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In November 2023, Houthi militants in Yemen began firing on commercial ships in the Red Sea. Their stated reason: solidarity with Gaza. The consequence felt by consumers and businesses in Leeds, Lagos and Lyon was immediate and far-reaching. Shipping costs surged 200 to 400% on key Asia-Europe routes. Within weeks, 95% of container ships had been forced to reroute around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding up to fourteen days per journey and rewriting the economics of global trade almost overnight.
That is not a shipping story. It is a story about how a conflict in one corner of the world can reach into your supply chain, your inflation rate and your board’s risk register within weeks. It is a story about interconnection, the defining strategic condition of our time. And it is a story that most organisations are not yet fully equipped to read, let alone respond to.
For much of the past two decades, organisations operated in a world that, while complex, was broadly predictable. Risks were identifiable, modelled and, to a large extent, manageable in isolation. Market risk, operational risk, geopolitical risk: each was assessed within its own domain, with dedicated teams, models and mitigation strategies built around it. The underlying assumption was rarely questioned. Risks could be understood independently of one another, contained within their categories, and addressed through the right combination of expertise and process.
That world no longer exists.
What institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the IMF have described as a polycrisis is now the operating reality for leaders everywhere. Climate volatility, geopolitical conflict, economic pressure and political instability are no longer discrete challenges sitting in separate boxes. They interact, compound and amplify one another in ways that traditional risk frameworks were simply not designed to capture. The whole has become genuinely more dangerous than the sum of its parts.
Consider what Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 actually set in motion. There was, yes, an energy crisis in Europe. But trace the threads further and the picture becomes far more troubling. Russia and Ukraine together supplied nearly a third of the world’s wheat. Sanctions cut off Russian fertiliser exports. Belarus, under its own separate sanctions regime, supplies close to half of the world’s potash. The result was a chain reaction that spread across continents: fertiliser prices spiked, food prices followed, and social unrest rippled through countries that had no direct stake in the conflict whatsoever. An estimated 22 million additional people were pushed into hunger as a direct consequence of the war’s knock-on effects on food supply chains. By late 2025, Russia had moved beyond economic disruption and was attacking Ukrainian grain ports directly, sinking vessels and disrupting wheat shipments bound for Algeria and sunflower oil destined for Egypt.
None of those dynamics sit neatly within a single risk category. They are systemic, moving across sectors and geographies with speed and unpredictability. The result is not just more risk. It is a fundamentally different kind of risk, one that behaves according to different rules and demands a different quality of response.
Despite this shift, many organisations continue to rely on frameworks designed for a more stable era. Forecasting models assume relative continuity. Scenario planning tends to explore variations of known risks rather than genuinely different futures. Strategy cycles remain anchored to annual or multi-year planning horizons that struggle to keep pace with the speed at which the real world now moves.
This creates a dangerous illusion: that risk is still something that can be measured, contained and optimised away. In reality, the challenge is increasingly one of navigation rather than control. The distinction matters more than it might appear. Control implies predictability; you design a system, anticipate the threats, and build defences accordingly. Navigation requires something different entirely: the ability to read a shifting environment in real time, to make sound judgements with incomplete information, and to move with purpose even when the destination is not yet fully clear. In a polycrisis environment, the organisations still reaching for control are the ones most likely to be caught off guard.
Layer climate on top of geopolitical fragmentation and the picture becomes more complex still. Morocco controls approximately 70% of the world’s proven phosphate reserves, the raw material underpinning global fertiliser supply. It is also a country facing intensifying drought. A sustained drought in Morocco does not just affect Moroccan agriculture. It constrains phosphate mining operations, tightens the global fertiliser market and ultimately raises food prices in countries thousands of miles away that may have never heard of OCP, Morocco’s state phosphate producer. Meanwhile in 2025, California suffered its most destructive wildfire season on record, generating $40 billion in insured losses alone. Tornadoes appeared on the US East Coast. Floods struck Dubai. These are not anomalies to be explained away. They are the new baseline, and every corporate risk model that has not yet absorbed that fact is already out of date.
