The crisis you could see coming

The most expensive crises are rarely surprises. Almost always, a signal was there: a regulatory change nobody read to the end, an operational fault that repeated until it became routine, a shift in a client’s tone that was read as a bad day, or data quietly leaving the building for months before someone outside asked why.

Companies don’t lose because the signal wasn’t there. They lose because no one was responsible for watching it.

It is worth asking a simple question of your own organisation: when an early signal appears, who owns it? In many companies the honest answer is no one in particular. The information exists, but it has no method of assessment and no agreed threshold for acting. The risk isn’t invisible. It’s simply unassigned.

Recognition is the hardest phase because there is no alarm. No single moment makes it obvious that the time to act has arrived. There are only quiet signs and a decision: to keep watching, or to act. Getting that decision right, consistently, is not a matter of instinct. It is a matter of system: who watches what, how a signal is judged, what threshold triggers escalation, and what is already prepared before it is needed.