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Reimagining the risk intelligent enterprise

Proactive risk management for competitive advantage

Managing risk isn’t just about preventing loss—it’s also about creating opportunity. By becoming a risk intelligent enterprise, leaders can create value for stakeholders, boost performance, and grow their businesses. Discover practical steps for adopting a proactive approach to risk management.

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The importance of risk intelligence

Is your organization taking a proactive approach to risk management? Many aren’t. Despite the advancements in risk management over the last 10 years, many leadership teams still lack a clear picture of the risks to their organizations and reliable ways of addressing them.

Leaders who adopt the practices of a risk intelligent enterprise have a sharper vision of risks and opportunities. The risk intelligent enterprise acknowledges that risk management must evolve as risks evolve. And it understands that traditional enterprise risk management isn’t enough. To get ahead of disruptive risk, organizations need to develop a proactive risk management program.

The risk intelligent enterprise:

  • Pursues the opportunities that risk presents while protecting existing assets
  • Creates strategic flexibility while maintaining operational discipline
  • Increases senior executives’ confidence in their decisions
  • Provides assurance to the board that risks have been addressed

Reimagining the risk intelligent enterprise

Inside a risk intelligent enterprise

The risk intelligent enterprise aligns people, process, tools, technologies, and governance into one system. From there, it prioritizes and allocates scarce resources to the highest return opportunities.

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Operationalizing risk intelligence: Turning concepts into practice

Operationalizing risk intelligence calls for tools and technologies that deliver timely risk information, facilitate risk-informed decision-making, and increase confidence in key decisions—all with the goal of optimizing value at a given risk level. Here are a few examples of operationalizing enablers:

Get it together Peek into the future Practice makes perfect Measure it
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Get it together: Align risk governance with strategic and financial goals


  • Challenge: Most organizations still view risk management primarily from a value-protection and compliance-focused perspective. As a result, risk management remains siloed, focused on isolated risks, and disconnected from strategy. Even most boards—the seat of risk governance and oversight—view risk in outdated ways.
  • Approach: Sound risk governance aligns risk management with organizational strategy and promotes an integrated approach to risk management and assurance.
  • Benefits: Robust governance drives a coordinated and consistent approach to risk management across the organization and gives leaders better lines of sight into risks and opportunities.

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Peek into the future: Leverage technology to sense risk


  • Challenge: Economic crises, market movements, regulatory changes, social media backlash, and new technologies can present major risks in our interconnected world. While typically “unforeseen,” in hindsight the signs were there and the risks (if not the events) could have potentially been anticipated.
  • Approach: Risk sensing platforms scan the external landscape for early signs of emerging risks.
  • Benefits: Risk sensing enables the enterprise to identify trends, anticipate risks, and seize opportunities based on the best information available.

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Practice makes perfect: Scenario planning and war-gaming


  • Challenge: Strategic risks can undermine the organization’s drivers of value and threaten its competitive position and ability to achieve goals and sustain performance. These disruptive risks create the need for rapid response and, potentially, rapid evolution.
  • Approach: Scenario planning gauges the impact of social, political, technological, and other trends on the organization.
  • Benefits: Scenario planning and war-gaming exercises are designed to enhance risk intelligence by broadening management’s view not only of risks and its impacts, but also of the ways in which the enterprise experiences risks.

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Measure it: Portfolio optimization


  • Challenge: Most companies endeavor to allocate capital to the optimal combination of projects to enhance enterprise value. To achieve long-term value, management should allocate capital effectively amid ongoing disruption.
  • Approach: Enhancing capital efficiency calls for a mix of quantitative and qualitative techniques and for integrating risk into investment decisions.
  • Benefits: This approach identifies potential missed issues, unpleasant surprises, and probabilities of success. It clarifies how value changes under varying scenarios and supports exploration of strategic alternatives.

Is it time to rethink your approach to risk intelligence?

Organizations that have evolved their approach to risk have embraced analytics, technologies, and innovations that harness data, expertise, and experience to drive a broader, more nuanced view of risk. And they’ve often prospered by shedding unnecessary costs and activities while leveraging risk for competitive advantage.

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What is risk intelligence?

Risk Intelligence is the difference between chaos and clarity. It helps bring the complexity and change inherent in today’s business environment into perspective and reimagines risk in a way that reveals new strategic opportunities and value for your company.

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