Amidst the coronavirus chaos, businesses need resilience thinking

When I started running the numbers at the end of January, I reluctantly began to draw my own conclusions regarding plausible future scenarios. I had a hard time convincing myself. I subsequently (re) learned that good old fashioned ‘denial’ is the first step of dealing with any crisis. As any good academic, I had written about it, but was strangely irritated when I experienced it myself. First, inside my own head, then with people I talked to. I’m writing when the coronavirus pandemic is in its initial stages. We are collectively snapping out of ‘denial’ right now, which is followed by panic, then anger, and eventually, a new pragmatism (discussed nicely by Karl Taro Greenfeld in this article for The Atlantic). I want to share some thoughts on fast-tracking your organisation towards the ‘new pragmatism’ stage. If you think risk management is a fairly specialised field, wait until you discover the many tribes that share it and constantly bicker about what exactly it is and means. I will highlight some thinking principles from corners that rarely make front page news: deep uncertainty, resilience and psychometric risk assessment.