Articles
May 28, 2025
Narratives in the Numbers: A Smarter Way To Make Big Decisions
# Risk Management
# AI
Risk expert Brian Hagen explains how narrative framing and AI can improve decision clarity, insurance efficiency and risk-based ROI.
Many executives have access to mountains of data that should, in theory, improve their decision-making. In reality, they often struggle to find a trail that leads to actionable insight. In the newest episode of NeuGroup’s Strategic Finance Lab podcast available on Apple and Spotify, risk expert Brian Hagen explores how reframing decision-making as a storytelling exercise can clarify choices, improve insurance strategy and elevate risk management.
- NeuGroup Insights writer Justin Jones speaks with Mr. Hagen, a longtime risk management consultant, who explains why even the most quantitative analysis needs a narrative core. Humans don’t make decisions based on numbers alone, he says, but rely on beliefs—and stories help shape those beliefs.
- Mr. Hagen, an adjunct professor at California State University, Fullerton, has decades of experience working with corporates on improving high-stakes decision-making, including his most recent role as founder of the Decision Empowerment Institute.
Brian Hagen, enterprise risk expert
Improving decision-making. Mr. Hagen developed a framework called PRO Analytics (short for problems, risks and opportunities) that helps to organize decision factors and assess trade-offs.
- In the episode, he shares how applying this method with a corporate client revealed that eight out of 10 proposed risk mitigation projects had negative ROI. Avoiding them saved the firm millions and steered investment to a higher impact risk reduction project.
- In another case, the method helped a company reassess its insurance portfolio—showing it was overspending on product liability coverage while underinsuring for cyber risk. By shifting spending based on ROI analysis, the corporate protected significantly more enterprise value with the same budget.
The AI impact. Mr. Hagen’s new venture, GENAIDA, aims to bring generative AI into the decision-making process—not to replace humans, but to structure conversations, surface relevant data and do the math in real time. That could turn a multi-week risk assessment into a few productive hours.
- “We all know the future, the automation of corporate decision-making. That doesn’t mean the systems are making the decisions,” he says. “It just means that the decision process will keep getting better with these systems informing us, so that we can make the decisions.”
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