Thought Leadership
Up & Out: From Insight to Authority (Part II)
Incorporating External Perceptions to Build Authority
Today’s senior leaders know that geopolitical risk perceptions shape not just internal strategy but also external relationships with regulators, investors, and policymakers. For intelligence teams seeking to solidify their advisory role, demonstrating awareness of these external perspectives is no longer optional – it’s a credibility must.
Sourcing External Risk Perspectives
To bring external viewpoints into intelligence products, teams should integrate insights from organisations that closely monitor geopolitical, economic, and regulatory risks. Entities tied to international and national regulatory bodies, such as those focusing on financial systems, trade stability, or national security assessments, offer valuable perspectives. Their research and risk assessments can help teams understand how political, economic, and regulatory shifts may impact business operations. These entities produce insights that help contextualise emerging risks in global and domestic environments.
For example, internationally, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – often called the “central bank for central banks” – provides research on geopolitical and macroeconomic risks affecting global trade and finance. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) offer risk assessments on financial stability, political trends, and systemic vulnerabilities across nations.
In addition to formal reports, intelligence teams can gain valuable insights by engaging in peer networking. By exchanging experiences and best practices with intelligence teams in similar industries, analysts can discover new methods for interpreting external stakeholder concerns and identifying emerging risks. This collaborative exchange not only broadens their perspective but also enhances the relevance of their intelligence products to current market dynamics.
Moving Beyond Traditional Intelligence Models
Traditional intelligence tradecraft, often shaped by government and military standards, is excellent for monitoring threats. However, it can feel mismatched when trying to illuminate market opportunities or strategic advantages.
As intelligence teams grow into strategic enablers, they must adapt. This includes reconsidering familiar frameworks like the “intelligence cycle” and translating them into processes that resonate with non-security audiences. One promising avenue is to mirror elements of your Executive Committee’s decision-making processes in your own workflows. By aligning your analysis structure to how executives make strategic decisions, you reinforce your team’s relevance and accessibility.
Consider a scenario where an intelligence team is assessing potential risks related to a new market expansion. To align their analysis with the decision-making processes of the Executive Committee, the team could mirror how executives assign weight to key factors when making strategy discussions.
For example, the Executive Committee might prioritise financial stability, regulatory compliance, and market potential in their decision-making. The intelligence team could organise their analysis around these same pillars, ensuring they provide detailed insights into the financial health of the target market, any regulatory hurdles that might impact expansion, and the overall business potential within the market.
By structuring the analysis in this way, the intelligence team makes their work more relevant and accessible to the executives. The decision-makers can quickly identify the key areas of concern, and the team’s analysis will directly support the strategic choices the executives need to make. This alignment not only helps with clarity but also reinforces the intelligence team’s role as an integral part of the decision-making process.
The graphic below shows one way of conceptualising a modernised intelligence-to-decision cycle tailored for corporate environments. It shows how intelligence teams can move beyond traditional collection and analysis by embedding themselves in a continuous, collaborative loop with senior leadership. Rather than acting as one-off reporters, analysts support decision-making from issue identification to post-decision evaluation. This integrated model reinforces the intelligence team’s role as a strategic partner – ensuring insights are timely, business-relevant, and aligned with how executives make decisions. Importantly, the model also allows for flexibility, making space for differing stakeholder needs, decision thresholds, and industry-specific concerns such as regulatory shifts or market volatility.
Generating True Collaboration
Evolving from passive reporters to trusted advisors requires new tactics:
- Build Alliances: Consider presenting to the Executive Committee as a united front with partners across other corporate functions (finance, legal, strategy, risk). A “Joint Intelligence Assessment” can carry more weight than a single-source report.
- Format Matters: Talk to colleagues who prepare Executive Committee materials regularly. Learning the preferred briefing styles and slide structures can dramatically boost your resonance.
- Flexible Engagement: Regular updates are valuable, but rigid monthly or quarterly reporting cadences may miss critical moments. Instead, establish a standing norm that allows for “special sessions” when geopolitical developments or key business decisions warrant urgent attention.
Mastering the Art of Unsolicited Advice
Proactive intelligence can feel risky – but waiting for an invitation often means missing the moment. Partner with your Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Chief Risk Officer (CRO) to test new intelligence products at the executive level. Keys to success: brevity, relevance, and impact. Before outreach, study your audience: review Executive Committee members’ public statements, internal memos, or past career experience for indicators of interest in geopolitical issues. Tailor your engagement accordingly.
Bridging Intelligence Needs with Business Language
Mastering corporate impacts starts with crafting intelligence efforts that align with business realities and resonate beyond the security sphere. As we highlighted in our last edition of Up & Out, many intelligence consumers – particularly at the executive level – aren’t familiar with the language of intelligence. They don’t think in terms of “requirements,” “collection plans,” or “indicators.” Rather, they think in terms of outcomes: growth, resilience, shareholder value, and operational continuity.
Intelligence teams must therefore act as educators and translators. This involves helping stakeholders to articulate what they need in their own language and then translating those needs into intelligence requirements behind the scenes. To bridge this gap, we recommended reframing the intelligence requirements conversation around business goals and risks. Using business-aligned questions allows intelligence teams to reverse-engineer robust, targeted intelligence requirements, without asking stakeholders to become intelligence experts themselves.
To support this approach and drive meaningful engagement, intelligence teams should explore:
- Key Indicators: What early signals (economic, geopolitical, or regulatory) could flag emerging risks? How do those early warning signs map to business objectives?
- Data Sources: What internal reports, external data sources, or open-source feeds can enrich your picture of the risk landscape?
- Decision Triggers: What internal or external events would realistically prompt shifts in strategy or operations? What is the stakeholder’s decision-making threshold?
This translation capability – connecting decision needs to intelligence outputs – is where real value is created. By embedding business-first thinking into intelligence generation, analysts ensure their insights are indispensable across the enterprise: the more intelligence teams understand the language of business (strategy, revenue, operations, brand, compliance), the timelier and more relevant their insights become. In this way, analysts don’t just deliver information—they become partners in foresight.
Conclusion
Incorporating external perceptions and adapting intelligence practices to match corporate realities are powerful levers for building authority. Intelligence teams that weave geopolitical awareness seamlessly into executive decision-making – and present insights in ways that executives recognize and trust – position themselves not just as informers, but as indispensable advisors.
In the next instalment of the Up & Out series, we’ll explore how intelligence teams can further institutionalise their value through operating models that drive sustainable executive sponsorship. We’ll dive into a five-step model for growing, elevating, and maturing your intelligence programme, focusing on how to move from initial steps to a fully embedded and strategic function. We’ll also look at organisational models and discuss how to leverage wider governance and decision-making processes to support a comprehensive intelligence application.