Most organizations already know what risks they face. The harder problem is acting on them in time.
That is the central argument of The Decision Advantage, published by the Willis Research Network (WRN), the research arm of Willis, a WTW business. The report, which is Willis-commissioned research, argues that the constraint on better risk decisions is rarely a shortage of information. It is the failure to connect that information to a strategic decision before conditions change.
The WRN's own Emerging and Interconnected Risks Survey puts numbers to the gap. Approximately half of respondents were confident their organization could respond to today's risk environment. Just 23% believed their strategy would remain resilient over the next decade. Only 37% reported having an emerging-risk framework, register, and management process in place. When risk awareness runs well ahead of risk-management infrastructure, value gets lost before any insured event occurs.
The report's most practically useful argument distinguishes between two types of value at stake. Value exposed is what could be lost, impaired, or delayed if an assumption fails. Value unrealized is what may never be captured because an opportunity narrowed, capacity became unavailable, or another organization secured access first.
An organization pursuing AI-enabled growth may have board approval and budget. But if compute infrastructure, energy, or specialist talent becomes constrained before deployment reaches scale, the investment underperforms without a single loss event occurring.
An electrification project may be commercially sound and still become uneconomic because a grid connection is delayed or equipment is unavailable. No asset needs to fail. The report argues risk managers should track what may never be created, not just what could be lost.
The report identifies six interconnected systems shaping whether strategic ambitions are realized or constrained: AI and digital decision systems; infrastructure and shared systems; energy, electrification, and critical resources; human capability, resilience, and care; geopolitics and regional agency; and nature, climate, and interconnected capital.
The systems are not separate risk categories but analytical lenses on a single operating environment. AI deployment depends on infrastructure and energy. Electrification depends on critical minerals, permitting, and skilled labor. A constraint in one system can quietly limit delivery across several strategic objectives at once. Programs that appear independently managed can rely on the same enabling conditions - a disruption at the infrastructure level may affect multiple apparently diversified applications simultaneously.
The report treats insurability as one of four value-at-stake lenses alongside strategy, people and operations, and financial performance. Changes in insurance capacity, affordability, or coverage terms can signal that a strategic dependency is tightening before that constraint appears in operating results.
Two anonymized WTW client cases illustrate the point. A critical infrastructure organization assessed climate exposure, retained risk, and insurance structures together rather than sequentially, identifying an immediate 14% cost reduction and clarifying its future climate exposure.
A global semiconductor manufacturer, meanwhile, used a connected assessment of utility resilience, natural hazards, and insurance strategy to secure US$100 million of additional utility insurance capacity.
Both cases point to the same shift: insurance decisions made earlier in the strategic planning cycle, and connected to capital allocation and resilience investment, preserve options that are harder to secure once conditions have already changed.
Hélène Galy, managing director of the WRN, said the organizations that succeed will not be those that predict the future most accurately. "They will be those that create decision advantage by identifying what is changing, understanding what is at stake and acting before opportunities narrow or critical conditions become unavailable," she said.
