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COVID-19 is not the only thing that should be worrying the C-suite
What do the UK’s hottest day ever, the National Grid failure and the collapse of Thomas Cook all have in common? They all took place over three months during the summer of 2019 for one thing and they all left thousands of people stranded.
2019 seemed particularly bad for large-scale disruptive events. And it was, until 2020 and COVID-19 came along and made it seem like a walk in the park. But the bigger picture is that, like climate change and severe weather patterns, the frequency of disruptive events is increasing.
These events can be magnified because our society is quite interconnected, partly driven by our increasing reliance on the internet. Even small businesses now have supply chains that include ISPs, software as a service accountancy packages, cloud-based storage of business documents and customer-facing websites. These supply chains now extend worldwide and have often been designed to be lowest cost and ‘just in time’ rather than resilient.