If you use the Two Lanterns platform, you have your own news feed. If you click on the Updates tab, you will see a display of all the updates posted to the monitors you have access to, arranged chronologically.

Because these are updates to monitors, you get not only get the headline, you also see to what monitor it applies, what driver it’s connected to, how it changes the weight and level of that driver, and the analysis for the update. You can immediately click through to the link to the source material.

Chris OatesMay 3, 2021

Tracking events with Two Lanterns

One of the problems with global political analysis is that there’s a lot of stuff happening in the world.

If you are following politics in a dozen countries and tracking legislation on a handful of sectors, there is a constant stream of elections, votes, hearings, and summits to be aware of.

With Two Lanterns, you can now track events in a way that is simpler and faster.

Chris OatesApril 28, 2021

Turn reading the news into political risk analysis

The work of a political risk analyst (or of anyone who has to keep an eye on what is happening in politics) begins as soon as they open up their phone in the morning.

The problem is that we often do this part of the job really inefficiently.

Chris OatesApril 23, 2021

Collaborating on political analysis without flooding your inbox

We want people to be analyzing issues together. It gives us a better product and lets us cover cross-cutting topics. I know from my own experience as a North America analyst that when I had to write on US-Japan relations that talking with my East Asia colleague was absolutely necessary. If I had been left to my own devices, the resulting report would have been much weaker. But we also need to ensure efficiency. If the process of collaboration is everyone sending around the same New York Times links in the company Slack chat all day, we won’t get anything else done.

Chris OatesApril 23, 2021

How to use monitors to manage political risk

Here, we’ll walk you through how to use the monitors to maximize their usefulness and to start turning reading the news into analysis quickly.

Chris OatesApril 21, 2021

Monitors as units of political analysis

After some considerable time over the past few months spent staring at pixels and wrangling workflows, the Two Lanterns Platform is ready to go. I’m still offering consulting services (please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any!), but I’m happy to have this product that can enable much more work than I - or any one consulting firm - could ever fit into a day.

Right now I want to introduce the central feature of the platform: the monitor.

Chris OatesFebruary 4, 2021

Threat Monitor Addendum: The details of the US-China soft power monitor

In Parts 1, 2, and 3, we discuss the utility of a threat monitor to tracking issues that are of low probability but high impact. We used the example of China overtaking the United States in soft power. In this section we’ll get into why each factor was chosen to illustrate some of the decisions that can go into the construction of one such monitor.

There is one question that you might have about forecasting. How do we know if we’re right?

Chris OatesJuly 21, 2020political risk metrics, political forecasting

Threat Monitor Part 3: Simulating threats

Threat monitors are great for tracking low-probability / high-impact dangers that can creep up on an organization. In Part 2, we showed how to extend the idea into a forecasting model that challenges a team to think more critically about the future.

There is one question that you might have about forecasting. How do we know if we’re right?

Chris OatesJuly 21, 2020political risk metrics, political forecasting

Threat Monitor Part 2: Looking over the horizon

Threat monitors are a great way at tracking what’s happening in the present. They can also be great at seeing into the immediate future. The monitors described in Part 1 are very well suited to looking into the next 12 months and seeing what might happen.

So what do you do when you want to look further? If you’re concerned with longer-term investments, say, out to five years, how can a threat monitor work?

Chris OatesJuly 21, 2020political risk metrics, political forecasting

Threat Monitors Part 1: How to sense the rising waters

How can you track the untrackable?

That’s a question that affects not only political risk, but anyone in business or politics who has to deal with low probability, high impact risks. Often these exist in such a morass of qualitative information and reports written entirely in the subjunctive that knowing whether the risk has grown or shrunk recently is difficult to impossible.

Yet we still need to know how threatening these risks are and what direction they’re heading in. Just because they’re currently over the horizon doesn’t mean we should take our eye off them.

Chris OatesJuly 21, 2020political risk metrics, political forecasting

Influence bargaining modeling - a new tool for forecasting

One of the hardest parts about forecasting politics is keeping track of all the moving pieces.

Two Lanterns has developed a new tool for this, an model that includes political influence in a bargaining model that can simulate a baseline outcome, a range of possibilities, and quickly adapt to show what would happen in different scenarios.

Chris OatesMay 28, 2020

Scenario planning for political campaigns

While there is no easy answer for how to run a campaign in a time of coronavirus, there is a technique that can help.

Scenario planning helps to map out what the future might look like when uncertainty clouds our vision. As a practitioner once put it, “It simplifies the avalanche of data into a limited number of possible states.”

Chris OatesMay 21, 2020campaigns, COVID-19

Five reasons to use a Matrix Game in political risk planning

According to an EY survey of the global business environment, 2019 saw a post-WWII high in political risk. Then COVID-19 hit.

It is not hyperbole to say that this is perhaps the most uncertain time in the global economy and geopolitics in at least 30 years. Countries are in lockdown. International cooperation has broken down. And economies are witnessing Great Depression levels of unemployment.

The necessity of planning for the future has never been more important, but that future has never been more uncertain.

Chris OatesMay 15, 2020matrix game, wargame, political forecasting

How to stay non-partisan when your clients (or bosses) aren't

One of the nicer things about political risk analysis is that you’re usually protected from accusations of partisanship.

We’re not in the business of saying what is happening (that’s journalists) or what should happen (activists, pundits, and politicians). We are asked only what is likely to happen or what might happen.

Usually, that’s a dry enough (or vague enough) task that we avoid the debates that surround policy proposals or the New York Times’ latest botched headline.

Chris OatesMay 8, 2020

What is Political Risk?

When I first got a job at a political risk firm, my parents said, “That sounds great. What is it?”

One of the main problems with practicing political risk is that it can be easily defined too narrowly or too broadly. When the former, huge disruptions can happen without being foreseen. When the latter, the analysis starts to resemble general punditry and organization fail to see the value.

To correct this, let’s start with some basic definitions that show how we look at the best way to confront the field.

Chris OatesMay 6, 2020political risk theory

Massachusetts network theory and unconventional political data

CommonWealth magazine yesterday ran my article about using network theory to understand how cosponsorships in legislation indicate a social structure underlying the state government. Basically, we can take the web of legislators who have cosponsored bills with each other, treat that like a social network, and use some sociological methods to tease out some insights about what that social structure means.

MassachusettsChris OatesMay 1, 2020political risk metrics

2018: Recapping the year in political risk

Around this time of year, you start to see lists of the top political risks for the next 12 months.

But we rarely see lists evaluating how our previous predictions performed. Yet even if it is not as topical, assessing past predictions is the only sure path towards a collective improvement and evolution of political risk as a practice.

Chris OatesMay 1, 2020political risk theory, industry analysis

Midterms 2018: Lessons for political risk

The US midterm elections yesterday are the biggest story of the week. Here are some quick thoughts about what they can teach us for political risk and its practice.

Political Forecasting, VotingChris OatesMay 1, 2020elections, political forecasting

How can we measure political risk when we can’t measure political risk?

A Martin Wolf column in the Financial Times earlier this month discusses how political risk, and political developments more generally, are impacting global markets. It’s a good article, but one odd item jumped out at me.

At the end of the article, Wolf includes a chart of the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index, developed by Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello, both economists at the Federal Reserve (more info in the paper “Measuring Geopolitical Risk” by Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello at https://www2.bc.edu/matteo-iacoviello/gpr.htm).