Is Your Organisation Existential-Threat Ready?

Rethinking risk in an unknowable world

There are three broad classes of existential threat:

• The organisation ceases to exist

• Humanity ceases to exist

• The Earth ceases to exist.

Few of us seriously contemplate a universe in which the Earth no longer exists. Some are acutely aware that humanity may be playing with fire. What is striking, however, is how little sustained attention many leaders give even to the survival of their own organisations.

This is not because leaders are careless. It is because the way we think about risk is increasingly mismatched to the world we are operating in.

The limits of conventional risk assessment

Risk is traditionally assessed using two dimensions: impact and likelihood. Existential threats, by definition, sit at the extreme end of impact. This immediately raises two questions:

• What are these threats?

• How likely are they?

The first question is difficult but manageable. The second is increasingly meaningless.

Scenario planning under strain

Consider a simple scenario. A regional war escalates, disrupting your supply chain. At the same time, your organisation becomes the target of a state-sponsored cyberattack.

Ask yourself:

• To what extent has your crisis management planning anticipated such a combination?

• Do you have a self-healing supply chain?

• Would your crisis plans work with no access to digital communications?

• Is there sufficient trust and loyalty in the organisation to ensure key people will do what it takes to keep it operational?

• How long could your organisation survive if it were unable to serve its market, or if that market ceased to exist altogether?

Holding substantial reserves may help you ride out a discrete shock. But what if this is not a single seismic event? What if disruption is continuous, overlapping, and chaotic, not an exception, but the new abnormal?

This example is deliberately simplistic, conflating just two macro-environmental forces: geopolitics and technology. Reality is far messier.

When scenarios become infinite

Now consider a fuller range of macro-environmental forces:

• Political

• Economic

• Social

• Technological

• Legal

• Environmental.

Each can vary independently and interact with the others. The number of possible futures quickly becomes infinite. Developing a bespoke crisis management plan for each is infeasible.

Faced with this, organisations often retreat to a shortlist: the five, ten, or perhaps one hundred scenarios deemed most likely. But in an environment that is no longer merely complex, and increasingly chaotic, likelihood becomes impossible to assess reliably.

At this point, leaders are left with uncomfortable options: hope for the best, avoid reality or assume today’s problems will become their successor’s concern. Given that most leaders are judged on the next quarter, these options can be temptingly rational.

They are also dangerous.

Rethinking governance

But imagine a different approach.

Imagine governance that does not attempt to predict specific existential threats but instead prepares the organisation to remain viable regardless of which threats materialise, including those that challenge humanity itself or place intolerable strain on the planet.

In such a world, governance is no longer just a set of compliance processes. It becomes an organisational asset, one that amplifies the value of every other asset the organisation possesses.

This raises a different question. Not ‘which threats should we plan for?’, but ‘what capabilities must an organisation possess to survive in an unknowable future?’.

Risk management maturity and living systems

Living systems offer a useful reference point. They have a proven track record in surviving existential threats, extending back millions of years. The fact that our ancestors looked quite different from us, living underwater or moving on all fours, attests to the power of adaptation.

Living systems do not survive because they predict the future accurately. They survive because they are responsive to their environment and capable of adapting over time.

This is why organisations need to become more akin to living systems, particularly in their ability to sense environmental change today and adapt their form tomorrow.

Being a living organism does not guarantee immunity from catastrophe. But it significantly improves the chances of survival. In organisational terms, this is where intelligence, both natural and artificial, becomes decisive.

Rethinking leadership

From this perspective, leaders themselves can become an emerging single point of failure. Concentrating sensing, decision-making and authority at the top slows responsiveness and increases fragility.

A more distributed approach to sensing, deciding and acting reduces this risk and increases organisational resilience.

Portfolio thinking and regeneration

Organisations can further improve their chances of survival by evolving from a single business model to a portfolio of diverse models. Diversity reduces the risk of catastrophic failure arising from any single point of dependence.

In this way, organisations can regenerate rather than merely endure. They can remain viable by cultivating a diverse set of income streams that are compatible with both human and planetary limits.

A final reframing

Existential threat readiness is not about predicting the end of the world. It is about accepting that prediction has limits, and that viability depends on design.

In an increasingly unknowable future, organisations that remain machine-like will struggle. Those that develop the capabilities of living systems, which include sensing, sensemaking, responsiveness and adaptiveness, stand a far better chance of staying in the game.