(So many) bad things can happen to good companies
Threat vectors are multiplying out there. Time to reboot corporate risk management.
The situation
A butterfly can flap its wings in Beijing, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine. That’s a popular way of describing the butterfly effect, which suggests that complex systems are so interconnected that little events in one place can cause much bigger events to happen someplace else.
Little events. Like…tweets. Or bits of malicious code. Interdependent, multidimensional little events with the potential for global impact. Events that must be managed at the speed of social media.
This is the key insight that Marianne Nichols and her global strategic intelligence colleagues at Invesco have operationalized. The Atlanta-based investment management company no longer addresses threats like brand risk, cybercrime, terrorism, or natural disasters with discrete, siloed functions; the networked scale of the threats has made that approach obsolete.
And it doesn’t matter that risk—as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown—is generally impossible to predict. Customers and investors still hold management accountable for performance and results, even when a risk event is unprecedented. That’s why Deloitte has paired with Invesco to promote a reboot for corporate risk management overall—one that recognizes the change in the risk landscape and more closely aligns risk management with a company’s overall strategy.
Unprecedented risks? Management's still on the hook for results.
The solve
The recommendation? A dedicated, global strategic intelligence function that cuts across organizational silos. The vision: operations, information security, IT, HR, legal, compliance, corporate relations, and other specialists monitoring, predicting, identifying, and responding to potential issues in an integrated way.
Here’s how it works: A strategic intelligence team collects (and produces) intelligence on threats from a wide range of connected domains—each according to their experience. They identify changes in the risk environment and generate big-picture, proactive impact analysis—an early warning system. This system doesn’t just guide tactical risk management; it gives leadership across the business a clear picture of emerging risks and the strategic insights they need to steer the organization. It helps them look forward rather than in the rearview mirror.
The best response to threats on multiple fronts? A united front.
The impact
If one truism has emerged from the past couple years’ events, it’s that we live in uncertain times. A strategic intelligence program can equip leaders to make more risk-intelligent decisions on how to navigate that uncertainty.
Integrated sensing and analysis lead to better insights; better insights lead to more informed, faster decisions. They lead to better agility and ultimately more resilient organizations—organizations able to respond and recover from risk events more rapidly and effectively than before.
And that—by any reckoning—is not a little thing.
Strategic intelligence = an integrated early warning system
Chris Ruggeri
