Why Risk Heat Maps Are Bad And Fail Leaders

(Also known as a risk matrix, heat map, or risk heat matrix.)

 

1. They Strip Risk of Context

Risk is never standalone. It’s entangled in timing, competitive dynamics, stakeholder posture, opportunity cost, and internal politics. Heat maps flatten this complexity—abstracting risks into sterile, color-coded boxes. They decouple decisions from the real-world pressures shaping them.

Executives aren’t making moves off color blocks. They need to see why this risk matters now, in this moment, given what’s at stake.

2. They Rely on Fabricated Scores

“Likelihood” and “impact” scores are often little more than structured guessing—rarely grounded in evidence, scenario modeling, or operational input. Most aren’t validated with those who’d carry the impact when the risk plays out.

These aren’t business consequences—they’re estimates dressed up as data.

Worse: shifting from a 4 to a 5 in likelihood changes nothing in reality, but redraws the map like it’s a turning point.

3. They Imply Action Without Earning It

The red-yellow-green spectrum suggests urgency—but offers no rationale. It’s a visual trigger with no logic behind it. There’s no clarity on thresholds, tradeoffs, or what shifts a risk’s status. The implication: the color should speak for itself.

But color doesn’t move decisions. Understanding does. Tradeoffs do. Timing does.

4. They Frame Risk as the Endpoint

This is the most strategic misstep: presenting risk as something to avoid, rather than to navigate in pursuit of value. The heat map frames risk as the problem—stripped of its connection to growth, innovation, or strategic positioning.

Smart leaders ask: “What are we trying to achieve—and what risks are worth taking to get there?”

Missing entirely: the cost of inaction, or the upside being risked.

Toward Decision-Relevant Risk Framing

Executives don't need decoration from CISOs. They need decision tools. Tools that:

• Anchor in business consequences, not assumptions
• Reveal opportunity cost and reward potential
• Model uncertainty, velocity, or fragility
• Provide narratives, not dashboards
• Create dialogue, not just reporting

A better model might look like a risk-reward portfolio, an strategic options map, or something akin to a Benefit-Harm Analysis—not a compliance heat map.

 

Driving Change in Risk Management with Stakeholder-Enhanced Risk Assessments (SERA)

Driving impactful change in risk management starts with engaging the right people. Stakeholder-Enhanced Risk Assessments (SERA) reshape how organizations understand and address risk by involving business stakeholders and cybersecurity specialists in the conversation. This collaboration transforms dry, technical risk data into relatable and relevant business insights. The result? Early, pragmatic solutions that cut costs, reduce complexity, and secure buy-in from decision-makers.

SERA involves managers and directors from both risk-generating and risk-impacted departments. This integrated approach uncovers how cybersecurity or technical risks affect business objectives, operations, and processes, with the functions creating those risks in the room when they are discovered.

Core elements of SERA for an effective risk dynamic:

• Engagement and Insight Gathering: By incorporating stakeholder perspectives, SERA reveals how risks intersect with broader business interests—even when they appear contradictory.
• Tailored Risk Discussions: Facilitators connect cybersecurity risks with business outcomes, embedding risk awareness into the organization's mindset.
• Collaborative Planning: Techniques like 'Pre-Mortem Assessments' help stakeholders identify risks early by examining potential failure points. These insights are then integrated into a comprehensive team-wide risk assessment process.

The benefits of SERA extend beyond traditional risk management approaches, providing several key advantages:

• Tailored Risk Communication: SERA reframes risks in ways that resonate with each department and decision-makers, presenting them in the context of their impact on key business priorities. This approach makes risk discussions more persuasive, relevant, and actionable.
• Shared Risk Discovery: Collaborative discussions uncover risks that gain visibility and become impossible to ignore, offering far-reaching and deeper insight than a traditional risk register.
• Stakeholder-Driven Risk Acceptance: Early engagement empowers stakeholders with responsibility and knowledge, leading to more well-defined and reliable risk acceptance while reducing the need for continuous oversight.
• Cybersecurity Steps Out of the Middle: SERA removes cybersecurity from the role of approving or rejecting actions, shifting that responsibility to the business stakeholders who are directly impacted. This allows cybersecurity to focus on advising rather than gatekeeping.
• Early Action on Risks: Early identification of risks leads to faster response times, often allowing remediation to begin before the final report is delivered. This accelerates the process and helps secure timely approval from senior leadership.

Stakeholder-Enhanced Risk Assessments (SERA) shift risk management from technical details to business relevance, fostering collaboration and uncovering practical, cost-effective solutions. By engaging stakeholders early, SERA strengthens support from decision-makers and simplifies the path to mitigation.

How will deeper stakeholder involvement transform your approach to core cybersecurity challenges and elevate your risk management strategy?

The Connection Between Risk Communication, Influence, Relationships, and Storytelling

At the intersection of risk communication and operating as an executive lies the need for clarity and connection. I continue to emphasize the importance of good risk communication and framing, while now also highlighting the value of relationships, influence, and storytelling—especially at the executive level.

If you're reading this blog, you might be interested in my CISO Impact and Influence newsletter, where I dive deeper into these topics for CISOs and cybersecurity executives.

Get steeped in the mindsets of the C-Suite and Boards: https://newcyberexecutive.substack.com 

Those interested in expanding their leadership and C-Suite executive performance might be interested in executive coaching.

