We need to rethink risk and reimagine crisis around critical human infrastructure

Key lessons from the 2025 ‘Reputation, Risk and Resilience’ Report

By Rod Cartwright, Principal, Rod Cartwright Consulting:

I’ve just released the 2025 edition of my annual ‘Reputation, Risk and Resilience’ report, in which I’ve summarised and analysed eleven major global reports – totalling a table-thwacking 834 pages of source material – on those interlocking topics.

It is certainly no small undertaking: an undeniable labour of love, both practically and – increasingly – emotionally, given the flux and tumult in which we now live. That said, I wouldn’t change it for the world, and it is a crucial part of my work and contribution to an industry I love.

It would be churlish to suggest that this 2025 edition will make a particularly cheery read. There is simply no hiding from the fact that we live in a world of complexity, uncertainty and fear.

However, I believe passionately that issues and crises are – in reality – nothing more than vulnerabilities manifested, risks realised and threats materialised. On that basis, my core argument is that how we respond to the ‘stimulus’ of today’s undeniably complex risk environment is in our hands – professionally and personally.

Today’s risk landscape: key themes and major risk dynamics

So how do I arrive at that pretty punchy, provocative conclusion? To answer that question, let’s look at the headline findings of the report and the key themes running like a red thread through the eleven publications.

As professional communicators and business leaders, we operate in a world where the ten major risk ‘buckets’ dominating expert and public concerns are starting to become remarkably consistent. That said, while the overall risk landscape is relatively stable, the dominant risks are increasingly interconnected, mutually-reinforcing, structural and systemic – intensifying almost by the day.

To understand more deeply that complex picture, I have also suggested three ‘major risk dynamics’ this year, into which I’ve grouped the key themes emerging from the report.

Firstly, we have ‘steady-state table stake’ risks – the undeniable top-tier threats that consistently dominate corporate risk registers. Those table stakes are the geopolitics of conflict, economic fear, cyber insecurity and the climate emergency.

However, there is also a series of ‘sleeping giant’ risks, hiding in plain sight and all too often downplayed or even ignored. These potential blind spots may yet become more prominent over the coming years.

They include the enduringly uncertain relationship between humans and technology; the demographic and societal impact of super-ageing societies; growing social tensions and intergenerational divides; and the hidden pandemic of plummeting mental health and wellbeing, accompanied by growing employee disengagement.

Finally, both the table stakes and the sleeping giants are being exacerbated by a set of ‘risk accelerants’: increasingly embedded structural permacrisis and systemic polycrises; ever-greater risk intersectionality and threat interconnectedness; and an excessive focus on operational and structural resilience over true human preparedness and critical human infrastructure.

As much as each of the report’s ten individual key themes merits careful scrutiny in its own right, standing back to consider the specific role of each of these overall risk dynamics in driving organisational outcomes and informing strategic responses is every bit as important – if not more so.

We need to rethink risk and reimagine crisis

Against that backdrop, a centrepiece of my approach each year is to avoid the risk of simply “admiring the problem” (to borrow a phrase from the UK’s National Preparedness Commission) and to place an ever stronger emphasis on recommendations for the practical responses needed to manage the risks and deal with the challenges the report raises. This includes providing recommending ten practical questions which leaders need to consider and address, as they seek to manage the volatility around them.

It is those recommendations which form the cornerstone of my assertion that for all the undoubted volatility, uncertainty and complexity we can see in today’s risk environment, our response must be to fundamentally rethink risk, reimagine crisis and re-engineer preparedness.

More specifically, I unapologetically revisit my consistent argument that there is real opportunity lurking beneath the sense of permacrisis – the chance to use risk management, crisis preparedness and resilience-building as sources of hugely positive tangible value and material opportunity, rather than viewing them as irksome, costly insurance policies.

To unlock that opportunity, crisis communicators need to act as ‘Sensemakers-in-Chief’, focusing as much on relationships as reputation, shifting their focus from ‘the self’ to ‘the other’, recognising that character-centred scandals can eat capability-led crises for breakfast and prioritising critical human infrastructure over technical systems and processes alone.

There are, of course many senior people on Boards and in senior leadership teams who continue to view crisis preparedness rather like a costly, irksome insurance policy that they may never need and deeply resent paying for. However, beyond the almost weekly examples of the immense damage that operational, reputational and relationship crises create, there is a growing body of hard data which puts to the sword that misguided and all-to-often complacent mindset.

For that evidence, we need look no further than the remarkable SenateSHJ Crisis Index – released in April – analysing the financial impacts of over 300 listed company crises globally over the past 44 years, using data from 27 stock exchanges and across 32 industry sectors.

Over that period, the average crisis was met with a share price impact of over 35%, with earnings per share (EPS) falling 68.3% and companies taking 425 days, on average, for their share price to return to pre-crisis levels. Corroborating a view I’ve long held that stakeholders already ‘price in’ – to a degree – the impact of operationally-focused crises, ‘mismanagement’ and ‘white-collar crime’ hit share prices hardest, with ‘cybercrime’ having the lowest share price impact.

For those minded to persist with the ‘expensive insurance’ view of crisis preparedness, I throw down an intentionally provocative gauntlet in the 2025 report, in the form of a 1-page ‘Letter to the CEO and Chair’.

Imagine – I assert – if I offered you an insurance policy that not only paid for damage to your home from a passing storm, but actually helped find – and repair – unseen cracks in the building’s walls and fundamental weaknesses in its foundations. You would probably bite my arm off! And yet, that is precisely what the systematic, collaborative risk readiness and crisis preparedness that so many executives consistently resist is able to do. That is why, I argue, we need to keep talking about crisis preparedness and risk management as sources of considerable tangible value and material

Yes, the world may be complex, uncertain and at times frightening. However, the sooner we acknowledge, internalise and culturally embed the fact that there is opportunity in every risk and risk in every opportunity, the better prepared we will be for what lies ahead. That is the opportunity, lurking beneath the sense of permacrisis and the polycrises we face.

Written by: Editor