OVERVIEW
“The world faces significant disruption and increasingly urgent global challenges affecting individuals, families, organizations, governments, and society. This VUCAD-driven (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and disruptive) era brings new complexities, opportunities, and risks for businesses. Today’s businesses face unprecedented challenges operating in a VUCAD (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and disruptive) global environment that demands a more cohesive support structure for leaders who face crises of increasing magnitude and frequency and, sometimes, multiple crisis events simultaneously.
The right leadership is critical for organizations to successfully resolve insurmountable challenges in any crisis event. Leaders must learn, unlearn, and relearn effective crisis leadership.”
– Sattar Bawany,
Author, The Making of a C.R.I.S.I.S. Leader (2025), Business Expert Press LLC, New York, NY, ISBN 9781637427842
In recent years, the world has witnessed a plethora of fundamental crises and challenges, including, but not limited to, the COVID-19 pandemic, transformative megatrends including disruptive technological innovations such as gen AI, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which has undermined core principles of international law, and the genocidal campaign by Israel in Gaza; climate change impacts leading to extreme weather events, and a growing economic strain due to rising inflation and interest rates; all of which are contributing to significant humanitarian needs worldwide.
These crises and challenges can be characterized as both “permacrisis” (a prolonged state of crisis) and “polycrisis” (a confluence of multiple interconnected crises) which are all taking place within the context of global instability, fragmentation, and polarisation, with war as a means of politics returning and ‘my country first’ becoming a strong political feature in many parts of the world, despite the need to tackle the common global challenges we face (Bawany 2025).
“Permacrisis” is a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner. When present and future risks interact with each other, the result is the formation of a “Polycrisis” which can be viewed as a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.
In the face of these unprecedented challenges, effective leadership plays a critical role in navigating complex and challenging environments. These situations demand a nuanced and adaptable approach to leadership that emphasizes resilience, strategic thinking, and collaborative problem-solving, which forms part of the “cognitive readiness” suite of competencies.
This Executive Briefing Series will include the latest research on the best practices for leading the organization and teams during times of crisis and disruption in an environment characterized by rapid and continual disruption, organizations which are published in the latest book The Making of a C.R.I.S.I.S. Leader (2025).
At the end of the session, the participants will be able to develop their understanding of the following:
- What are the leadership lessons from past decades on how leaders respond successfully to crises?
- What future mega-disruptive forces will lead to crises that may potentially impact organizations’ supply chains and business sustainability plans?
- How can organizations develop future-ready crisis leaders by leveraging the best practice “C.R.I.S.I.S.” Leadership Model that outlines the critical skills and competencies that leaders demonstrate effectively during times of crisis?
- How can boards, CEOs, and senior leadership teams successfully navigate the challenges posed by crises by adopting the best practice, the “5-Step Crisis Management Planning & Strategy” framework?
