Always on Guard: How a Corporate Immune System Can Engage Full-Spectrum Risks – A Conceptual Framework to Re-Engineer Organizational Capability and Culture

This chapter advances the idea that the modern organization can become immune to a full spectrum of risks by re-engineering its organizational capability and culture. Given the accepted role of people in causing or escalating technical risk – the requirement to achieve ‘always on' socio-technical protection poses a significant challenge. However, an enterprise's human resources offer a massive potential to detect and report risk and there is also substantial competitive advantage available to the organization which develops, integrates, leverages and acts on intelligence gained from a suite of socio-technical sensors and sense-making processes. The human resources and culture of an organization, properly configured, could comprise a powerful innate (constant) and adaptive (active) immune system. The chapter will provide the reader with a framework for how such an immune capability could be integrated into an organization that takes seriously the requirement to be ‘always on' – protected from any form or blend of socio-technical threat.