A Crisis Ready World Is All Of Our Responsibility — Let’s Discuss The Individual Steps Towards Achieving This.

I sit on the Global Advisory Board of the Institute for Strategic Risk Management (ISRM)—which is an amazing organization that I’m extremely proud and honored to be a part of—and I’m in Geneva this week to attend and partake in a symposium they’ve put together for the advisory council and other global leaders working together to look at multi-dimensional globally rising risk with the aim of responding to them now, before they continue to scale and culminate over the coming years.

That being said, I’ve taken the following from their Crisis 2030 Manifesto and wanted to bring it here for discussion: “Climate change, increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, hyper-urbanization, infrastructural fragility, IT/cyber dependency, the likelihood of a global pandemic, the increasing development of artificial intelligence and the social pressures that all of the above bring…”

There’s a lot here. A lot of risk and a massive amount of impact in each of these individual areas, let alone how they all play together to increase the exposures to our planet and global society.

And here’s the thing: like it or not, every professional and organization plays an important part in all of this. Including you and yours.

We all have a responsibility to be environmentally conscious and proactive.

Where it applies, we have a responsibility to anticipate the impacts of natural disasters and strengthen and protect our infrastructures.

We have a responsibility to understand the scopes and impacts of our technological infrastructures and IT security… and the lists go on and on and on.

All of this plays into the importance of each organization understanding its risks, impacts on the greater whole, and working to become Crisis Ready to equally protect itself and the whole.

Stakeholders are demanding more and, quite frankly, we all deserve more.

Right now, we still live in a primarily shareholder primacy world. While this is shifting towards a stakeholder model (finally and excitedly!), we each need to do our part to continue to progress this forward, looking at long-term impact on all aspects of business, society and globalization, rather than short-term monetary rewards. And it all starts with each of us individually recognizing the power and responsibility that we uniquely have within our roles to impact the greater whole by taking steps in the right direction every single day.

It’s a massive undertaking that can feel overwhelming when we look only at the whole, rather than the individual yet monumental steps we can take to get there–and it’s the sum of these individual, proactive steps that will in fact take us there.

So, with all of this being said, I want to hear from you. How do you see this? How do you approach it? What steps have proven rewarding within your organization that you can share to help, inspire, and motivate others to be mindful and proactive towards creating a Crisis Ready world?

This article was originally published to melissaagnes.com.