Crisis management in most organizations happens in one of two ways. Respond to the crisis as best and fast as possible to minimize fallout, quickly draining energy and resources. Or pressure test the organization’s readiness to cope with a familiar crisis while remaining oblivious of what other crises might be brewing. The first is an approach akin to dousing a fire after the blaze has begun burning your home. The second prepares the house to cope against an impending fire.

There is also a third pathway: Prevent a crisis from happening in the first place. Given crisis management is all about ‘managing a crisis’, this might seem counter intuitive. But crisis management can begin long before a crisis.

Lessons from nature

Natural calamities rarely happen suddenly. The conditions leading up to their occurrence are often prolonged – days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, even millennia – and invisible.

Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, climate change, bushfires and floods all develop over time, triggered by natural forces such as tectonic plate movement, gravity and atmospheric changes.

Thanks to science and technology, we have seismometers, gas sensors, satellites, radar tracks and other devices that help forecast when and where natural calamities may occur and with what intensity – even if they are not able to precisely predict natural disasters, they help us prepare.

Many man-made disasters – such as wars and terrorism; revolutions and regime changes; mining and air, rail or road accidents; chemical and oil spills; plagues and pandemics – also follow a similar pattern with underlying precursors, except we are often too late in recognizing their evolving symptoms.

The challenge in business

The business approach to crisis management is mostly skewed toward survival. Attention is given to pressure testing an organization’s capacity to manage a known crisis. Not enough effort is directed at preventative action that can help avert an emerging crisis.

Some of it is because the C-suite is limited by time constraints, operational (bottom-line) focus and competing demands and does not have the sensing ability to discern any early symptoms. Boards generally focus on building capability to ‘govern well’ when a crisis arises.

The number of agenda items, the volume of reading material and spiralling compliance load are increasingly occupying a director’s attention. During meetings, items that require approval receive more air time, dedicated opportunity for questioning and a serious debate. Other items are dealt with more superficially. The board’s necessary separation from operations can also make it difficult to see hidden red flags in other areas.

What can businesses do?

The C-suite must cultivate a serious ‘sensing’ ability beyond the customary environment scan undertaken for a SWOT analysis and more precise and detailed than what is deployed in a scenario planning exercise.

Importantly, management must create open channels for customers, employees, suppliers and community (for example, non-governmental organizations) to provide direct and unfiltered feedback that could help discover a crisis starter.

Give employees the freedom to whistleblow while assuring immunity from adverse consequences for any issue raised in good faith. Acknowledge and reward teams that have contributed to averting what might have become a major crisis.

Boards must allow for a greater diversity of representation at the table, not only in terms of skill sets and gender, but also age, ethnicity, tech savviness, lived experience and perspectives.

While recruiting new directors, nomination committees must seek out different thinking styles, induct the odd contrarian who can smother groupthink, avoid blind spots, reduce risk and advance hindsight. Invite non-executive managers to present regularly at Board meetings, periodically visit operational centers and seek pre-mortem analysis of all major projects.

Human intelligence and AI

Thinking back to where we first started, there is evidence to show that the longer the invisible build-up, the greater the impact of a natural disaster. And where crises spread rapidly, the winners are not the ones who are most accurate or best informed but those who are less late, something that was clearly witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So for businesses to combat a looming crisis, it is necessary to balance accuracy with speed. Monitoring latent changes as they occur will reduce build-up time and hasten responses.

With its capacity to process myriad data points at furious speeds, AI can be that critical factor needed in sensing and navigating imminent, emerging and distant crises. However, guiding AI’s work will require humans with diverse skills and experience at various levels of an organization with detailed knowledge of the business and its processes.

The AI–human combination can replicate past crises and the conditions leading up to these, execute reverse crisis management practices, perform pre-mortem of future scenarios and more. Over time this can assist in preempting potential crises that are still under the radar or bubbling below the surface. The benefits to organizations in terms of resources saved and stress avoided could be huge.

It is possible the next generation of ‘Inference’ AI chips that go beyond training models to providing answers to real-world problems will turn human hindsight into machine foresight.

At a time when the world is increasingly split between AI crusaders and detractors, will crisis management be the bridge that links AI with human intellect and experience to evade crises and deliver economic progress, productivity and wellbeing without shedding jobs? Only time will tell.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.