Horizon Scanning: what are the ongoing and emerging global risks facing businesses in 2022?

Horizon scanning provides a fuller picture of the threats to and opportunities for your business. If your planning doesn’t take the time to assess a broad range of factors that could impact operations and performance, avenues for development could be missed. What’s more, threats might either be under- or overestimated.

This is the context for the Business Continuity Institute's Horizon Scan Report 2022. Based on data from 424 survey respondents in 65 countries, it provides questions to several questions.
What has dominated firms’ risk landscape over the past year? What are the threats that business leaders expect to face over the coming 12 months? And what are the standards that help organizations carry out horizon scanning?

The Business Continuity Institute’s Horizon Scan Report 2022 (produced in collaboration with BSI) enables organizations to prepare for disruptions and to develop business continuity plans. The report also provides useful insight into the uptake of business continuity planning and use of longer-term threat trend analysis.

Top threats and disruptions

This year’s report comes at a critical time for many businesses. While organizations in many countries are starting to return to a degree of normality after COVID-19, the report makes clear the threat of the pandemic still lingers in 2022. Non-occupational disease remains the primary perceived risk to organizations and their staff.

The knock-on effects of the pandemic are also at front of mind for business leaders. Hybrid working environments are increasingly testing organizations and bringing additional risks, meaning that cyber-attacks and data breaches are deemed an even bigger threat than they were 12 months ago.

Supply chain disruptions are also on the rise, as the global shortage for several types of products and services continues

Top 5 threats experienced

The top 5 threats faced over the past 12 months, as reported by this year’s survey respondents, were:

1. Non-occupational disease
2. (Issues arising from) remote working/new workplace environment
3. Travel restrictions
4. Health incident
5. Lack of talent

Top 5 threats expected

The top 5 threats business leaders expect to face over the next 12 months are:

1. Non-occupational disease
2. Cyber-attack and data breach
3. Travel restrictions
4. (Issues arising from) remote working/new workplace environment
5. IT and telecom outage

Human impact of disruption
The findings of the report show that the consequences of any disruption aren’t just organizational. In fact, when considering the consequences of disruption, survey respondents were most concerned about the human impact:

1. Negative impact on staff morale/wellbeing/mental health
2. Loss of productivity
3. Staff loss of displacement
4. Loss of revenue
5. Supply chain disruption

In anticipation of the challenges ahead, greater appreciation of resilience is now widespread.

Tellingly, 22.2% of interviewees reported their organizations had created the role of Chief Resilience Officer at board-level in the past year.

How can standards help with horizon scanning?

Encouragingly, the report reveals progress in using best practice standards to contribute to the resilience of organizations, big and small. 56% of surveyed companies are using the international standard on Business Continuity Management Systems (ISO 22301), but are not certified to it. Almost 10% both use the standard as a framework, and are certified to it.

Beyond ISO 22301

Other than BS EN ISO 22301, the top 5 standards used within organizations are unsurprising, and reflect the continued focus on the cyber security threat:

1. ISO 27001 – Information security management
2. ISO 31000 – Risk management
3. ISO 9001 – Quality
4. ISO 22316 – Organizational resilience
5. NIST Framework – Information security

Developed by stakeholders, standards can save business leaders valuable time by setting out best practice in any given area. Standards are sometimes perceived as cumbersome or bureaucratic, but in truth there is immense value in establishing a culture and a structure to support a new initiative, whether this is business continuity planning or any other activity.

To learn more about the ongoing and emerging risks and threats facing organizations all over the world, and to learn how standards can be used to develop the organizational resilience needed to meet the challenge, download the Horizon Scan Report 2022 today.

If you have any questions about standards, BSI members can get in touch with the Knowledge Centre’s information experts.