Why So Many Organizations Get Blindsided by Crisis

In 2021, the Ever Given container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal and blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping corridors for six days. No one predicted it. It was, by definition, a Black Swan event — the kind that wasn’t supposed to happen and then did, with consequences that rippled across global supply chains for months.

Most companies scrambled. Procter and Gamble (P&G) did not. They had already built flexibility into their supply chain, including alternative sourcing options, pre-agreed reformulation protocols, and delegated authority to act. When their inputs got stuck in the Canal, they rerouted production and kept moving. They didn’t predict the crisis, but they had prepared for the category of problem it represented. That distinction is what separates the organizations that absorb disruption from the ones disruption defeats.

The Problem with Waiting for the Crisis to Define the Plan

Black Swan events are becoming a more regular feature of business life. The Suez Canal. The Strait of Hormuz. The COVID supply shock. The tariff volatility of 2025 and 2026. The sources are different every time, but the pattern is not: conditions change suddenly, organizations that had pre-agreed on how to respond absorbed the shock, and organizations that hadn’t scrambled while the crisis unfolded. Those that treat every disruption as if it’s the first one spend the critical early hours doing the work they should have done months before: debating risk appetite, assigning ownership, figuring out who has authority to act. By the time they reach alignment, the window for an effective response has often closed.

What I recommend instead are scenario guardrails: pre-agreements, decision triggers, and response architectures that allow an organization to move quickly when something it did not foresee arrives. Guardrails are not predictions, but they are a framework that gives leaders and their teams a clear answer to the most important question in any crisis: what do we do now, and who decides?

Three Things That Must Exist Before the Crisis Arrives

In my experience, the organizations that respond best to disruption have built three capabilities before the crisis happens. Most companies have the first. Far fewer have the second. Almost none have the third.

The first is having the plan: a documented set of responses to a range of scenarios — what happens if a critical supplier fails, if a shipping route closes, if costs spike beyond a threshold. Most large organizations have some version of this. It is necessary but not sufficient by itself.

The second is having trained on the plan. A plan that lives only in documents is not a plan. The people in operations need to know the protocol. Regional leads need to understand the triggers. Decision makers at every level need to have rehearsed the choices they will face under pressure. P&G’s response to the Suez Canal was not improvised, it was practiced.

The third — and where most organizations fall short — is building genuine flexibility into how decisions get made when the moment arrives. This requires something that runs counter to how most senior leaders operate: delegating real authority downward, to the people closest to the problem.

Flexibility Is a Culture Problem, Not a Crisis Problem

True organizational resilience is almost never delivered by the most senior leaders. It is delivered by the people in the middle and at the front lines, the ones who understand local conditions, who have the relationships with suppliers and partners, who can see in real time what is happening on the ground.

I saw this through work with the Ares Charitable Foundation and their grantee WRI India, which had spent two years training micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the Surat textile cluster on boiler efficiency, combustion optimization, and fuel diversification. The foundation’s Climate-Resilient Employees for a Sustainable Tomorrow (CREST) initiative supported WRI India’s activities within the Resilient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Enterprises (RISE) Surat initiative.

When geopolitical supply chain disruptions caused coal prices to spike and availability to tighten, those businesses were ready. Twelve MSMEs successfully switched from coal to biofuels for their boiler operations. No one handed them the exact formula, but they had the knowledge, the training, and the authority to act.

That is flexibility: delegated authority within clear guardrails, held by people who have been prepared to use it. The guardrail sets the boundary. The person on the ground makes the call within it. Most organizations don’t get here because of a coaching failure. Senior leaders carry institutional crisis knowledge so intuitively they don’t think to transfer it. The coaching that prepares mid-level leaders to make good decisions under pressure rarely happens systematically because it feels like low-priority work when things are calm. That is exactly when it needs to happen.

Three Questions to Start Building This Capability Now

If you want to start building this capability, begin by solving for these three questions:

First question: what is your organization’s risk appetite, and is it visible to the people who will need to act on it? If your mid-level leaders don’t know where you sit on the spectrum from cautious to aggressive, they cannot make good decisions at speed.

Second question: who has the authority to act when a crisis happens, and do they know it? If the answer is that everything flows up, your guardrails will fail the moment they are needed.

Third question: when did you last test the plan? A plan that has never been practiced is a hypothesis. Run the scenario. Find the gaps before the crisis does.

Black Swan events are not going away. The disruptions will keep arriving from directions we didn’t anticipate, caused by events we couldn’t foresee. The organizations that will absorb them and keep moving will be the ones that did the preparation work when everything was calm, not because they knew what was coming, but because they had decided in advance how they would respond to disruption when it did.