The Anti-Crisis
The polycrisis isn’t going away. Here’s what to build instead.
A senior leader at a global organization told me last week that her company required every senior leader to submit a 2026 roadmap. In December. While the organization was actively trying to figure out where it was going.
Nobody questioned it. They just did it. Because that’s what you do.
That’s the problem.
The Old Playbook
We are in a moment where the old planning playbook is actively working against us. Not because planning is bad, but because the version most organizations default to — the long-horizon, multi-scenario, beautifully formatted strategic plan — assumes a stability that doesn’t exist right now. It consumes enormous energy. It creates false confidence. And it leaves teams less prepared for what actually happens, not more.
There’s a word for what we’re actually living through. Farrah Bostic used it on a recent episode of The Breadwinners and it’s truly the word of the moment: polycrisis. Not one disruption at a time. Multiple crises, compounding, hitting simultaneously. The kind of environment where by the time you’ve responded to one thing, three more have shifted.
Farrah works at the intersection of strategy and organizational behavior, and she named something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: we keep handing people reports full of options and long-term projections when what they actually need is the agility to move fast with the information they have right now.
The antidote isn’t less planning. It’s different planning. Contingency thinking instead of destination thinking. What do we do if this happens? What do we do if it doesn’t? How quickly can we shift?
Name It
That’s what I call the Anti-Crisis. Not a crisis plan. Not a resilience initiative. A way of operating that means your team doesn’t need a disaster to find out what it’s actually made of.
It starts with one thing most organizations skip entirely: an honest read of where the team actually is.
Not where leadership hopes it is. Not where it was six months ago. Where it is right now, under current conditions, carrying current pressure.
That means naming what’s working. It also means naming what isn’t, clearly, without hedging. Farrah was direct about this: the organizations that navigate uncertainty well are the ones willing to look at reality as it is rather than as they planned for it to be. That sounds obvious. It is remarkably rare.
When teams don’t do this, they don’t stop planning. They just plan around the problems they won’t name. And that’s how you end up building a 2026 roadmap in December while your people are quietly wondering if the whole direction is wrong and nobody is saying so out loud.
What to Build
The Anti-Crisis isn’t a single intervention. It’s a condition you build before you need it.
It means your team has shared language for where it’s strong and where it’s vulnerable. It means your leaders are steady enough to make good decisions when information is incomplete. It means you’re planning for contingencies instead of destinations, so when something shifts, you’re not starting over. You’re adjusting.
The polycrisis isn’t going away. But teams that have done this work don’t just survive it. They find the opportunity inside it.
If you don’t know whether your team has that capacity right now, that’s worth paying attention to.
The Team Compass is where I’d start. It’s a diagnostic built to show you exactly where your team is functioning and where it’s carrying pressure it hasn’t named yet. Not a personality test. A navigation tool, for exactly this kind of moment. And when done together in real time, you don't have to wait more than a couple hours for results.
Learn more here.