Dennis Mahoney and his colleagues know more than a thing or two about risk. Helping client businesses identify, quantify and manage risk forms an increasing part of what Aon, of which Mahoney is the UK chief executive and chairman, does.

This was a smart move on Aon’s part as the company’s traditional insurance broking business – Aon is the biggest in the sector in the UK according to recent figures – saw its traditional landscape completely altered by the rise of the internet, losses and regulatory scandals.

(As Mahoney puts it: “In every town you used to have a butcher, a baker, a travel agent and an insurance broker. Now the travel agencies have largely gone and the insurance brokers are going the same way.”) So you could say that Aon has moved to cope with its own business risk.

So risk is not just mere academic knowledge for the senior leaders of Aon – especially when you consider that the company lost about 100 people in the World Trade Centre terrorist outrage whose fifth anniversary is tomorrow.

The reality of terrorism and how the world, and in particular the world of business, learns to live with it is one of the main emerging risks which was cited by Mahoney at a series of meetings with Scottish businesses last week.

Terrorism is also the subject of a meeting of the Scottish North American Business Council being held in Edinburgh tomorrow evening – the actual anniversary of the event – in which speakers from security specialists Control Risk and Delta, the US airline, are taking part.

But it wasn’t just terror Mahoney highlighted. Aon is advising companies to prepare for the effects of a sudden slump in the oil price.

There is also the prospect of a global pandemic, with avian flu being top of everyone’s worries in this area of risk.

Add to that that two-thirds of companies have no exit strategy in place for their defined benefit pension schemes. Mahoney says this is another area in which companies need to act. More companies, and in particular finance directors, have this on their agenda but is it leading to actual action? I suspect that the answer to that is ‘no’ in many cases.

Interestingly, research conducted by Aon shows that topping the list of top 10 risks as far as businesses themselves are concerned, are loss of reputation and business interruption.

Given recent dramatic examples of these phenomona, it is perhaps not surprising that they are top of the risk pops. It is pretty spectacular to have your business’s name flash across the world’s media because your chief executive (David Carruthers) in the case of BetonSports has been picked up by the FBI while changing planes at an American airport.

How much the company, its board and the brokers who issued the company’s flotation prospectus foresaw the legal risks is the subject of much debate.

But if you can understand that they might not have seen the potential risk of such action by the American authorities, given how close to the legal line they are skating on betting in the US, the same could surely not be said for Sportingbet. Its chairman, Peter Dicks, was arrested last week at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York.

It is perhaps little wonder that a colleague of Dicks on one of the boards he serves on was quoted in The Daily Telegraph last week as saying: “He’s ultra-bright and highly numerate. He’s so bright sometimes he doesn’t see the obvious things, like not going to the US if you chair an online gambling company.”

It is a really striking example of the need for a company, executive team and board, to keep right on top of the changing environment and keep asking the ‘what if’ questions.

What if some of the batteries you have been supplied for your laptops have a tendency to burst into flames?

What if you discover that more than a million of your edible products are potentially contaminated with salmonella? Do you keep it a secret or disclose it?

A lot of these issues which start perhaps as business interruption or product tampering or employee accidents (all on the top 10 risk list in Aon’s research) also (normally very quickly) become reputation management issues.

So businesses are fighting on (at least) two fronts. Management has to put in place whatever urgent measures are required to deal fully with the issue and has to decide on its message and get it out very quickly. The trick here is being on the front foot and not being dragged along by events.

All of this speaks of the need for having very good advice in place on the reputational issues. Trying to put it in place only when the proverbial is hitting the fan is just too late. A game of catch-up can be played but it is not advisable.

It is interesting that ‘failure to change’, which shared the top spot on Aon’s top 10 risks list in 2003 has now dropped back to third place.

Dennis Mahoney will have his own thoughts about that. He is, after all, part of an industry which has seen its own choppy waters.

The losses and regulatory scandals following investigations into the industry on Wall Street led by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer led to a shake-up which saw Mahoney announcing 750 job cuts at Aon UK.

Nobody could accuse Mahoney of a failure to change, although he was criticised for the speed in which he did it. As he said at the time: “We decided to wait and analyse what was happening in the post-Spitzer world. I hate this part of my job.”

Hate that he may, but it has all added to the quality of advice on risk that Mahoney and his colleagues can provide.