not the football daft environs of Liverpool, but rather the Rugby League heartland of St Helens RLFC where he served as a non-Executive member of the renowned club’s board for a two-year period. One of his abiding memories of working at the club was being asked by the coach to teach judo to the first team – a task given to him because he had been the captain of the University of Manchester’s judo club as a post-graduate student. “That was a painful morning,” he recalls. “Rugby league players are extremely fit, very strong, and took great delight in trying to tie me in knots!  The bruises are now beginning to fade. I made a mental note to watch the game from the stands in future.”

He sees many similarities between the banks of the Mersey and the banks of the Clyde. “There tends to be an honesty and humor in both cities – you will invariably know what people think about a particular situation” he says.  His links with the University of Glasgow have become a family affair - his wife Moira is Dean of Learning and Teaching with the College of Social Sciences and they met when he was appointed in 2006 – and both are now Glasgow graduates. Moira received her PhD from Glasgow and Denis an MLitt and DLitt.

Focus

The focus of Denis’s work is low-probability/high consequence events. He explains: “Usually these are events that have some form of human involvement in causation. For instance, that could be a result of violations - such as through terrorism, organised crime - or from more 'routine' forms of  human error and my work has focused on the ways in which organisations seek to control and manage those problems. The research also looks at how we deal with events for which we have little or no prior experience and how we incorporate the resulting uncertainty in our decision-making processes. A lot of the time organisations make assumptions  concerning the uncertainty that surrounds their decision making processes and experience shows us that we are not very good at doing that. Despite this, when you look at the teaching curriculum in business schools then it is clear that not many of them do much teaching in the areas of risk and crisis management and this has been a major criticism of such courses in the USA. Business schools have only really come to this relatively recently".  

Denis’s career to date has followed his roots in the North of England, with spells at Liverpool University, where he founded the business school and also professorial posts at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Liverpool John Moores (where he was also head of the business school). He has also held faculty positions at the University of Manchester and both Leicester and Nottingham Polytechnics. In terms of international links, he has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Kobe (Japan), San Diego State (USA) and Innsbruck (Austria). Within the UK, he has been a visiting fellow at the Wolfson Institute at the University of Durham and a visiting professor at Brunel and Edge Hill Universities. Denis initially trained in Geography and Environmental Science before doing an MBA and his PhD was in the area of the control of major accident hazards in the chemical and petrochemical industries.

Harsh realities

His early career experience brought him face to face with some of the harsh realities behind the practice of risk management. He worked with a North West local authority as it struggled to re-organise front-line services to protect vulnerable children. Currently one of his external engagements is on contingency planning with the Scottish Government. “I have only really ever been interested in real world problems that can be used as a means of developing our understanding of how organisations fail” he says.  

One area of his research that he still finds painful is his work around football stadia accidents and especially Hillsborough which now the subject of a fresh inquiry, which is currently being conducted in Warrington. Professor  Fischbacher-Smith, who worked on issues relating to safety in football grounds with a colleague at Liverpool University, and who happened to be in Sheffield city centre on the day of the disaster, says: “Even 25 years on, looking at what happened at Hillsborough it is still absolutely shocking to see how a chain of events unfolded to cause the deaths of 96 people. More shocking is the manner in which information relating to those deaths was not made available to the bereaved and how they have had to fight since then for justice.

"The people who died at Hillsborough had gone to watch a game of football, like many others across the country, and they died in tragic circumstances as a result of a series of events that should not have happened. Some of those factors were policy driven like the pitch-side security fencing; some were design errors in the ground itself, its location, and the lack of effective communication on the day; and there were also a series of human errors that compounded some of these strategic level problems. It is hard to believe that so many people could die simply watching a game of football. It happened not because of a willful act, not because someone had gone out to cause harm. It happened because of a whole range of factors that came together to create a catastrophic event. Families have had to endure a further 25 of years of searching for answers to why their loved ones died and that is quite frankly unforgivable.”  

It may be early days for Professor Fischbacher-Smith to fully assess the opportunities that the Principal Fellowship of the HEA might bring...but he’s not short of the real-world experience that will help him influence shape and implement public policy which is at the heart of the Academy’s mission.

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First published: 10 April 2014