One of the less visible but deeply consequential effects of polycrisis is what it does to decision-making inside organisations. Leaders often assume that more risk means faster decisions, a sharper sense of urgency driving quicker action. The reality is frequently the opposite. As risks become more interconnected, decision-making tends to slow rather than accelerate. Trade-offs become more complex and harder to resolve cleanly. Reaching internal alignment becomes more difficult as different parts of the organisation see different aspects of the same problem. And leadership teams face escalating cognitive load at precisely the moment that clarity and speed matter most.
What appears externally as market volatility or competitive disruption often manifests internally as strategic friction: meetings that go in circles, decisions that keep getting deferred, plans that feel outdated before they are fully implemented. Organisations are not just responding to more risks. They are struggling to process how those risks interact with one another, and how actions taken in response to one risk might inadvertently create or amplify another. The frameworks they are using to make sense of the environment were built for a world that has since moved on.
In recent years, resilience has become one of the most frequently used words in corporate strategy. It appears in annual reports, board presentations and leadership frameworks with reassuring regularity. But much of what is described as resilience still reflects a single-shock mindset: build supply chain redundancy in case of disruption, hold capital buffers in case of financial stress, develop contingency plans for the scenarios you can most clearly envision. These are sensible measures. They are no longer sufficient.
In a polycrisis environment, resilience must evolve in a more fundamental direction. It must move from the ability to withstand a defined shock and recover, towards the capacity to adapt continuously as conditions shift in ways that were not anticipated. It must move from protecting existing value in a known business model, towards the ability to reposition dynamically as the landscape changes around you. The goal is not to return to a previous state of stability after each disruption. The goal is to build an organisation that can operate effectively in the absence of that stability, because the stability itself is no longer coming back.
This requires changes that go deeper than most organisations have yet made. Highly optimised systems are efficient, but they are also brittle. Every degree of optimisation is, in another sense, a degree of reduced flexibility. The organisations building genuine resilience right now are doing the harder work of mapping their systemic exposure, understanding not just their direct dependencies but the dependencies of their dependencies. They are asking not only where their suppliers are located, but what makes those suppliers themselves vulnerable, and what the second and third-order consequences would be if those vulnerabilities were triggered simultaneously.
If risk can no longer be fully predicted or controlled, the question becomes: what does effective leadership actually look like in this environment? Three shifts are becoming increasingly decisive in separating organisations that are genuinely adapting from those that are merely coping.
The first is from prediction to preparedness. The value of being able to anticipate specific outcomes is diminishing as the environment becomes less legible. The ability to respond quickly, with clarity and without paralysis, when something unexpected occurs is becoming the more strategically valuable capability. The second is from optimisation to flexibility. The logic of lean, efficient, tightly integrated systems served organisations remarkably well for decades. In a more volatile and interconnected world, that same logic is now a source of fragility as much as competitive strength. The third is from certainty to judgement. Data remains essential and the organisations investing in better data and better analytical capability are right to do so. But data alone is no longer sufficient. In a world where models struggle to capture the full interaction of compounding and interconnected risks, the human capacity for interpretation, contextual experience and sound judgement becomes increasingly decisive.
This is the question that organisations need to confront honestly and with some urgency. Many are still operating as though the current environment represents a temporary phase of elevated instability, one that will eventually settle into something more predictable and manageable. It is an understandable hope. But if polycrisis is not a phase through which we are passing, but a structural condition that defines the decade ahead, then the response it requires cannot be incremental.
The evidence of opportunity within the disruption is already visible for those willing to look for it. The Red Sea crisis has accelerated nearshoring strategies across multiple industries, reshaping where production and logistics networks are built. Ukraine’s agricultural disruption has elevated Morocco, Egypt and Brazil as critical food security partners and, with that, has elevated the strategic value of deep relationships with those countries and regions. Climate stress is generating entirely new categories of demand for adaptation, infrastructure, data and innovation that did not exist a decade ago. Inside the complexity, there is real opportunity. But it is only accessible to organisations that have developed the capability to read the system rather than simply react to whatever it throws at them next.
The organisations that succeed in the decade ahead will not be those that find a way to control an environment that is beyond control. They will be the ones that have built the strategic capability to move within it with purpose and confidence, to navigate rather than merely react, to adapt before circumstances force their hand, and to act decisively when others are still searching for a certainty that is not coming.
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