Executive summary
European organisations are operating in an environment of sustained uncertainty, where resilience, competitiveness, and long-term value creation increasingly depend on how well risk management is embedded into strategic decision-making. The findings of Marsh’s 2026 Strategic Imperatives and Risk Management Survey show that awareness of the need to adapt is high. Still, maturity remains uneven across the five areas assessed: scenario analysis and stress testing, extended supply chain oversight, AI and analytics in risk management, workforce adaptability, and infrastructure resilience.
A clear pattern emerges across the survey: organisations are generally more advanced where risk management is already linked to broader strategic, financial, or capital-planning processes, and particularly where governance requirements create stronger discipline.
This is most evident among listed companies and larger organisations, which tend to show more structured and embedded practices. However, for many respondents, risk and strategy still operate in parallel rather than as fully integrated processes.
Scenario analysis and stress testing are among the more established capabilities, but their use is not yet fully translated into decision-making. Many organisations conduct scenario analysis and stress testing, yet only a minority consistently link the outputs to risk appetite and use them to shape strategic priorities in a structured way. Horizon scanning also remains largely traditional, relying on industry reports, regulatory monitoring, and internal workshops, while automated trend monitoring is still not widely adopted.
Supply chain risk management shows a similar pattern. Many organisations retain visibility only over direct suppliers, while deeper-tier visibility and real-time monitoring remain limited. Manual review of alerts is still the dominant approach. Although some organisations are moving towards more automated and integrated models, end-to-end supply chain transparency is not yet widespread. Quantitative supplier-risk analysis and structured multi-scenario stress testing are also still maturing, which limits the consistency with which these insights are used in procurement and supplier relationship management.
Awareness of the need to adapt is high — but maturity remains uneven, and risk and strategy still often run in parallel rather than as a fully integrated process.
AI and analytics represent the clearest capability gap. While respondents recognise the value of AI as an enabler of better risk management, adoption remains limited and concentrated in a smaller group of listed companies, larger organisations, and data-rich sectors such as financial services and logistics. In most other sectors, AI use in risk management is still at an early stage, underscoring a significant gap between ambition and actual implementation.
Workforce adaptability is widely recognised as a strategic issue, but responses remain largely qualitative and short term. Talent shortages and critical skills gaps are seen as material by many respondents, yet structured analysis of medium- and long-term workforce shifts is still not consolidated. The use of structured data analytics and key risk indicators (KRIs) for ongoing monitoring is not yet common, and many organisations still rely on reactive measures rather than proactive workforce planning.
Climate-related resilience is comparatively more developed, but still uneven. Many organisations have carried out scenario analyses of physical and transition risks, yet only a portion of the sample have translated these into structured adaptation and mitigation plans. The survey also shows that the impact of mitigation and adaptation initiatives on risk profiles is often analysed through unstructured or ad hoc risk assessments, rather than through consistently embedded, forward-looking decision frameworks.
Overall, the survey points to a consistent opportunity for risk management functions: to move beyond identification and monitoring and play a more active role in connecting insight to action.
The strongest organisations are those that are beginning to link analytics, governance, planning, and execution into a more coherent model of decision support. For many others, the challenge now is to turn growing awareness into more integrated, data-driven, and action-oriented risk management.