Ukraine and dealing with 'predicted surprises'.

What do Bill Gates and Otto Habsburg have in common?

In 2015, five years before COVID, Bill Gates gave a TED talk that was watched by 2.5 million people. He argued that the next disaster to take millions of lives worldwide would most likely be a highly contagious respiratory infection. Ten years earlier, Otto Habsburg, the late son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, argued that Vladimir Putin, with his aggressive national-socialist expansion policy, was the greatest threat to world peace. He called Russia the last colonial power. You could conclude that the world is an unpredictable place, but personally I would draw a different conclusion. I think the real problem is that we are only to a limited extent able to anticipate, even when we see the risks well in advance. The examples are abundant. Think for instance of 9/11, the credit crisis, Brexit, the Arab Spring, the COVID pandemic and now the war in Ukraine; all of them predicted surprises. And you can already write down the list of predicted surprises for the future: extreme weather, food crises, cyber wars, social instability, extreme scarcity and stagflation and, of course, a new pandemic that combines the contagiousness of COVID with the lethality of Ebola.

The misconception about resilience

Fuelled by the war in Ukraine, the question of resilience is on the table in many organisations. Many executives we speak to grumble that they were caught out again. "Biden said it out loud, after all!" Most of them assessed Biden's warning of war as a strong piece of negotiating tactics rather than as a real threat to at least stable access to raw materials, and perhaps even to world peace. The bad news is indeed that many did not think through the implications of a war in Ukraine in good time. The good news is that it is certainly not too late to start working on this. In fact, the importance of recognising predicted surprises early is sometimes overestimated. Thinking through their implications in a structured, uninhibited and continuous way is much more important. We have seen many examples in the past of organisations that did identify risks such as a Brexit or even a pandemic early. Subsequently, however, those same organisations were barely able to think through the consequences of such a risk and to organise themselves in such a way that they were optimally positioned to seize opportunities and avert threats. In other words, resilience is not about predicting developments or risks, but above all about anticipating and organising for their consequences.

In this article we offer a number of perspectives and pointers for leaders of organisations to strengthen their resilience in the light of the Ukraine war. We first look at ways to anticipate predicted surprises and then at ways to organise for predicted surprises.

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