Geopolitical risk is determined by contingency – the choices people make, based on the information they receive, viewed through the prism of the way they see the world. For all the big forces supposedly driving world events, it is day-to-day decisions – and the biases, institutions and simple systems failures of the decision-makers – that shape everyday geopolitical risk. And much of the time decision-makers deal with events in unfamiliar places, guided by patchy information, quixotic political pressures, and their own worldview.

Dominick Donald has been helping commercial and government clients understand this risk for over 20 years, as an independent advisor for the last seven years. He combines extensive global knowledge and academic rigour with personal experience of key institutions and an acute understanding of how people and organisations frame the unfamiliar. Often it is little nuggets of information – the ‘unconsidered trifles’ that Shakespeare’s thief Autolycus would ‘snaffle up’ – that reveal which risks are real, and which are not. This ability to define the gap between real and perceived risks underpins all the geopolitical services he provides.