DHS CISA National Risk Management Center Strategic Foresight Analytic Transition and Actioning Capability

DHS CISA National Risk Management Center Strategic Foresight Analytic Transition and Actioning Capability DHS CISA National Risk Management Center Strategic Foresight Analytic Transition and Actioning Capability Emerging and systemic risks and opportunities to critical infrastructure is an issue that confronts the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). As these risks increase in their frequency, novelty, and impact, they could be considered a wicked problem in which new design-led approaches to address these problems are needed. A wicked problem involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting agendas and requires sustained behavioral change over multiple time horizons to achieve resolution. As the landscape of challenges to the US critical infrastructure continues to grow more complex, the National Risk Management Center (NRMC) sought to build Strategic Foresight capabilities to understand the root causes and implications of emerging risk. The use of risk assessment techniques, like Threatcasting, identify and understand the driving forces and trends to inform plausible futures. This work supports CISA in addressing emerging and systemic risks as well as shaping risk response strategies to understand the environment in which CISA operates and what external environmental forces present the greatest opportunity or risk to critical infrastructure and supports the tenets of Adaptive Risk Reduction. Alignment with this strategic concept will be a necessary aspect of successful integration of the strategic foresight efforts into CISAs risk reduction planning activities. Arizona State Universitys (ASU) Threatcasting Lab (the Lab) provides a unique service that fills the critical need for the NRMC to build its strategic foresight capability and eventually lead and run it independently. Developing this cutting-edge capability and supporting tool(s) is essential to the NRMC being able to fulfill its role in identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, and managing the most significant strategic risks to the Nations critical infrastructure. Threatcasting as a method and practice provides decision-makers specific indicators that one or more of the futures or threats are manifesting with suggestions or possible actions that can be taken to disrupt the threat or enable the future. The output of the methodology provides organizations and decision-makers a framework to plan, prepare, and make decisions in a complex and uncertain environment; ultimately helping to guard against strategic surprise.