How can we manage risk in a changing environment?

After attending the Nuffield conference in 2017, I was hooked and knew I wanted to undertake a Nuffield one day. It was not until I had left my job as a trader at ADM and returned to Devon that I realised now was the right time. Succession and shifts in the operating environment had led me to ask the question: how do we build the ability to anticipate, adapt, and bounce back to manage strategic business risk? 

To answer this question, the report does not look for a single solution. Instead, it explores what it means to build the capacity and system to manage risk and argues that this is a more valuable ambition than seeking certainty. The framework adopted is drawn from the Cranfield Business School: business resilience through the lens of building the ability to anticipate, adapt, and bounce back. Across ten countries and countless conversations, I sought to understand what this looked like in practice and whether it could lay the foundation not just for bouncing back but, ultimately, for bouncing forward. 

Three themes emerged: 

1. The businesses best placed to navigate uncertainty have a clear understanding of their internal and external environment built through data, lived experience, and a practice of looking ahead. 

    

2. The most resilient operations had translated clarity of purpose into structure: a long-term plan, clear governance, and the feedback loops to manage. 

    

3. And the triple bottom line, when genuinely embedded in how the business is run rather than treated as a reporting exercise, offers a useful lens for long-term positioning, balancing environmental stewardship, investment in people, and financial discipline, not as competing priorities but as interconnected ones. 

None of this eliminates risk, especially as agricultural and rural businesses operate in an environment shaped by climate volatility, political uncertainty, structural change in land markets, and a growing distance between urban consumers and the countryside. These forces are not going away, and the pace of change, if anything, appears to be increasing.

But as pointed out during my study, we have agency, we are not alone, and we can build a strategy. This mindset, more than any single tool or technique, was striking.