Intelligence-driven strategic planning and positioning

The welfare of organizations-commercial, public, or military-operating in highly competitive, volatile contexts is intimately tied to their ability to accurately forecast the threats to which they might be subjected. Given sufficient notice, they may then move to avert or preempt a threat or, lacking that, position themselves in such a way as to best weather it. As things now stand, however, there is no general agreement as to what a threat-based planning/positioning process might look like. One particularly promising approach would be to adopt procedures of the sort that the professional intelligence community has evolved to support threat-based strategic contingency planning in the modern military sector, particularly those grouped under the general heading of Indicator/ Warning-Alert (IWA) operations. This paper suggests how certain of these procedures might be both formalized and generalized.