Michael Rasmussen

In my earlier reflections on enterprise risk intelligence, I focused on a fundamental realization: the world organizations now operate in no longer matches the way risk has traditionally been framed, assessed, or governed. That observation has continued to stay with me, not as an abstract idea, but as something I see play out repeatedly in conversations with boards, executives, and risk leaders across industries.

In a recent GRC Report piece, Risk Is Our Business: Why the GRC Market of 2030 Will Look Nothing Like Today, I argued that the governance, risk, and compliance market is not heading into another cycle of incremental change, but a structural break. The core claim was that risk has outgrown the architectures, assumptions, and mental models most GRC platforms and programs still rely on, and AI bolted onto legacy thinking will not save them.

In my earlier piece, Governing the Extended Enterprise: The TPRM Platform I Would Demand, I laid out what a future-proof third-party governance platform must look like. But if the architecture is the “what,” organizations are now asking about the “how.” How do we take those principles and turn them into capability, authority, and action? Technology alone won’t get us there. Governance needs orchestration.

In my last piece, The Inevitability of Failure, I wrote about something most leaders quietly know but rarely say out loud—failure isn’t an interruption of the journey, it is the terrain. That article opened the door to a conversation I’ve been having with myself for decades, long before GRC became my lens for understanding how organizations move through uncertainty.

Every crisis begins with a moment of disbelief. The thing that wasn’t supposed to happen suddenly has, and the assumptions that felt so comfortable a day earlier now feel paper-thin. That’s when risk management either shows up or falls apart.

Technology does not create good risk management. Strategy does. Risk, by its nature, is not the enemy. As I often remind listeners on the Risk Is Our Business podcast, the company that avoids risk altogether is already obsolete. The task isn’t to eliminate uncertainty, it’s to orchestrate it. To take the right risks, at the right time, with purpose, visibility, and confidence.

In an era defined by disruption, resilience is no longer a side conversation in boardrooms, it is the conversation. Cyber incidents, technology outages, geopolitical instability, and supply chain fragility are not “if” events; they are “when” events. Regulators, investors, and customers all demand that you show us not only that you can take the hit, but that you can recover, adapt, and continue to deliver.