This article kicks off a series on how in-house intelligence teams can break free from their silos, enhance their value, and become essential partners in enterprise-wide decision-making. If you find the #Up&OutSeries useful, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to get it in your inbox.
Private sector intelligence teams could be on the brink of a major expansion in their roles. Moving beyond traditional security functions, analysts are realising their potential to offer insights into geopolitical risks that influence corporate strategy decisions at the most senior levels.
But the journey to gaining this broader influence—what we call getting “Up and Out”—isn’t a straightforward one.
A Growing Industry Debate
Discussions about the evolving role of intelligence teams have surged at security industry forums in recent years.
Groups such as OSAC, AIRIP, ASIS and ISMA have long been vital for discussions on how intelligence can best support stakeholders focused on safety and security. However, as firms are forced to navigate the impact of a fragmenting global order on their core business interests, we’ve noticed the debate shifting towards how intelligence teams could play a more active role in guiding strategic approaches to managing geopolitical risk.
Intelligence teams are among the most qualified in their organisations to provide perspectives on dynamic and multi-faceted sources of risk. Most of them consist of individuals with a prior professional grounding in the subject, and they certainly have access to sources of insight into geopolitical dynamics that few other business units can match.
But the debate isn’t so much over the desirability of their playing a greater role—it’s obvious they should—but a series of interlocking questions about why it rarely happens. Why do so many intelligence teams struggle to break “Up and Out” from the traditional confines of the safety and security function?
This question has circulated on the fringes for a while. But it’s now creeping towards mainstream focus as the corporate impacts of geopolitical volatility become more apparent and fundamental to business strategy.
While 2025 may bring stress and concern for many, it’s also a year of opportunity for intelligence teams and their customers. Now is the time to offer a guiding framework for Chief Security Officers (CSOs) and their intelligence teams so they can discover new ways of working and realise their full potential.
In this Up & Out Series, we’ll unpack common themes emerging around three key areas:
- The piecemeal, fragmented, and reactive integration of geopolitical risk insights into wider corporate decision-making and enterprise risk management, exposing firms to systemic risks and cascading impacts.
- A growing need for CSOs and their intelligence teams to tailor internal engagement approaches to different teams in their organisation and overcome the barriers to communication and cooperation with other business functions.
- A growing appetite among intelligence teams for more effective public-private information exchange on geopolitical risk issues, accompanied by frustration at the lack of a systemic approach to overcoming barriers to communication on both sides—with some participants pointing to cooperation in other areas, such as cyber resilience or financial crime, as a model for what could be attempted.
Impacts on Business
It’s tempting for security professionals to view upstream geopolitical risk and volatility primarily as a source of the downstream physical security and resilience challenges with which they must contend day to day.
A narrow focus is understandable, but the impacts of geopolitical volatility for firms are generally more wide-ranging than this—to the point that a firm’s most important exposures may not lie in security in its traditional sense but be felt elsewhere.
The picture is complicated by the growing salience of second and third-order impacts. For instance, most firms without a presence in Ukraine were not directly affected by the Russian invasion in 2022. But many more, including those operating in markets well away from Eastern Europe, did feel the resulting commodity price volatility and indirect macroeconomic impacts, including higher inflation, higher interest rates, lower GDP growth, and a range of other economic phenomena.
This means that geopolitics is best understood as an enterprise-wide phenomenon, potentially affecting a firm’s strategic calculations, financial performance (both from the demand and supply side), operational resilience, and reputation. We see other impacts in business model dependencies, legal entity structures, and a range of compliance-related issues.
A Calling for Intelligence Teams
What does this mean for intelligence teams born in security functions? There is no doubt that geopolitical risk, once seen as an interesting aside, now routinely features as a priority concern for executive decision-makers.
This means intelligence teams have an increasingly receptive audience at the most senior levels. Moreover, they have a gateway towards engaging other business units who also contend with the impacts of geopolitical uncertainty—but who may lack the grounding and expertise in the subject to do so with confidence.
This pathway entails evolutionary and incremental changes for an intelligence team’s work, but we think the end-state—the ‘Gold Standard’— is a team that:
- Supports both short- and long-term management decision-making where geopolitical insight is needed, in addition to ongoing analysis of security-related threats and risks,
- Works with other key functions, such as finance, risk, legal, compliance, and procurement, to develop decision-making processes on cross-cutting areas of geopolitical risk exposure, and
- Integrates its outputs into key decision-making and oversight fora, such as the Executive Committee (ExCo) and Risk Management Committee (RMC), and the board and its committees.
The Gold Standard remains elusive, in most cases not for want of trying. The good news is that in uncertain times, there is no better opportunity for intelligence practitioners to broaden horizons within their organisations. Perhaps this is why conversations at industry events, and those we have with clients and partners, are so clearly pivoting towards finding the right playbook.
Next up, we’ll look at current approaches of intelligence teams and the common obstacles they face in spreading their wings. If you have any thoughts or stories to share on this topic, we’d love to hear from you.
(Source: Sibylline)