The most expensive words in crisis management.

“Ha! That just wouldn’t happen here!” One of our 2025 sim scenarios saw a contractor assault a government employee. Someone in the training room scoffed at the idea and decried its likelihood,, and then blushed when we told him it had happened in a comparable organisation, in routine circumstance in Sydney only months earlier.

By the time a crisis is claimed as unlikely or unprecedented, there’s usually been a comparable somewhere!

If we’re honest, unprecedented sometimes betrays limited horizon scanning - or a failure of ‘worst case scenario’ imagination.

Look at the sequence across Australia’s arts sector: the furore that hit Bendigo Writers Festival didn’t emerge in isolation, and the issues surrounding Adelaide Writers' Week had clear precedents across comparable organisations. The signals were visible, recent, and relevant - so, not unprecedented.

Such failures were not mere bad luck. You see; risk registers quietly degrade due to what they exclude.

And the data is blunt:

76% of corporate crises are considered avoidable (per Forbes and my own research in ‘Public Relations Disasters’)

Only 49% of U.S. companies had a formal crisis plan as of 2023!

For boards and risk leaders, the real question isn’t “what could go wrong?”

It is which scenario are we currently ignoring that have already happened somewhere else?

Though the next crisis may feel unprecedented on the inside, it’ll look plausible from outside!