No Manager, No Strategy—Why GRC Alone Can’t Win the Risk Game
Hope Springs Eternal (And Why Risk Needs a Manager)
As the Major League Baseball season gets underway, there’s a familiar sentiment in the air: hope springs eternal. Every team starts the year with a clean slate. But throughout 162 grueling games, the difference between contenders and pretenders becomes clear.
The best teams aren’t just the most talented—they’re the best managed. That’s why, in baseball, the head coach is called the manager. Their job is to make real-time decisions, manage risk across innings and matchups, and keep the team aligned with its long-term strategy.
It’s no different in business. Organizations face a full season’s worth of uncertainty—across strategy, operations, technology, and compliance. And yet, many still approach risk with little more than static checklists and after-the-fact reporting. They’re managing uncertainty without actually managing risk.
That’s where Integrated Risk Management (IRM) comes in.
If Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is like a team without a manager, IRM is the system that brings structure, alignment, and leadership to the field. Without a manager, even talented players operate in silos—doing what they think is best individually but without strategic coordination or shared purpose. That’s the reality in many organizations today: siloed compliance, governance, and risk functions acting without integration.
IRM provides the playbook and the leadership. It integrates GRC with Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), Operational Risk Management (ORM), and Technology Risk Management (TRM) to form a unified team—managed strategically, guided by data, and aligned around shared enterprise objectives.
And here’s the key: GRC is like a team without a manager. Each player may have talent and good intentions. Still, without coordinated leadership, they act independently—focusing on their specialties without any sense of operating as a cohesive unit. That happens when governance, risk, and compliance functions are disconnected from enterprise, operational, and technology risk oversight.
IRM brings the whole team together. Integrating GRC with ERM, ORM, and TRM delivers both coverage and coherence. A strategy. A game plan. A system that can win.
That’s why the “M” matters. And that’s where the story begins.
Source: Wheelhouse Advisors
The “M” Is for Management—And That’s What’s Missing
The challenge isn’t that IRM is misunderstood. It’s that GRC is overstated. While some still present GRC as a comprehensive, integrated framework, what it claims to be and how it’s implemented in most organizations are very different.
When I say “there’s no M in GRC,” I mean it literally. After more than three decades working in, researching, and advising on risk and compliance—first as a practitioner, then as a senior executive, a global market analyst, and now as a strategic advisor—I’ve seen firsthand how GRC, as originally conceived and most often practiced, lacks the actual management of risk. Yes, the “R” stands for risk—but too often, that risk is simply identified or documented, not actively treated, mitigated, or continuously monitored.
GRC tends to focus on controls, policies, and compliance audits—important ingredients, no doubt—but not the full recipe for risk-informed decision-making. It’s the playbook without the coach—the rules without the strategy.
This is precisely why IRM emerged—not to replace GRC, but to supply what was always missing: the “M.” The management of risk as a connected, enterprise-wide capability that unifies governance and compliance functions with operational, strategic, and technology-driven risk oversight.
IRM is the architecture that gets things done.
Source: Wheelhouse Advisors
Managing Risk to Achieve All Enterprise Objectives
Some industry voices continue to defend traditional GRC by retroactively expanding its scope—arguing that governance, risk, and compliance inherently include everything from strategy to integrated oversight. On paper, that may sound comprehensive. However, in practice, GRC, as implemented, has overwhelmingly focused on policies, controls, and regulatory checklists—not real-time risk management.
The IRM Navigator™ Framework by Wheelhouse Advisors addresses this challenge head-on by defining four critical enterprise risk objectives that modern organizations must balance:
Performance – Driving business outcomes and growth
Resilience – Adapting to disruption and emerging threats
Assurance – Instilling stakeholder confidence
Compliance – Meeting legal and ethical standards
Where legacy GRC programs focus heavily on compliance, IRM actively manages the trade-offs between these four objectives—each essential to long-term enterprise success.
Risk isn’t just a compliance issue. It’s a strategic variable. IRM also gives organizations the tools and visibility to manage that variable in real-time.
