Here’s what nobody tells you about risk management: your cyber team speaks Klingon, your operations folks speak Elvish and your strategy people speak ancient Greek. And somehow, you expect them all to protect the same castle.
We’ve watched this play out more times than we care to count. The CISO warns about ransomware threats. Operations worries about supply chain breakdowns. The board obsesses over market disruption. They’re all talking about risk, but they might as well be on different planets. When the crisis hits (and it always does), everyone scrambles in their own direction while the place burns down.
These teams are brilliant at what they do. The problem is that risk has been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, with each department claiming their favorite piece. Cyber gets the drumstick, operations takes the breast, strategy grabs the wings. Nobody’s looking at the whole bird.
This fragmentation kills companies. Enron didn’t collapse because it lacked smart people or fancy frameworks. It died because information was sanitized, altered or otherwise modified as it moved up the chain. Leadership told one story, the books showed another and, in some cases, ground operators had no clue what was actually happening. When the truth finally surfaced, trust evaporated overnight. Billions vanished. The largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time.
That’s what happens when risk lives in silos.
The three languages problem
Walk into any organization and you’ll hear three distinct dialects of risk.
Cybersecurity teams talk in terms of vulnerabilities, threat actors and zero-days. They live in a world where attacks evolve faster than defenses and one misconfigured server can expose millions of records. Their risk language is technical, immediate and often terrifying.
Operations speaks of process failures, human error and business continuity. They worry about the mundane things that actually break companies: the supplier who goes bankrupt overnight, the employee who clicks the wrong link, the warehouse fire that stops production for weeks. Their risk language is practical, grounded in what can go wrong today.
Strategy thinks in market shifts, competitive threats and business model obsolescence. They’re playing chess while everyone else plays checkers; trying to spot the disruption before it arrives. Their risk language is abstract, long term and maddeningly uncertain.
None of them is wrong. But none of them is complete either.
When Netflix faced potential extinction from Blockbuster’s competing service in the early 2000s, they didn’t just fix their technology, tweak their operations or revise their strategy. They aligned all three. Leadership made a bold strategic call to pivot to streaming. Operations transformed their entire delivery model. Technology became the foundation instead of a support function. They spoke one language across all domains.
Blockbuster kept its domains separate. Strategy made decisions without understanding operational constraints. Operations couldn’t adapt fast enough. Technology lagged behind market needs. We know how that story ended.
Building one culture from three languages
The Organizational Risk Culture Standard (ORCS) offers something most frameworks miss: it treats culture as the foundation, not the afterthought. You can’t bolt culture onto existing processes and call it done. Culture is how people actually think about risk when no one is watching. It’s the shared beliefs that guide decisions under pressure.
Think of it as a dynamic system in which people, processes and technology must dance together. People are the operators who judge and act on risks. Processes provide standards, so they don’t have to improvise in a crisis. Technology provides tools to detect patterns, monitor threats and respond faster than human reflexes.
But here’s the catch: these three elements have to align across all three risk domains. Your cybersecurity team needs to understand how their decisions affect operations. Your operations team needs to grasp strategic implications. Your strategy folks need to stop treating cyber and operational risks as someone else’s problem.
This alignment happens through four pillars that actually make sense.
Integrate across domains
First, leadership and governance have to integrate across domains. Not just a CISO reporting to the CIO while the COO does their own thing, while the board gets quarterly updates and the corporate risk team is nowhere to be seen in cyber.
Real integration means cross-functional committees where cyber, operations, risk and strategy people sit together, speak the same language and make decisions as one unit. It means leaders who model the behavior they want to see, who ask about cross-domain impacts before approving anything significant.
Establish a system of unified risk intelligence
Second, you need unified risk intelligence. Cyber threat intelligence can’t live in a bubble. When your security team spots a phishing campaign targeting your industry, operations needs to know because it affects their people. Strategy needs to know because it signals competitive intelligence gathering. Risk intelligence flows across boundaries or it’s just noise.
This requires applying the ORCS standard’s concept of adaptive elasticity. Organizations that survive aren’t rigid. They bend. They recalibrate. When conditions shift, they adjust their risk appetite and tolerance in real time. They don’t wait for the annual strategy review to realize the world changed six months ago.
