The Case for Strategic Assurance: Stopping Fires before they start
Rebecca Reid is a director at Sayso
We are very good at fighting fires.
Not literally, of course, but when something has gone wrong or is about to, that’s often when we get the call. A customer issue is escalating, a journalist has a deadline to meet in an hour, or an executive team is working out what happens next and who needs to know, and we’re asked to step in and wrestle the blaze under control.
Strategic assurance is about determining where, how and why a fire might break out. More specifically, it’s about analysing and guiding business decisions to ensure that a potential inferno has neither the fuel nor the spark required for it to ignite in the first place.
Effective decision-making requires a full spectrum of perspectives, which means asking the right questions and understanding the ramifications of the answers before committing to a course of action. Someone needs to be the impartial challenger in the room, unaffected by internal politics and able to ask the questions others may not be asking. They need to be able to view the situation or impending decision through multiple lenses, and weigh the trends, sentiment, reputational risk, culture and context, as well as the broader social and political mood.
This is where partnering with a trusted advisor in strategic assurance becomes particularly valuable. Years of seeing decisions play out in the real world gives us a sound instinct for what can happen once decisions leave the room, what stakeholders are likely to think, and how seemingly small issues can become significant problems.
Because organisations don’t operate in neat functional boxes, yet decisions are often made as though they do.
An operational decision can become a people issue if employees lose confidence in the direction being taken or no longer understand the rationale behind change. A commercial decision can affect customer trust and ultimately revenue. A regulatory issue can constrain operations and increase costs. A technology decision can create unintended stakeholder concerns and consume leadership attention managing issues nobody anticipated.
The consequences rarely remain within the function where the decision was made. Sometimes the biggest P&L cost isn’t the decision itself; it’s actually the cost of not understanding the consequences early enough to prepare for them.
Strategic assurance isn’t about avoiding all risk.
Because that’s an impossible ask. Rather, it’s about understanding the consequences and potential perceptions across stakeholder groups, debating the costs and benefits, challenging assumptions, and ensuring that decisions are made with a clear understanding of what sits on the other side of them.
Decisions are made by the people who are accountable for the enterprise, but those people need to be able to stand behind a decision once it leaves the room. Strategic assurance is what happens when we arm those decision makers with the fullest picture possible before they commit.
To do that, we need to test the decision against potential outcomes, risks and how it could be perceived, giving decisionmakers confidence and clarity around both the opportunities and the consequences.
AI heightens the relevance of strategic assurance.
Once your decision is made, you could brief Claude or ChatGPT to generate a comms plan for X, Y and Z, throw in a few additional prompts to refine the outcome, and end up with what appears to be a workable roadmap for rolling it out to your stakeholders. Your favourite AI platform will produce a communications plan in seconds, but the caveat is that it comes with no judgement, no discernment, no understanding of context, nuance or relationship dynamics. A technically accurate message is by no means equal to a sound strategic strategy that is communicated to key stakeholders over months or years.
In a world of disruption, heightened stakeholder expectations and emerging technologies, organisations are operating in increasingly complex environments. That’s why we see the future of strategic communications and corporate affairs as not simply helping organisations to communicate decisions.
To us, it starts with helping organisations to make better decisions in the first place, delivering strategic assurance through perspective, challenge, experience and judgement while there is still time to change course.
Because by the time the fire starts, the cost has usually started too.