Crisis Communication as part of risk resilience
If you thought 2025 was the year of multiple risks, get ready for the age of the ‘polycrisis’
There have always been risks for business but CEOs and Boards today confront threats on multiple fronts. Building operational resilience into organisations is, therefore, vital. But even as the risk environment evolves at speed, the need for effective crisis communications planning to best protect corporate reputation, customer, stakeholder and employee loyalty as well as sustaining brand equity, remains a constant element of risk mitigation.
According to global experts in the AXA Future Risks Report 2025, the world is entering ‘the age of the polycrisis,’ an era of overlapping risks where everything is interconnected and difficult to isolate.
It’s not just the big, dramatic events, such as floods, wildfires , other natural disasters or social upheaval that are cause for concern; sometimes it is the seemingly small, localised incident, such as a cyber breach or AI incident at a faraway supplier, that can ripple through a global supply chain triggering a domino effect of logistical disruption and product shortage.
This inter-connectivity of events makes it more challenging than ever to predict the impact of incidents outside an organisation’s direct control and so the ability to anticipate the unexpected, to join the apparently unconnected dots, is an invaluable asset.
The experts in the AXA Future Risks Report list their Top 10 risks in the next 5-10 years as:-
- Climate change
- Geopolitical instability
- Cyber security risk
- AI and Big Data
- Social tensions and movements
- Natural resources and biodiversity
- Macroeconomic risks
- Energy risks
- Financial stability risks
- Risks related to changing demographics
For anyone who keeps across the news, none of these will come as a surprise.
However, organisations should use this as checklist to aid their crisis communications planning. Don’t immediately dismiss any of them as ‘irrelevant’ or ‘too big’ to contemplate. Rather, think of how the organisation might be swamped by the ’ripple effect’ and how to mitigate those impacts by integrating greater resilience into operational functionality.
The one common factor to all the risks is the requirement to communicate speedily to all affected audiences and for your information to be accepted as accurate, factual, true and timely should any of them escalate from theoretical to actual crisis .
In the age of ‘fake news,’ misinformation, deliberate disinformation, a cynical public and with traditionally trusted sources of information under attack, this is essential. But the heart of a crisis is not the time to start building trust; rather it is the moment to draw down from the bank of trust the organisation has built up over years of being true to its values.
A new year brings new risks but the old adage still applies – ‘ Prepare for worst but hope for the best.’