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Planning for the Unexpected
Typical crisis planning focuses on specific potential shocks. But how do
you prepare for an unforeseen “asymmetric” threat — one that comes out
of nowhere, with no rule book to follow?
by Paul Wolfowitz, Kristin Rivera, and Glenn Ware
If you’re a government or business leader, you probably spend
much of your time trying to anticipate threats and preparing
for them. (In a 2018 PwC survey of chief executives on crisis
management, 73 percent of respondents said that they expect
to be hit by at least one crisis in the next three years.) You
know that heading off a crisis is less difficult and expensive
than trying to fix the damage after the fact. Yet for all the
time and money spent on crisis prevention, companies and
communities are still regularly blindsided by terrible events
that somehow slip through the cracks.
Consider, for example, factors that affected the preparedness
for two well-known, relatively recent disasters:
• When Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm to hit
Puerto Rico in nearly a century, made landfall on September
20, 2017, it was known that rescue and recovery would be
difficult. But the statistically improbable circumstances of
the storm season exacerbated the crisis. Within the previous
month, Hurricane Harvey had struck Texas and Louisiana,
and Irma had ravaged Florida. This left rescue and recovery
agencies overburdened and exhausted. Relief efforts lacked
the staff, supplies, private contributions, and administrative
attention they might otherwise have had.
• The October 1, 2017, massacre in Las Vegas circumvented
the conventional security measures for large outdoor
concerts. Nobody planned for a scenario in which a heavily
armed shooter would begin firing from the window of
an adjacent high-rise hotel. Resulting in more than 900
casualties, including 58 deaths and 422 others wounded by
gunfire, this was the deadliest mass shooting by an individual
in U.S. history.
In hindsight, the causal logic of a crisis — how one occurrence
led to another, and then another — is often clear. That
does not mean it could have been easily predicted, let alone
prevented. The combination of factors at play gives the event
a high level of asymmetry: the seemingly low probability of
the event versus the high cost of preparing for such an event
and the immense costs and destruction if it occurs. (The
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military term asymmetric threat, which refers to attacks by
small groups on large countries, is just one type of asymmetric
event described in this article.)
Most catastrophes have some asymmetric aspect. The
devastation rarely happens the way people think it will: It isn’t
possible to keep track of all the factors or anticipate how they
will combine. With destructive wildfires, for example, factors
such as wind velocity, the materials of the underbrush, and the
temperature at night interact in ways that physicists don’t fully
understand, and that make the blaze unpredictable. In other
natural disasters, escape routes can be unexpectedly blocked
— as they were during the eruption of the Kilauea volcano in
Hawaii in May 2018. Even in deliberately generated threats,
such as some of the cyber-attacks of early 2018, there are
surprises. Millions of home Wi-Fi routers in the U.S. and Europe
were targeted, a move that wasn’t widely anticipated.
This unexpectedness is even true of major geopolitical crises,
including wars. As of late 2018, for example, many major
corporations undoubtedly have contingency plans in place
for war on the Korean peninsula, or for more open trade war
between China and the United States. They know events like
these are unlikely, but if they occur, they could have global
impacts on a scale not seen since the 1940s — disrupting
trillions of dollars of trade, shutting down sea lanes, causing
massive casualties, and displacing millions.
Unfortunately, most contingency planning is predicated
on recognized signals of pending conflict: breakdowns in
diplomacy, the mass movement of troops, the deployment of
naval assets, and so on. All of these involve substantial lead
times. The plans are based on having time to prepare. But a
real war, on the Korean peninsula or elsewhere, could start
accidentally and suddenly, triggered by some small factor, in
an asymmetric way. Global businesses, with their multifaceted
international value chains, might be among those affected
first by any resulting conflagration.
Threat Ecosystems
and Meta-Readiness