Organizations are faced with increasingly complex, complicated and fast-moving challenges – internally and externally – and corporate security leaders need to find new ways to deliver resilience in this new reality.
- Geopolitical shifts: the world has been characterized for some time as ‘volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous’ – today those trends are exponential, bringing ever more complexity and chaos to geopolitics.
- Technology: the use of technology brings extraordinary opportunities – but also creates risks of fragility and dependency; almost all boards rate cyber threats as high or very high.
- Generational change: millennials and Gen Z have higher expectations of their employers on ethics, flexible working, use of technology and diversity.
- ESG: there is significantly heightened scrutiny of environmental, social and governance measures which makes managing security globally more complex than ever before.
- Hybrid-working: this creates opportunities foraccessibility and efficiencies, but also creates risks around technology, cyber, information and wellbeing.
In the face of these complex, complicated and fast-moving challenges, decision making across organizations is best done by diverse and inclusive teams. Group think creates blind spots that can be catastrophic, while research shows that diverse groups of problem solvers consistently outperform groups of the best and the brightest. There is growing evidence that diversity drives better performance and increased innovation.
Nowhere is the need for innovative problem solving more pressing than in corporate security departments, tasked with delivering resilience for their organizations in the face of this complex set of challenges.
Progress on diversity is slow and challenging for the security community, which has traditionally been relatively homogeneous and structured around hierarchies of command and control. Given the growing complexity of the external threat environment and the challenges posed by hybrid and flexible working patterns, diversity is non-negotiable for effective security management. We can and we must do better – but how?
This research will:
- Measure and document diversity within the corporate security function globally
- Seek to understandthe challenges faced by the industry in delivering on diversity
- Collate examples of good and promising practice to understand what works
- Produce a blueprint for corporate security leaders to deliver on diversity
You can get involved by completing our survey, sharing examples of good practice or providing personal reflections of your experience of diversity and inclusion asa security practitioner.
The action-oriented research report will be published in October 2022 by The ASIS Foundation.
For more information on how to get involved:
Rachel Briggs, rachel.briggs@clarityfactory.com
The Clarity Factory
This research project summary is available for download.