Building resilience through co-operation: the sector-wide playbook

Geopolitics and political uncertainty were ranked by global CEOs as the greatest risk to the growth of their business in 2024, according to a recent survey by KPMG. CEOs shared concerns around the impacts of navigating regional geopolitical conflicts, disrupted supply chains and price fluctuations. Global and regional geopolitical dynamics are constantly evolving, and new macro risks and trends continue to emerge. Great power competition, climate change, economic volatility and rapid technological advances all carry risks and opportunities for organisations, sectors and countries. KPMG has developed a sector level crisis response Playbook that is helping whole industries to prepare for the shocks and crises to come.

Since Covid-19, executives and directors have become increasingly open to recognising, and factoring into their planning, these external macro threats; however, as we learnt from the pandemic, such events are very hard to control for.? It’s possible to create response plans and build internal resilience at an individual organisation level, but large, sector-wide impacts will remain outside any one organisation's control.

That’s why sector-wide resilience has become such an important goal. Imagine how much more effectively your whole sector could have managed the unprecedented events of 2020 if it had already established plans to guide collaborative responses to macro shocks and crises. These plans help the organisations that make up a sector align their interests to negotiate temporary changes with regulators, secure funding support and adjust delivery approaches to customers in a way that reduces the long-term impact of the external shocks. More and more organisations are now seizing the opportunity to get ahead of the game by uniting with others in their sector to create just this kind of?sector-wide geopolitical and macro crisis Playbook.

The Playbook fits above the control environment of each organisation to identify interventions that can only be conducted at a sector level. These interventions mitigate the shared impacts of a large-scale crisis. ?It identifies temporary arrangements for either a relatively short period of response or a more protracted disruption. Every organisation needs to act independently to respond to a crisis; however, there are many things that are done better as a collective. The Playbook identifies shared vulnerabilities and resources and agrees ways of working together in advance of the crisis to speed up the response. This will help sustain long term viability and reduce the risk of organisational failure.

KPMG has developed a process for identifying and assessing sector-level macro risks, and preparing crisis response plans to address them. To explore how your sector can supercharge its crisis readiness, reach out to us.

Sector resilience contacts

Katherine (Kate) Shaw Partner, KPMG Risk Strategy and Technology

Philip Barfield Partner, Transformation Program Management

Jon Berry Associate Director, KPMG Australia Geopolitics Hub