Anticipate | Adapt | Lead - Emerging Risks [and Opportunities] Management

Why this matters now

Over the past five years, disruption has become the dominant rhythm of organisational life. Brexit (2019) unsettled supply chains and labour markets. COVID-19 (2020) redefined operational continuity and digital adoption. The cost-of-living and energy crises (2021–22) reframed customer behaviour and economic confidence. The war in Ukraine (2022) exposed the fragility of global supply systems. And the rapid emergence of generative AI (2023 onwards) continues to reshape work, competition, and ethics at speed. This is before we consider the constant disruptions such as cyber security...

These events weren’t isolated shocks. They revealed how complex, interdependent, and fast-moving the modern operating environment has become. Conventional risk management rooted in hindsight and control was never designed for this pace of change.

Emerging risk [and opportunity] management takes a broader view. It integrates strategic foresight (anticipating change), resilience engineering (absorbing and adapting to disruption), and behavioural insight (understanding how people make decisions under uncertainty).

1. Strategic Integration

Emerging risk management begins at the level of organisational architecture. ISO 31000 defines risk as the “effect of uncertainty on objectives,” and the 2018 revision places equal emphasis on value creation as on protection. This shift from compliance to foresight reframes risk management as a strategic function.

To manage emerging risks, strategy itself must become dynamic. Leaders must design flexibility into planning and governance so that sensing, analysis, and response are woven into the way the organisation operates. It means shifting from risk registers to learning systems - structures that continuously integrate new intelligence into decision-making.

This approach aligns with the UK Government Office for Science’s Futures Framework and the OECD’s Strategic Foresight Framework, both of which advocate building foresight into governance and investment cycles. When properly embedded, foresight isn’t an annual workshop; it’s a continuous discipline that informs every major choice.

Ascent5’s model positions emerging risk management not as a bolt-on but as a strategic capability—a mindset and system that keeps the organisation relevant and ready.

2. Horizon Scanning and Strategic Sensing

Most organisations use a model such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) analysis at some point, but often as a static report. In reality, it should operate as a dynamic sensing mechanism that continuously captures weak signals and interprets them in context.

The aim is to spot early indicators before they harden into disruptive forces. This means combining data analytics, trend monitoring, and stakeholder intelligence with human insight. Frontline employees, customers, policymakers, and suppliers often perceive weak signals before they are discussed at a strategic level or become visible in official reports.

The OECD foresight framework encourages this integration of multiple lenses and time horizons, helping organisations distinguish between transient noise and structural change. In Ascent5’s approach, PESTLE becomes a live map of the operating environment, highlighting not only risks but also emerging opportunities for innovation or repositioning.

Strategic sensing draws on the behavioural sciences too. Research on selective attention and groupthink (Janis, Kahneman) shows that teams often overlook disruptive signals when they challenge dominant narratives. A culture that encourages curiosity and dissent is therefore essential. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety is particularly relevant here: employees must feel permitted to voice inconvenient observations. Without that permission, weak signals stay silent.

3. Testing and Simulation

Awareness alone is insufficient. The next step is to test assumptions through simulation, war-gaming, and scenario analysis.

Drawing on resilience engineering and decision theory, these exercises expose how the organisation behaves under stress and where dependencies lie. They also build what Gary Klein calls recognition-primed decision-making: the intuitive ability to act quickly and accurately under pressure, developed through realistic rehearsal. One approach we advocate is Crisis Management Drilling for developing this muscle memory.

Modern simulation tools now integrate AI and Monte Carlo modelling to qualify and quantify probabilities and test multiple future pathways. But the human element remains central: simulations help teams experience the emotional and cognitive load of real decisions, revealing how bias, hierarchy, or overconfidence might distort judgment.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s research on cognitive bias anchoring, availability, confirmation remains instructive. Leaders who understand these biases can design decision processes that counteract them, such as structured red teaming, pre-mortems, and diverse scenario planning.

This is also where the ISO 22301 standard for Business Continuity Management adds reinforcement. It provides a structure for ensuring that critical functions can continue through disruption and that learnings from exercises inform strategic planning. It transforms foresight from speculation into operational resilience.

Ascent5’s simulation workshops draw directly from this body of theory and practice, combining hard analytics with behavioural insight to strengthen both preparedness and confidence in decision-making.

4. Strategic Choice

Once potential futures are explored (and this is a recurring exercise not a on-time event), leaders must determine how to respond. This is the point where foresight frames strategy.

Ascent5's Emerging risk management model defines four broad pathways:

• Accept – absorb and monitor the risk while reinforcing resilience.

• Pivot – adjust strategy, markets, or methods in response to the signal.

• Diverge – invest in new capabilities, products, or business models.

• Focus – apply the founder’s mentality: simplify and protect the core.

Each path requires conscious trade-offs between stability and exploration, and recognises the other mainstay of traditional risk management - outsourcing risk - is not an option for ambiguous and potentially existential organisational risks. Here, the behavioural science of confidence and first-mover advantage becomes crucial. Research from Columbia Business School and Harvard’s adaptive leadership field (Heifetz, Kotter) shows that organisations capable of “exploratory confidence” consistently outperform reactive competitors.

The ability to make difficult calls early, to commit amid ambiguity, relies on psychological readiness, not perfect information. Ascent5’s approach helps leaders cultivate this readiness by institutionalising foresight, reflection, and rehearsal. It builds the muscle memory for decisive, proportionate action.

5. Reinforcement and Resilience

The emerging risk management model culminates in a cycle of reinforcement. Business continuity, crisis management, and enterprise security are not separate from foresight, they are its operational counterpart.

Standards such as ISO 22301 and ISO 9001 ensure that resilience and learning are systematically maintained. Together, they form a framework for organisational continuity, process discipline, and continual improvement.

Resilience theory, particularly as developed by David Woods and Erik Hollnagel, defines four core capabilities:

1. The ability to anticipate potential disruptions.

2. The ability to monitor critical performance conditions.

3. The ability to respond rapidly to emerging issues.

4. The ability to learn and adapt after each event.

These mirror Ascent5’s principles of Anticipate | Adapt | Lead, and they emphasise that resilience is not about returning to a previous state but evolving to a stronger one.

Crisis management, supply chain design, and security all sit within this reinforcing layer. The emphasis is on coherence: every preparedness exercise, every post-incident review, feeds back into foresight and strategy as the organisation becomes a self-learning system.

Leadership for uncertainty

Emerging risk management cannot be delegated. It’s not the domain of compliance departments or subject-matter experts - it’s a core leadership function.

That responsibility is both strategic and psychological. It demands calm amid ambiguity.

The most effective leaders use foresight not to eliminate uncertainty but to navigate through it. They treat signals of change not as threats but as invitations to evolve. They understand that waiting for certainty is the most certain way to fall behind. And they build cultures where curiosity, dissent, and experimentation are normal, not disruptive.

The Ascent5 Approach

Ascent5 works with executive teams to embed this discipline into the fabric of strategy. Our Emerging Risk and Opportunity Management programmes combine structured foresight, behavioural science, and simulation-based learning to strengthen leadership capability in uncertain environments.

Participants learn to interpret weak signals, to translate foresight into action, and to test decisions under pressure. They leave with a framework that connects strategic intent, operational resilience, and human judgment, supported by recognised standards and contemporary theory.

Emerging risk management, in this view, is not about surviving disruption. It is about creating organisations that can learn faster than the environment changes.

In a world where volatility is normal, leadership is defined less by prediction and more by preparation. Those who can anticipate, adapt, and lead are not merely resilient, they are ready.

And readiness, as Ascent5 argues, is the new strategic advantage.