Get the quiet advantage of many C-Suite executives, executive coaching: https://newcyberexecutive.com

Top-N List "Frameworks" and Why They Will Fail You

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend of prioritizing security program activities using Top-N security issue lists under the guise of using them as ‘a framework’. While possibly a useful input to decision making, Top-N lists amount to someone else’s risk assessment, one that doesn’t necessarily address your business objectives, operating model, technical environment, and industry specific issues. They are also rarely the type of all-encompassing catalog or taxonomy of considerations that are denoted by “framework.”

I see the overuse of generalized external risk assessments (Top-N “frameworks”) as the result of two issues. First, the entirely poor state of basic cybersecurity hygiene which is a result of cybersecurity and information technology technical debt, the kind of debt which now requires a defensible approach for being only partially paid down. Second, the failure to use risk assessment in the context of business decision making supported communicating technical risks in business risk terms. Not coincidentally, the second issue is the root of the first.

Everything Old is New Again, or Why Firewalls Were Always Supplemental

Those who I have spoken to who entered the security field in the last 15 years have often expressed the notion of cybersecurity as a network-first endeavor: firewalls, DMZs, perimeter controls, and so on. Those that have been in the field for 30 years or more will likely remember that firewalls were created as backstop for host security at a time when host-based security protection from the network was scarcely on the radar of most OS designers.

As the network-first approach continues to show the limits of its usefulness in environments where network boundaries are becoming less definable and where advanced persistent threats are common, it makes sense to advocate for a shift back to the host-centric mindset.

I suspect that this will be widely viewed as cost prohibitive, burdensome, unrealistic, and so on. Most good ideas are characterized this way until effective approaches and efficient methods are developed.

The Trap of Risk Assessment Tools

Humans understand and respond to narrative innately. Impactful events are explained as stories, successful calls to action are delivered as a descriptions of a desired or undesired future, and people make decisions every day through explanations.

We do this because narratives are a natural form for communicating information and insight. Narratives are therefor also a natural form for risk communication. In regards to risk, narratives help listeners visualize and develop internalized models of risk, which in turn represent the truth in a way that numbers alone won't (and can't) for most individuals and most situations.

Much of the current cybersecurity and enterprise risk management world is premised on the idea (or ideal) that risks can be meaningfully summarized in ordinal form, such as “very high likelihood”, “moderate impact.” These english ordinals are then often converted to numbers. Sometimes math is performed, and a magic risk number is derived. Some models even use dollars or dollar ranges in their outputs. However, focusing on getting to the “right number” - and reporting that is focused on numbers - denies the reader the benefit of context. It makes it hard for decision makers to object to the assumptions embodied in the inputs and the calculations. Numbers or dollars alone convey objectiveness and authority, even while that is not necessarily the case. The work of "getting to the numbers" behind closed doors only serves to exacerbate this issue. In the best case systematizes the subtle biases of the assessors, and in the worst case distorts the model to fit preconceived notions about organizational priorities, or conform to personal risk worldviews. Caution should be advised for those using numbers alone to represent risk.

In contrast, risk assessment communication that focuses on narrative and which embraces dialog allows for discoveries and insights by the decision makers, provides an opportunity to question assumptions, and enables sharing and alignment of perspectives. Risk decisions, everyday and tough risk decisions alike, are best borne of discussion, and will be for the foreseeable future.

If you are responsible for risk assessment at your organization, don’t fall pray to a tool’s promise, or the unquestioned illusion of objectivity and certainty that comes from numbers. If you are performing risk assessment where the focus is populating fields in a spreadsheet or application, no matter how advanced it is, you run the risk that the one thing that everyone needs to consider is getting lost through reductionism. Do the numbers if required, but wrap it in an informative discussion, and design and facilitate the discussion to convey risks in business terms that supports business decision making.

You Can Keep Your Compliance, I Have a Mission

Doctors practice very real, very tangible risk management every day when caring for patients. The decisions they make affect the wellbeing and the very lives of their patients. The trade-off between various treatment options, judgements about future patient behavior based on historical behavior, the upsides and downsides of surgical and pharmacological treatments vs the likelihood of behavior changes, and long list of considerations are based on risk assessment and are themselves part of risk assessment.

Patient care is a complicated and nuanced field, and risk management is core to managing the complexity. As such, doctors have a seasoned perspective on risk management that gives them a unique perspective on information security and compliance. What they do is telling. They reframe compliance and security with a question derived from their mission: What is the impact to patient care?

While it should be fairly clear to most that patient care is more important than compliance or information security, what is less often clear to practitioners is that the only framing in which to consider either compliance or information security is that of impact to patient care (so long as patient care is defined broadly enough). This highlights the need for something to bridge from compliance and information security to patient care; and that bridge is risk management.

Most doctors understand risk management innately, at least as well as, and perhaps even more intimately than those in the compliance, technology, and security fields. They haven’t been steeped in the myth of the “choice between security and functionality” and they are willing to have substantive conversations, often leading to “let’s do both” solutions. For all organizations, healthcare or otherwise, it comes down to mission and risks to the mission. If you are having a conversation where your ultimate goal is compliance or “great” security, you’re doing yourself and your organization a disfavor and a disservice.

Instead, ask “what is the impact to our mission?”