What is ISO 31050 and How Does it Guide Emerging Risk Management?
Some business risks are so new and complex that there isn’t enough data to size them yet. Early evidence can be thin, sources can conflict, and definitions can keep shifting. Not even past loss data and stable benchmarks will help.
Take fraud + AI, for instance: a clear example of when emerging risks can be too new to make proper sense of them. For example, imagine you send money to someone you think is a colleague—they even call you on Teams and you can see and hear them on video in real-time—but it’s actually all fake, and one of the newest workplace scams to come onto the scene. Here, a scammer creates a deep-fake audio or video meant to trick you into sharing company access or paying money.
ISO 31050: Protecting Organizations from New, Hard-to-Make-Sense-of Risks
This is where ISO 31050 comes in. It’s a concise guide from the International Organization for Standardization (the ISO) on spotting change early, turning information into usable knowledge, and linking that knowledge to action. In practice, that means clear roles, steady scanning of context, and a process that feeds strategy and operations through informed choice.
ISO 31050 is a specific technical standard that offers guidance on how to make sense of unknown risks. Namely, risks that are perhaps too new to fully understand, risks that don’t have enough data tied to them to make proper sense of them, or risks that are just too complex momentarily to get a proper handle on.
ISO 31050 provides a framework organizations can use to manage emerging risks. Some emerging risks, reports the ISO, include: risks created by innovation, risks created by technological development, risks tied to unrecognized risk sources, and risks from modified services.
Diving a bit deeper, just a few emerging business risks now that are new, evolving at lightning speed, involve great complexity, and/or data-poor, include:
- Deep fake-enabled fraud and reputational risk, as mentioned above, such as when a voice impersonation sparks a million-dollar heist.
- The EU AI Act, which went into effect in August of 2024, and its ongoing complexities as AI-related risks rapidly evolve
- Supply chain traceability under EUDR, a new EU law requiring adherence before end-of-2025
- Extreme climate change challenges, such as storms and floods that can put the supply chain to a stop and disrupt things like worker safety and insurance
Making Sense of Uncertainty: 5 Things to Know About ISO 31050, from ISO:
- For emerging risks, it’s not often possible to know the chance of a risk hitting, what the consequences may be, or what an early risk scenario may be identified as.
- It’s critical to pay attention to weak signals, not just incidents. This is where things like interpretation bias can skew perception. Meaning early risk reads deal with a lot of noise and messy human perception.
- ISO 31050 plugsinto ISO 31000. 31050 complements ISO 31000 for any organization and explicitly shows how principles, process, resilience, and a risk-intelligence cycle apply to emerging risks.
- System effects matter. Some risks are systemic, meaning small changes can cascade across an organization. This is where interdependencies and non-linear effects come into play.
- What’sthe payoff? More risk awareness, earlier recognition and preparation around risk, faster information flow around risk prevention, and then the ability to align action across the organization from end-to-end via a holistic and unified approach, versus operating in silos.
How do the ISO guidelines enhance resilience?
These guidelines explain how emerging risks arise, how they develop, and how they can shift as context changes. They also explain how organizations can become more informed about risks when information is either limited, inconsistent, or both. That knowledge helps organizations prepare for shocks and seize upside. The result? Having stronger organizational resilience drives higher awareness, better preparedness, and aligned action across teams.
Which principles make a forward-looking program work?
A forward-looking program is anchored in principles that are integrated, structured and comprehensive, customized to context, inclusive of perspectives, dynamic over time, informed by the best available information, attentive to human and cultural factors, and committed to continual improvement.
These principles encourage continual scanning for weak signals in both external and internal contexts so that assessments, treatments, and reviews are informed by the freshest picture possible. The approach translates signals into priorities, connects actions to objectives, and supports emerging risk management as an ongoing practice.
How does SAI360 Horizon Scanning support this kind of guidance?
SAI360 Horizon Scanning offers early risk detection for proactive management. It provides a disciplined way to watch the operating environment and connect signals to objectives. Horizon scanning creates traceable links from inputs to decisions.
It helps companies, for instance:
- Frame issues under the right context
- Collect and analyze relevant information
- Interpret why changes occur
- Communicate findings to decision makers
The outcome is a steady flow of actionable knowledge. Knowledge that strengthens organizational resilience and emerging risk management across strategy, risk, and compliance.
What does operational ISO guidance look like inside ERM?
Under ISO 31000, emerging risks move through a repeatable loop. Teams define scope, context, and criteria, assess the risk, choose and implement treatments, monitor and review changes, and keep communication and consultation going.
A regular cadence of horizon scanning keeps the pipeline of signals current, helping teams refine thresholds, update ratings, and route actions into plans and reports. These steps make ISO 31050 usable in daily governance and reporting. In the meantime, it gives programs a consistent cadence for emerging risk management inside ERM.
How does this enable strategic risk foresight and guard against systemic shock?
Strategic foresight reflects an organization’s ability to watch for change, learn quickly, and decide early. The capability increases organizational resilience by linking signals to plans, owners, and triggers. When horizon scanning surfaces weak signals, the ERM process translates them into decisions that can be defended with evidence. That path from guidance to results is a practical way to withstand disruption and advance program maturity.
What should leaders do next to align with this standard?
Streamlining processes is king. When a simple loop can run on repeat, this flow keeps everyone aligned. You can scan for change, frame what matters, collect and analyze what you’re seeing, interpret the why, and share what the findings mean. The loop ideally stays tied to your objectives and risk appetite. This way, strategy, operations, and compliance move in sync. Over time, decisions become more evidence-based, and organizational resilience grows.
This is where routine horizon scanning keeps the signal strong and helps your organization stay current with ISO 31050.
