The year 2020 will be remembered for its high-impact, global events that left most organizations rethinking how they respond to crises — with risk mitigation strategies, resiliency plans, and organizational structures heavily tested. Among those crises, the relentless global spread of the COVID-19 disease, resulting from a novel coronavirus first detected in late 2019, has upended nearly every crisis playbook.
While businesses face myriad challenges during this protracted pandemic period — such as declining revenues, supply chain disruptions, rapidly changing public health mandates, and travel restrictions — the enterprises that are managing to stay on course, and even thrive, are those that had already established and tested plans, processes and tools, across key functions, to better anticipate and mitigate emerging risks. In a 2019 survey from PwC, 70% of senior leaders said their company had experienced at least one major crisis in the past five years — and one year later, this experience of crisis has only intensified.