Resources + Insights

Dealing with political risk is a complicated business.

From standing up an in-house team to knowing how to deal with consultants, from understanding the biases inherent in all of us to forecasting far in the future, there are many challenges that pose difficulties to understanding and mitigating your risk profile.

Here we talk about some best practices and other ways to better deal with a changing operating environment. We recommend starting with the posts to the right and checking back frequently for blog updates below.

What you need to know

 
Featured
Create your own analytical news feed
Create your own analytical news feed

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.

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Tracking events with Two Lanterns
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.

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Turn reading the news into political risk analysis
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.

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Collaborating on political analysis without flooding your inbox
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.

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How to use monitors to manage political risk
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.

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Monitors as units of political analysis
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.

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

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Threat Monitor Part 3: Simulating threats
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?

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Threat Monitor Part 2: Looking over the horizon
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?

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Threat Monitors Part 1: How to sense the rising waters
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.

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