Unify your risk appetite and communicate it
Third, you establish a unified risk appetite and a unified communication framework. Most organizations have implicit risk appetites that vary wildly by department. Cyber might be risk-averse while strategy takes big swings and operations splits the difference. That’s not a strategy. That’s chaos with a budget.
Clear risk appetite means everyone knows which risks you’ll pursue and which you won’t touch. Risk tolerance sets the boundaries. When you cross them, alarms go off and people escalate. No guessing. No freelancing. No surprises.
Communication makes this real. Transparent information sharing across domains. Psychological safety so people can raise concerns without getting their heads bitten off. When Red Lobster’s endless shrimp promotion nearly bankrupted them, the new CEO didn’t hide behind PR spin. He went straight to social media, took accountability and engaged directly with customers. That transparency rebuilt trust faster than any marketing campaign could.
Add continuous learning
Fourth, you build continuous learning into the culture. Risk management isn’t a project with an end date. It’s a practice that evolves. You assess your current state, design improvements, implement changes and measure results. Then you do it again. And again.
The ORCS standard provides a maturity model with five levels. Most organizations start at Level 1, where risk management is reactive and fragmented. People improvise. Policies exist on paper, but nobody follows them. Crises catch everyone off guard.
Level 3 is where things get interesting. You have formal frameworks, consistent processes and moderate integration. Risk management becomes part of how you work, not something you do when forced.
Level 5 is where risk becomes a competitive advantage. You anticipate disruptions before they hit. You turn threats into opportunities. Stakeholders trust you because you’ve earned it through consistent, ethical action.
Making it real
Here’s what implementation looks like in practice, stripped of consultant-speak.
You start by assessing your current state across 10 dimensions: leadership, risk intelligence, ethics, decision-making, risk appetite, communication, technology integration, people development, framework alignment and change management. You’re looking for gaps between domains. Where does information get stuck? Where do decisions get made in isolation? Where do people speak different languages?
Then you design the integration. You create a common risk taxonomy so everyone uses the same terms. You build governance structures that force cross-domain collaboration. You define metrics that matter across all three domains, not just within silos.
Implementation starts small. Pick one high-impact cross-domain risk. Ransomware works well because it touches everything: cyber defenses, operational continuity and strategic reputation. Build your integrated response there. Show it works. Then scale.
You’ll need technology that connects the dots. Risk management platforms that give everyone the same view. Real-time monitoring that spots patterns across domains. Dashboards that executives can actually understand.
But technology is just the enabler. The real work is cultural. Training people to think beyond their domain. Creating incentives that reward collaboration over turf protection. Building feedback loops so lessons learned in one area spread across the whole organization.
Patagonia achieved this by running a full-page ad that read, “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” They acknowledged the environmental cost of their own bestselling product. Risky? Absolutely. But they backed it with operational changes: repair services, recycling programs and resale platforms. They aligned ethics, operations and strategy. Sales jumped 30% the following year because customers trusted them.
The payoff
When you get this right, the benefits compound.
You see risks earlier because you’re looking at the whole picture, not just your slice. That cyber threat intelligence reveals a supply chain vulnerability. That operational disruption signals a strategic shift in your market. You connect dots that siloed teams miss.
You respond faster because everyone knows the plan. No time wasted arguing about whose problem it is or who should lead the response. The governance structure has already defined roles. The communication channels already exist. You execute.
You make better decisions because you’re balancing risk and opportunity across all domains. You’re not being reckless in strategy while being paranoid in cyber. You’re maintaining the standard’s dynamic risk equilibrium. You take calculated risks that support your goals while staying within boundaries that protect what matters.
Most importantly, you build trust. Employees trust leadership because they see consistent values in action. Customers trust you because you’re transparent when things go wrong. Investors trust you because you demonstrate resilience. Regulators trust you because you align with frameworks such as ISO 31000 and COSO ERM.
Risk stops being something you manage and becomes something you use. Not every organization will get there. Most will stay stuck in their silos, speaking their separate languages, wondering why they keep getting blindsided.
That’s how you build one culture from three languages and turn disruption into advantage. And be the one still standing when the dust settles.
This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
Want to join?
No Responses