What Your Board Isn’t Hearing About Human Risk

The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) now advises boards to view cyber risk as a systemic business issue, not merely a technical one. Their updated guidance urges directors to assess organizational preparedness, resilience, and leadership engagement—focusing less on volume-based metrics and more on operational impact and long-term risk posture.

This shift is underway—boards are increasingly being advised to view cybersecurity through a strategic, enterprise-wide lens. But is the pace of change fast enough to keep up with the evolving threat landscape? In many organizations, boards still receive cybersecurity reports filled with familiar metrics: patching cadence, MFA adoption rates, phishing clickthroughs, compliance training completions. The problem? These numbers barely scratch the surface of what matters.

Human risk is complex, contextual, and rapidly evolving. But it's often oversimplified, mischaracterized, or ignored entirely in executive briefings. As AI reshapes threat models and attackers target human behavior with more precision, boards need more than technical metrics—they need cultural insight, behavioral indicators, and business-aligned human risk data.

Cyber Risk Isn’t Just Operational—It’s Existential

Too often, human risk is filed under “training and awareness” and treated as a compliance checkbox. Yet the vast majority of breaches still involve human factors. According to Verizon's 2024 DBIR, 74% of breaches involved the human element—errors, privilege misuse, use of stolen credentials, or social engineering.

• IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that breaches caused by human error averaged $3.81M in damages—higher than technical failures alone.

• A recent Gartner survey showed that 88% of board members now view cybersecurity as a business risk, yet only 37% believe their organizations are properly equipped to manage human-centric threats. These are not isolated mistakes; they are systemic vulnerabilities embedded in workflows, communication styles, and workplace culture.

AI has only accelerated this trend. From deepfakes to real-time social engineering, AI-driven threats exploit psychological patterns and behavioral blind spots—factors your board isn’t seeing in most dashboards.

If cyber risk is a top business threat (and it is), then human risk must be part of the strategic risk register, not buried in a sub-bullet.

Leadership Blind Spots and the Metrics That Matter

Board members are used to asking:

• How much have we spent?

• Are we compliant?

• Are we covered?

But they should be asking:

• How resilient is our workforce under stress?

• Where are the warning signs of risky behavior?

• How do we measure digital risk culture across regions and roles?

CISOs need new language and new tools to engage executives in meaningful conversations about human risk. That means translating psychological friction, process complexity, and culture clash into terms the board understands: exposure, financial impact, reputational harm, and regulatory scrutiny.

We must evolve reporting from "X% completed training" to "Here’s how behavioral risk decreased quarter over quarter." From "We simulated phishing" to "Our culture supports rapid recognition and response."

Boards don’t need more detail. They need more relevance.

Closing the Risk-Understanding Gap

The strategic misalignment between what security teams measure and what the business needs to know is growing. Boards want to know if they’re safe. But safety can’t be proven with compliance stats alone.

To close the gap:

• Align cyber and human risk to business outcomes.

• Introduce behavioral and cultural diagnostics.

• Measure change, not just coverage.

• Frame human risk as both a vulnerability and a lever for resilience.

Security leaders must move beyond awareness campaigns and toward operationalized, strategic human risk programs—backed by insight-rich dashboards, robust diagnostics, and clear paths to risk reduction.

If your board isn’t hearing about human risk, they’re missing the story that matters most.

It’s time to rewrite the narrative.