Leading in the era of the compounding crisis

Written by Nic Daley and Hannah Cambridge

Navigating an organisation through a crisis has always been one of the most demanding requirements of executive leadership.

We’ve walked alongside leaders as they’ve faced the toughest moments of their careers, with crises threatening not only licence to operate, but livelihoods and life itself.

And in the modern era, amidst turbulent geopolitical tension, conflicting expectations and unyielding scrutiny, these challenges no longer strike in isolation – they overlap, amplify, and arrive in relentless waves.

We call this the era of the compounding crisis.

We’re all eyewitnesses to this phenomenon. It’s the evolution of the perma-crisis and symptomatic of a world fraught with ambient anxiety and volatile polemic.

But diagnosing the problem is one thing. Finding answers to it is quite something else. That’s where our new report, Leading in the era of the compounding crisis, hopes to help.

We’ve surveyed 150 leaders at large UK businesses to gather and harness their insights into not only what’s happening, but what can be done to address some of the uniquely disruptive conditions facing business leaders today.

They helped us identify four core traits that provide a useful guide for navigating today’s crisis communications landscape:

1. Leaders are feeling unprecedented pressure and exposed by a lack of preparedness
2. The ‘compounding crisis’ is the new normal
3. Modern issues – of which there are many – are a direct threat to profit
4. There is trouble from within. Keep your friends close and your employees closer.

Their message is clear – the old ways of doing things no longer protect CEOs or ensure financial stability. A host of insights are in the report but here are a handful:

⚠️ Traditional risk management structures need a refresh. The historical siloes are important but must be integrated with communications, political advisory and investor relations.
📝 You can’t bring your analogue playbook to a world of algorithms. Tear up the dusty book and craft an agile crisis playbook that includes identification of modern threats and frameworks for combatting them.
🔗 Embed issues management across your organisation. Reputation is a red thread running through all aspects of your business and it’s tied to your profit.
🚫 Misinformation will find you. It’s your responsibility to get ahead of it.
💥 Become comfortable being uncomfortable. With the prevalence of employee and shareholder activism, coupled with a rise in toxic social media conversations and public backlash, your responses will never please everyone. Identify who really matters, and engage with them.

This all demands a new approach to risk management, organisational preparedness and crisis response. And it needs to start today.