If there is one thing we can be certain of in 2020 – it is that nothing is certain.
The world has entered into a state of instability that means that the risk registers and crisis management frameworks that we have used in previous generations are simply no longer strong or robust enough to stand up to the challenges that 2020 crisis events are throwing at us.
The coronavirus pandemic is only the latest, and perhaps clearest, indicator of the sort of challenges that we are facing. Whether it is climate change, natural disasters, infrastructure fragility, IT dependency, global supply chains, travel disruption, political and social instability or new forms of terrorism, the scale and scope of the disruption / destruction that these events can cause, both as primary events and in terms of cascading consequences, means that organisational risk and crisis management frameworks can no longer rely on protocols that have in essence remained unchanged for fifty years.
At the strategic level, the question is not technical (‘What do we need to do and how are we going to do it?’), but cultural. What sort of organisation do we need to become? What does a 2020 risk sensitive and crisis ready organisation look like?
On a practical level, it is also the organisation’s executive committee that will be responsible for setting the framework within which the organisation responds to a crisis, whatever the specific nature of that crisis might be.
