Understanding before action.
For more than three decades, my work has moved across strategy, security, intelligence and resilience. Different fields, certainly, but increasingly I have come to see them as different ways of looking at many of the same problems. Much of what I do today comes from trying to understand those connections.
My father worked internationally in security and intelligence, so the people around me, and many of the conversations I grew up listening to, came from that world. Security was not something I first discovered in a textbook. I encountered it through the people who actually had to deal with protection, investigations, technical security, crises and terrorism.
As I grew older, listening became participating. I supported my father, Giovanni Manunta, in the development of the APT theory of security, which brought assets, protection and threats into a single frame, and later contributed to the development of its methodology.
One lesson stayed with me from those early years. Procedures and drills are useful, but reality rarely behaves exactly as expected. Knowing a procedure tells you what has been done before. Understanding the principles behind it helps you decide what to do when the situation is different.
That question followed me through economics and politics at Bath, military operational research at Cranfield, and later four years of research into strategy, conflict and war. It eventually took me into the philosophy of science and a question that has remained with me ever since: how do we know what we think we know?
Academic and operational. Public and private. Different disciplines, organisations, countries and cultures.
Over more than three decades, I have worked with government and law enforcement, critical infrastructure, multinational organisations, professional services and academia. The questions have ranged from intelligence and security to risk, resilience, strategy and organisational change.
The differences were often considerable. But moving between them also made something else visible: problems that looked very different on the surface often shared remarkably similar patterns underneath.
That observation drew me increasingly towards systems thinking. Every situation has its own context, but treating each problem as entirely unique can prevent us from seeing the relationships and dynamics that are shaping it.
Over time, I became less interested in responding to one situation after another, and more interested in how we navigate through them: how we understand what is happening, recognise when that understanding is no longer adequate, and change direction before reality forces us to.
Much of my work today begins there.
Strategic Navigation
Strategic Navigation grew out of a question that had followed me through many of those different environments:
How does an organisation remain oriented when the reality it is trying to understand keeps changing?
It has become the central theme of my current work, alongside the continuing questions of strategy, security, intelligence and resilience from which it developed.
Publications
Ideas and frameworks for exploring these questions in greater depth.
Executive Intensives
A place for senior practitioners to examine them together, challenge assumptions and improve the quality of their judgement.
Advisory
Working directly with organisations when the question is real, current and does not fit neatly within one function.
Three decades of professional practice · Academic and executive education across the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.
Some questions are worth a conversation.
If something here connects with a question you are facing, I would be interested to hear about it.
Roberto Manunta
Strategy · Security · Intelligence · Resilience