Not a Replacement—A Realignment
IRM doesn’t replace GRC—it realigns it. It treats governance and compliance as vital risk domains to be actively managed—not static structures to be passively referenced.
In addition to GRC, IRM integrates adjacent disciplines—including ERM, ORM, and TRM—into a cohesive operating model that aligns strategy, execution, and oversight. Through the lens of the IRM Navigator™ Framework, IRM connects:
Strategic goals with performance-oriented risk insights
Operational processes with resilience planning and disruption response
Technology assets with assurance of security, continuity, and integrity
Compliance policies with evolving regulatory and ethical expectations
In doing so, IRM enables organizations to manage risk holistically across all four enterprise objectives—in a way that GRC, on its own, was never designed to do.
In recent years, even OCEG—the nonprofit think tank that initially developed the GRC Capability Model—has acknowledged the need for deeper integration. Through new certifications and guidance focused on performance and strategy, including the Integrated Risk Management Professional designation, they’ve expanded their model to address the real-world challenges that IRM was designed to solve from the outset.
These changes reflect a broader truth: the market is moving beyond policy conformance toward integrated, objective-driven risk management. IRM isn’t a break from GRC—it’s what GRC was always meant to become.
From the Minors to the Majors
IRM also gives senior business leaders—especially those in the C-suite—a clear line of sight into risks that span the entire organization. Unlike traditional GRC platforms that report upward from siloed compliance functions, IRM is built to surface cross-functional risk intelligence in the context of strategic goals.
This is a defining capability—and one that’s central to the IRM Navigator™ Buyer Persona Guide, which highlights how today’s risk management buyers include not just risk and compliance officers but also COOs, CFOs, CIOs, CISOs, and CEOs. These executives demand insight, not checklists—actionability, not audit trails.
Source: Wheelhouse Advisors
For technology providers, this means it’s time to step up from the minors to the majors. Delivering IRM value requires more than just enhancing dashboards or rebranding legacy workflows. It demands a product vision that connects risk to performance, resilience, assurance, and compliance—and a go-to-market strategy that speaks directly to the executive suite.
Those still building for yesterday’s GRC buyer will be left behind. The leaders will be those who help organizations manage risk as a driver of strategy, not just as a box to check.
From Compliance Playbook to Management System
Legacy frameworks have long helped organizations establish accountability and maintain compliance—but today’s risk environment requires more than that. What organizations need now is not another label, but a more integrated and actionable system of management.
IRM isn’t a marketing construct. It’s a structural shift. One that unifies risk domains, ties risk decisions to strategy, and ensures organizations are equipped to operate with confidence in the face of complexity and disruption.
It’s not just about tracking risks. It’s about managing them with foresight, agility, and purpose.
That’s the promise of IRM—and the reason so many are moving beyond GRC to something stronger, clearer, and more connected.
What Comes Next
This article sets the stage for deeper conversations that will take place next week at the Mitratech Interact 2025 Conference in Dallas, Texas.
I’ll be joining fellow risk, compliance and legal management leaders for two key sessions focused on translating IRM principles into real-world impact:
Session 1: Holding the Line: Building Resilient Risk Programs in the Modern Era 📅 Tuesday, April 15 at 3:00 pm | Breakout Session We’ll explore how today’s fragmented risk landscape—cyber threats, supply chain shocks, and remote workforce challenges—demands an integrated approach. I’ll share strategies to build IRM-aligned programs that strengthen resilience across the enterprise.
Session 2: From Gatekeepers to Growth Partners: Embedding Risk at the Heart of the Organization 📅 Wednesday, April 16 at 10:00 am | General Session In this keynote session, we’ll reframe the role of Risk as a strategic business enabler, not a compliance gatekeeper. We’ll discuss what it takes to embed risk into decision-making, align it with business performance, and build a culture of transparency and trust.
If you’ll be at Interact, I look forward to the conversation. And if you’re following from afar, I’ll share key takeaways in the following days.
Either way, this moment is about more than evolving GRC—it’s about leading risk forward.
