When Multiple Crises Hit at Once, Leadership Determines the Outcome
For decades, organizations built leadership capacity and strategic planning around a reliable assumption: Crises are discrete. Identify the problem, activate the response, return to operations.
That assumption no longer holds.
The same systems that drive organizational performance — supply chains, technology platforms, cross-border operations, workforce infrastructure — are also the pathways through which interconnected crises travel. When one breaks under pressure, the others follow.
What triggers the cascade is almost never what determines the damage. Instead, what determines it is the state of the organization those events land in: the vulnerabilities that had been accumulating across systems, invisibly connecting and waiting for a catalyst to reveal them.
This is polycrisis, the convergence of multiple crises that interact and amplify one another in ways traditional crisis management wasn’t designed to address. We examined how organizations navigate polycrisis and found that preparation and leadership capacity shape how effectively they respond.
Our research puts numbers behind what many executive teams are already sensing. The typical employee was affected by 8 out of 10 categories of crisis in the past year, and 65% report those multiple crises make each other worse. These are the people leading your organization right now.
This report distills our research into 3 key insights, organized around important collective moments when facing polycrisis:
- Anticipating the conditions that make a crisis catastrophic before a trigger reveals them
- Coordinating across functions when multiple crises hit simultaneously
- Capturing what polycrisis makes possible before the transformation window closes
Each insight includes diagnostic questions and specific actions organizations can take now to build the leadership capacity that polycrisis demands.
Download White Paper
Our report for executive teams distills our polycrisis research into what building leadership capacity requires when multiple crises arrive one at a time.
