Every engagement starts the same way: with the right questions, asked by the right people.
FIELD GUIDE
Field guide · Reputation and emerging issues
The Issues Radar
Reputation pressure rarely begins with a headline.
Thirty pages on detecting and prioritising emerging issues before they become crisis response. Scan, verify, cluster, assess and choose a posture — with issue states, an exposure profile, trigger matrices and the governance that decides who owns an issue before it becomes a crisis.
Run it on a cadence that follows velocity rather than the calendar. The radar is a decision loop, not a listening dashboard.
Get the field guideWhat it is — and is not
A detection method
For finding and prioritizing emerging issues while they can still be managed, rather than responded to.
A bridge to decisions
It separates a weak signal from a pattern, an issue from an incident, and reputation from sentiment.
Not a prediction engine
Scores and issue states are structured judgment aids. They do not forecast outcomes or assign probabilities.
Not consensus manufacturing
It is not a system for manipulating stakeholders or manufacturing agreement, and the guide says where the line is.
What is inside
Scan
What is changing? Build the scan around sources, not platforms.
Verify
What do we actually know? An evidence ladder and verification questions.
Cluster
What belongs together? Name the issue as a tension, not a headline.
Assess
What could matter, and how soon? The six-dimension exposure profile.
Choose
What posture is proportionate? Seven postures, including reasoned silence.
Issue states
How far the issue has moved, and what that changes about the response.
Portfolio view
Which issues deserve scarce executive attention this month.
Narrative environment
The five questions the environment is quietly answering about you.
Triggers + decision windows
What would change the posture, agreed before it happens.
Governance
Who owns the issue before it becomes a crisis, and at what cadence.
Digital + AI
What changes when the information environment itself is unstable.
Measurement + guardrails
Did the issue move, did the response help, and what the radar should never become.
Templates built to be used in the room
Signal card
One signal, its source, its evidence level and what it might mean.
Signal log
The running record, so patterns become visible.
Issue definition
The issue written as a tension, with the stakeholders it sits between.
Exposure profile
Six dimensions scored, with confidence recorded separately.
Expectation + reputation gap
What stakeholders expect against what they currently experience.
Narrative environment
The story the environment is building, and where you sit in it.
Trigger matrix
Trigger type, threshold, pre-agreed response and owner.
Response decision
The posture chosen, the reason, and what would reverse it.
Issue portfolio
Every live issue in one view, ranked by exposure and velocity.
Refresh log
What changed, when, and what it changes about the strategy.
The templates are compact by design. Copy them into your own workspace and pre-fill everything that can be known in advance.
What it is built on
Horizon scanning, issues-management lifecycle research, risk-management standards and reputation practice are established disciplines with published guidance. The five-step loop, the issue states and the six-dimension exposure profile are Artefact91 synthesis: structured judgment aids rather than validated predictive instruments, and the guide marks which is which.
- UK Government Office for Science — A Brief Guide to Futures Thinking and Foresight (2025)
- UK Government — A Practical Review of Horizon Scanning Approaches, Tools and Techniques (2026)
- Defra (UK) — Weak Signals and Trend Analysis: Horizon Scanning
- ISO 31000:2018 — Risk management guidelines, and the Edition 3 committee draft (2026)
- Femers, Klewes & Lintemeier (2000) — the life of an issue and approaches to its control
- Jaques (2007) — issue management and crisis management as a non-linear relational construct
- Arthur W. Page Society — Page Principles and Building Belief
- Arthur W. Page Society / The Harris Poll — Confidence in Business Index 2026
- AMEC — Integrated Evaluation Framework and measurement taxonomy
- World Economic Forum — Global Risks Report 2026
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to stop uncertainty becoming an excuse for either panic or delay. If you want the issues moving toward you named and ranked, the issues scan does it in three minutes. Or bring us the situation you are facing.
