Reputation, Risk and Resilience: where are we now and what happens next?
By Rod Cartwright
To say that we live in a world of dizzying complexity, anxiety-inducing uncertainty and seemingly unending turbulence would be among the understatements of the decade. It is almost as if Murphy’s Law – that if something can go wrong, it probably will – is somehow now hardwired into daily life.
The full granular extent to which that pervasive sense of permacrisis appears to have become embedded in our very existence was truly brought home to me when I compiled the 2024 Edition of my report ‘Reputation, Risk and Resilience: where are we now and what happens next?’, which I released in May. The full 2024 report – and a short overview – can be downloaded here.
In it, I summarised and analysed eight major global reports from the previous 12 months on the current – and emerging – state of trust, risk, resilience, employee engagement, security and business continuity. The reports I covered were:
G4S’s inaugural World Security Report
The Business Continuity Institute’s Horizon Scan Report
The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report
The Conference Board’s C-Suite Outlook Report
The Page Society’s CCO Views into 2024 Report
Ipsos’s 2024 Reputation Council Report
As well, as providing a TL:DR (‘too long, didn’t read’) summary and overview of each report, I drew out ten cross-cutting themes, which run through many of them:
The looming shadow of geopolitical tensions
The terrible twins of misinformation and polarisation
The ever-growing threat of cyber (in)security
The real and present danger of climate catastrophe
The overall and individual fear of economic collapse
The long tail human impact of the collective global COVID-19 trauma
ESG as a priority in principle, but not necessarily in practice or in the pocket
The importance of technology with a human face
Business stepping in where governments fear and fail to tread
The new intersectionality of risk, amid today’s polycrisis
To the final point, what shone out from beneath the pervasive sense of permacrisis revealed by the 2024 report was the interconnected, mutually-reinforcing nature of an ever-growing list of top-tier risks underpinning our new abnormal. In short, it is the intersectionality of risks and threats that is the defining feature of today’s rolling polycrises.
This year’s report certainly doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture of the risk landscape over the coming decade. However, the 2024 edition also provides a crucial reminder that there is real opportunity lurking beneath the sense of permacrisis – the chance to use risk management, crisis preparedness and resilience-building as sources of huge positive value, rather than viewing them as irksome, costly insurance policies.
To do so requires the right mindset, systematic preparation and concerted action. With that in mind, I also offered up ten crucial questions for leaders to consider, informed by the report and by three decades of front-line crisis advisory experience.
Those questions range from unlocking ‘sensemaking’ as a hidden communication superpower, remembering that resilience is a cultural outcome and focusing on governance as the often-forgotten glue in ESG, to harnessing frontier technologies to mitigate risk and putting human preparedness front and centre.
To support organisations of all kinds with the process of turning risk into opportunity, I’m running:
Interactive primer sessions, exploring the ten cross-cutting themes and ten critical challenges, and discussing how to plot an effective, practical path forward.
Practical, half-day deep-dive workshops, exploring how to apply the report’s findings to individual organisations.
Half- and full-day crisis communication masterclasses, combining key report insights with extensive real-world examples, best practice tools and 30 years on the crisis frontline, to enhance participants’ confidence, capability and competence in this crucial discipline.
We would, I’m sure, all love there to be simple, quick fixes to the challenges of fast-moving, intersectional risk. Sadly, that is not today’s reality. That is why I’m delivering these sessions: to help professional communicators and other business leaders, as they try to make sense of the complexity around us and unlock the latent opportunity peeking out from beneath the wall of risk. Just get in touch if you’d like to find out more, on LinkedIn or at rod@rodcartwrightconsulting.com.
Rod Cartwright, Special Advisor to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Crisis Communications Network, a Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University and Principal, Rod Cartwright Consulting