A world in turmoil pushes crisis management to its limits

Is traditional risk management unable to meet the challenges of current global crises, and how can cities adapt to unprecedented challenges?

While what we consider as modern crisis management is not yet 25 years old, it’s undergoing profound change as swirling global pressures increasingly point to a powerful paradigm shift. According to urban resilience expert Dr David Rubens, a rethinking of what cities are is likely to be required.

At a recent AGSM @ UNSW Business School online symposium, which focused on cyber and climate risk management, Dr Rubens, Executive Director of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM), discussed the intersection of urban resilience and risk management, including limitations of traditional approaches and thinking around complex emerging risks. 

Speaking to an audience of senior executives and risk professionals, Dr Rubens said that the confluence of global crises and challenges, including climate change and geopolitical conflict, is likely overloading society’s ability to understand and deal with risk. “It’s a crazy world out there right now; it really is,” said Dr Rubens, who is recognised as an authority on strategic management of complex events, particularly within a multi-agency crisis management framework.

“It’s pushing our understanding of what risk management means and of the capabilities and frameworks that have been in place and stood us in good stead for the past 50 years. They’re being pushed and stretched to the absolute limits of their capabilities.”

These realities have significant implications for how the world’s cities approach resilience to risk, Dr Rubens said. But it might also be a wake-up call about cities themselves.

Managing an ‘age of crisis’

Modern crisis management effectively began with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Dr Rubens explained. “Before that was somehow a simpler, older, more linear age; suddenly, we’d introduced an age of complexity.”

Indeed, he referred to the 10 years between 2001 and the 11 March 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan as an “age of crisis” that included Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005, the global financial crisis in 2008 and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Read more: Crisis management essentials: Preparing for the unexpected

“If felt that we were in crisis, and in 2011, a new word came into the lexicon: resilience,” he said. “Suddenly, we stopped talking about crisis, and the focus moved to being resilient – resilient society, resilient organisations, personal resilience, economic resilience, emotional resilience. That was an interesting transition because, if we talk about crisis, we’re looking out the window at what’s happening out there,” he added. “We very much feel that we’re victims of something over which we have no influence or control.”

Resilience, in contrast, is something that’s within our control and over which we have influence. However, in 2017, another new word gained importance. “Suddenly, everything was ‘unprecedented’ – unprecedented climate change, unprecedented weather events, unprecedented flooding, unprecedented drought, unprecedented data release,” Dr Rubens said.

This sense of rapid escalation has made risk management increasingly challenging. “What we consider risk management is based on a fundamental principle or belief that the world is a rational place, and we can observe the past, model the present and project that into a future,” Dr Rubens explained. 

“Of course, there’ll be changes, but nevertheless, there’s a continuity; there’s a golden thread. What was, creates what is, creates what will be. That allows us to engage with it in a rational way. But, if we use the word ‘unprecedented’, we’re breaking that causal chain. Fundamentally, it’s saying, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on; it makes no sense to me; I can’t model it.’”

A possible paradigm shift

According to Dr Rubens, a key question is whether these seemingly seismic events constitute “natural” evolutionary changes; “revolutionary changes, in which the structures we built are being knocked down and rebuilt in new ways” – or whether they are mutational. He noted that many of the problems the world is grappling with are changes to the planet itself. If this represents a mutation in our operating environment, he said, then it constitutes a paradigm shift.

“One of the signs of a paradigm shift is that you can’t use the language of the previous paradigm to describe the new paradigm,” he explained. “You can’t use the language of a typewriter to describe the internet; it doesn’t work. If you understood how a car engine worked in 1930, you basically understood how a car engine worked in 1990 – there had been changes, but fundamentally, as an engine, it’s the same.

Read more: Leadership lessons from the frontline in crisis management

“If you open up a car engine in 2024, it’s computer chips,” he added. “You can’t turn up with the skills and capabilities and toolbox of 1990 and expect to fix computer chips.”

While Dr Rubens said it’s not yet clear if we are in the midst of a paradigm change, “what is clear is that whatever we thought about crisis management in 2008 and 2018 is not enough to help us in 2025 or 2030”.

As such, a significant challenge will be “just to find a language to describe the complexity and interdependencies and cascading consequences of the risk environment we’re operating in”, he said, noting that policymakers and other stakeholders “often seem to be using a linear language to try to describe a complex world. I think that’s genuinely one of the challenges we face as a community – to find a conceptualisation or taxonomy that fits over the reality of the chaotic world we’re living in.”

Not only are risk categories evolving, but their intersection increasingly creates complexity and a sense of being overwhelmed, Dr Rubens noted. First, the individual events are overwhelming – that’s inherent in crises. He pointed to recent strings of 40-degree heatwaves in Europe as an illustration, noting that countries’ communications and infrastructure systems were not built for such sustained heat.

“These are not outlier, random or once-in-100-year events; this is the reality of the world we’re looking at,” he said. “The events themselves are overwhelming, unprecedented, chaotic and challenging, and so are the cascading consequences they create. Global warming increases pressure on migration, food security and water resourcing.”

Read more: From battlefield to boardroom: lessons in military crisis leadership

There are at least three perspectives or pillars through which to engage with these realities, and assess our ability to adapt, beginning with the complexity of the world we live in and the unprecedentedness of our accumulating challenges. The third pillar is non-recoverability.

“Traditionally, we still think that if something fails, somebody somewhere will know what to do; they’ll fix it, and in 12 hours, it will be okay,” Dr Rubens said. “But what we’re seeing more and more now is situations that are not recoverable. You have to deal with a new reality, which can often be frightening, chaotic, disruptive and destructive in ways we haven’t encountered yet.”

Reconceptualising resilience

If this is a new paradigm, it could be one in which major cities begin to disappear due to changing climate pressures. Already, cities in the ‘Global South’ are experiencing dire effects from climate change. Dr Rubens was speaking from Jakarta, and he alluded to Indonesia’s project of replacing the sinking capital with a new, purpose-built city.

However, he added: “When we as the global community talk about cities, those aren’t the cities we think about. We think about London and New York and Milan and Melbourne; there’s an in-built bias there.”

Dr Rubens noted that he spent two and a half years living in Lagos, which he called a “chaotic city” that people think is dysfunctional. “It’s not; it’s just functional in a very different way,” he said. “But Lagos is probably more resilient than London because it’s self-managing and self-functioning. We have an expectation in the so-called developed world that the government knows what it’s doing and will run things. In Lagos, you have absolutely no belief that the government’s going to do anything about it.”

Dr Rubens argued that this decentralisation may be advantageous for cities in the changing world – particularly as things fall apart. He pointed to the possibility of a “black sky event” – when a country faces total national infrastructure failure and has to get its entire system back online. “If there was a black sky event in London and one in Lagos, Lagos would manage that much better than London would, because Lagos is used to chaos,” he said. “In London, we’re not used to chaos. I think we have to rethink our whole understanding of what global resilience is.”

Subscribe to BusinessThink for the latest research, analysis and insights from UNSW Business School

He cited an observation by Sheela Patel, from the Indian non-governmental organisation the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, a partner of ISRM who works with marginalised communities around the world. She says that for many city planners, the “city” is “this smart area in the middle with railways and bridges and beautiful buildings”, according to Dr Rubens. “You pretend that the slums and the favelas are not really part of the city,” he explained. 

“Actually, the slums and the favelas are the city, and the bridges and the fancy buildings, that’s just the façade you put over it; those are fragile and brittle. I think we’re reconceptualising the ‘developing South’. If we look at the cities of the developing South, which is, of course, where the major growth will be over the next 10, 20, 30 years, I think we’re seeing a different understanding of what a city is.”