Is Your Business Prepared to Weather a Polycrisis?
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We are in an era of multiple crises that can happen simultaneously, creating a flashpoint that can send shockwaves across an enterprise.
What began as a cyberattack or data breach can quickly cripple operations, lock up computers and data, disrupt or take down the ability for employees to communicate and react, interrupt revenue streams, flood customer support call centers, damage reputation and hurt brand trust, and expose the business to legal risks and liability.
Conditions and tangled vulnerabilities that have been incubating for years are suddenly exposed, and the damage multiplies.
While the final trigger may be a fast-moving event (the breach), it reveals the slower moving stressors that have been building for years — teams working in silos, success that masked danger, resource decisions in one domain that affected others, multiple systems or functions that were weakened but nobody realized it. No single person sees the full picture.
Executives and senior leaders who are prepared to navigate and manage through a polycrisis are more likely to proactively spot and manage vulnerabilities that are interconnected, according to a growing body of research by the Center for Creative Leadership.
These three things can mean the difference between a quickly recoverable event and a catastrophe that materially threatens your business:
Identify and address stresses before the trigger — Audit your organizational readiness for polycrisis. Identify where and how core functions and operations are interconnected. Have good backup systems, and a way to roll back to operations to a state from before the crisis occurred. Document manual or offline procedures. Invest in leadership development as a force multiplier. Develop good relationships with external partners, so they can play a role in your recovery.
Act systemically, not sequentially — Don’t try to fix problems one at a time; fix the entire system. Know where your interconnected nodes are, and have circuit breakers and firebreaks. For a cyber event, that may mean shutting down everything to limit the attack.
Empower leadership to operated collectively — No single executive should command the response. Teams with real authority and decision-making powers should collaborate across boundaries simultaneously, and have experience and comfort doing so.
Lastly, it’s important to take advantage of the unique transformation window of opportunity for positive change that occurs when polycrisis strikes. The organization is primed for rapid change, innovative ideas, and new ways to thinking as systemwide barriers dissolve. That elasticity won’t last long, and you can miss out on those gains if you don’t document the wins and adopt changes that helped the enterprise mitigate disaster.
