In The Fifth Risk, author Michael Lewis explores the seen and unseen functions that otherwise unconsidered government bureaucracies perform to keep the business of daily life ticking over uninterrupted. The titular risk, the one that preoccupies the author and, by the end of the book, the reader, is the risk that these agencies do not account for out of a failure of imagination, political will, or steady refusal to believe that things could go so uniquely and spectacularly wrong. What we see and experience is easy to wrap our minds around, and so we focus on the tangible and let the fantastical slip from our thinking.
Risk, and risk mitigation, is always a topic of consideration for any business, but it has a particular primacy in the face of the lingering pandemic. And the risk we’ve been forced to grapple with — the insidiousness of the spread of coronavirus and its effects on our health and the health of those close to us — is not one that the average business can say it was suitably prepared for. We’re prepared for financial and economic crises, because money is the organizing concept of business, and thus we have to plan for less fortuitous circumstances. And while the coronavirus has precipitated a recession and potential depression, it’s under circumstances that no one would have predicted at the outset of the year, at least not in a way that would have been taken seriously then.
And so businesses are left to deal with the fallout of an unexpected public health disaster — one that seems unlikely to go away in the near term — and consider what might be learned from this period in history. It would be easy to view the coronavirus period as an outlier, something so unique that it would be impossible to take lessons from, given the once-in-a-lifetime nature of what’s unfolded. But while the contours of the crisis itself might be unique, world-disrupting events aren’t. We can draw on our usual crisis management and risk mitigation skills.
The future can hold unexpected changes and unforeseen events, so while we may look at projections and forecasts to guide our actions and decisions, we have to be prepared for possibilities beyond the typical in a world where change can seem to happen both slowly and all at once.
To be prepared for a post-pandemic world (when we get there), businesses need to expand their own thinking as to what’s possible in a more comprehensive and holistic way. It’s not simply reacting to the crisis past and not thinking of the challenges to come. Rather, you have to expand what you think is possible beyond what you might have previously considered, into the realm of the impossible.
That can present its own challenge given how limited we can be in our thinking. Prior to the first days of the outbreak, we would have certainly said that the potential exists for a global pandemic but that the chances were small given how advanced medicine and science are and the governmental bulwarks in place against such things. Things are impossible or improbable until they aren’t.
Figuring out the risks you aren’t seeing requires no small amount of creativity and perhaps a dose of pessimism paired with a willingness to consider some hard realities; you could argue that we’ve suffered as much due to magical thinking as we have from the normal course of events of a viral infection. That’s why we have to think and plan now and carry the worry with us moving forward of the risks we might face because coming to terms with them in real-time is too late for us and our business.
The coronavirus has exacted a heavy toll, and the living should mourn the dead while recognizing their own fortune that the price extracted from them, while steep, may only be financial. What it’s taught those of us in business, beyond the value and fragility of human life, is the breadth of possibility that exists when it comes to existential threats to our businesses. We thought we had a handle on the risks facing our company, only to have a curtain pulled back to reveal there are some we’ve never considered, and would never see until they beset us. That unknown, as much as virus outbreaks and earthquakes and hurricanes, keeps us up at night. #onwards.
