​​​Organisations that operate internationally or in volatile contexts have an acute requirement for political risk intelligence, not just as a “product”, but as a way of sensing and adapting to environmental change.

 

Organisations can and do develop effective intelligence capabilities through experience. For others, though, institutional political risk intelligence knowhow can lag behind exposure. This leads to vulnerability and a higher incidence of disruption, disruptive uncertainty, and damage to organisational health and performance.

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Ultimately, the “best” political risk intelligence model for a given organisation is the one in which intelligence customers get actionable insight on relevant questions and apply it in decisions and planning, consistently over time. How that is achieved varies depending on organisational size, complexity, exposures, culture and ambitions.

 

Thus, while there are general principles of sound intelligence practice, there is no best practice organisational blueprint which one can simply take off the shelf and roll out in one’s own context. When organisations have tried that in the past, replicating models used by early-movers, the results were usually less than ideal. On the other hand, Harmattan has seen companies and NGOs eventually institutionalise informal but nonetheless highly effective models that organically emerged through experiential learning.  

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Harmattan’s organisational reviews are aimed at two broad contexts. In one, an organisation is seeking to move from ad hoc approaches to a formal model, in order to achieve institutional learning and consistency. We help to map the appropriate model and to plan how to build it. In the other, we help organisations who already have political risk intelligence structures to identify gaps and weaknesses to improve effectiveness.

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As with the operational reviews, our intelligence practice reviews emphasise learning about real experiences within the organisation. We have internal discussions and workshops with functions responsible for aspects of political risk intelligence, managers who use intelligence, and integrated sessions with both sides to assess tasking, communication flows and the actual application of intelligence in management decisions. We also map relevant organisational structures and processes to assess the comprehensiveness of the intelligence capability and to spot gaps, overlaps and silos that could impede effectiveness.

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Reviews lead to a roadmap to institutionalise or improve the intelligence capability, from shared concepts of relevant phenomena through to quality assurance and ways to capture and apply learning from ongoing and future innovation.

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Past cases have helped organisations to create replicable blueprints of effective approaches used by entrepreneurial managers and analysts; overcome silos and fiefdoms that fragmented insights on the same intelligence targets; strengthen the links and relationship between practitioners and customers for more actionable and useable insight; develop clear triggers for the initiation of intelligence tasks to meet specific decision, problem-solving or planning needs; and reposition corporate intelligence teams to build trust and collaboration with customers and with other functions whose own important roles had been overshadowed by the creation of a centralised unit.