Episode 355: Leading under Pressure in a More Volatile and Compounded Crisis Environment with Jon-Paul Gabriele

Business leaders are operating in a harsher, more expensive, and more politically volatile environment, where geopolitics is now showing up directly in fuel costs, inflation, supply chains, capital markets, alliance structures, and executive decision-making. I’m Dominic Bowen, host of The International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the issues shaping business, leadership, and global risk.

Today, the operating environment for business is clear. The Iran conflict is pushing up oil and gas prices. The Strait of Hormuz is back at the centre of global trade risk. Eurozone inflation is reacting to energy costs. Questions are being raised about NATO cohesion and US alliance commitments. And the shockwaves are spreading well beyond energy into shipping, semiconductors, sovereign debt, industrial inputs, and broader business confidence.

Our guest today is Jon-Paul Gabriele. He is the founder of Crisis City and brings more than 15 years of crisis management experience. Today, we are discussing the gap between having a crisis management plan and actually leading under pressure.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

The International Risk Podcast is sponsored by Conducttr, a realistic crisis exercise platform. Conducttr offers crisis exercising software for corporates, consultants, humanitarian, and defence & security clients. Visit Conducttr to learn more.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. 

Transcript

Polycrisis is another thing. It could be where there’s always something going on. You may have a crisis in your business and then that just adds to it and it’s multiple crises at the same time.

Everyone’s getting a bit exhausted with what’s going on really in the world at the minute. It feels like we’re just in this constant state of crisis. Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.

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Please hit the subscribe or follow button now and let’s jump in to today’s episode. Business leaders are operating in a harsher, more expensive and more politically volatile environment. And we’re seeing geopolitics showing up directly in fuel cots, in inflation, supply chains, capital markets, alliance structures, and unquestionably, in executive decision-making.

I’m Dominic Bowen, host of the International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the issues that are shaping business, leadership and global risk. Today, the operating environment for business is clear. The Iran conflict is pushing up oil and gas prices.

The Strait of Hormuz is back at the centre of global trade risk. The Eurozone inflation is reacting to energy costs. Questions are being raised about NATO cohesion and US alignment commitments.

And the shockwaves are spreading well beyond energy into shipping, semiconductors, sovereign debt, industrial inputs, and of course, broader business confidence. And our guest today is Jon-Paul Gabriel. He’s the founder of Crisis City and he brings more than 15 years of crisis management experience.

And today, we’re discussing the gap between having a crisis management plan and actually leading under pressure. Jon-Paul, welcome to the International Risk Podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Dominic.

Where in the world do we find you today? I’m in Newcastle in northeast of England. Well, good to hear. Jon-Paul, business leaders are dealing with an operating environment that’s getting more volatile.

It’s getting more political and much more expensive by the week. And the headlines are not just about the war in Iran. They’re about oil shocks, inflation pressure, supply chain choke points, alliance strain, market volatility, and of course, the growing reality that geopolitical instability lands directly on the table of our C-suite executives.

I’d love to hear from you about what are the biggest weaknesses that you’re seeing when it comes to corporate crisis preparedness today? Yeah, it’s a fantastic point. And I think the main weakness that I see, it’s in the supply chain. So a lot of companies will prepare for crises that are almost in their initial span of control.

So what kind of things that would keep them up at night that will affect their business directly? What they don’t tend to look at, or they’re starting to now, but it’s wider than that. The third party suppliers and deeper than that, the fourth party suppliers, because a lot of business now is outsourced. And if a company that you outsource to has a crisis themselves or is impacted by the geopolitical events that are going on more directly, then that impact comes back to you as a company and you then have to absorb the impact and still deal with it.

And I think that’s what business leaders need to understand a bit more is just because you transfer outsourcing to another company doesn’t mean the risk goes away. You still have the impact. That’s something that they need to look forward to.

Yeah, I think that’s a great point, JP. And we’re seeing a similar signal flashing across all markets. We’re seeing hormones risk.

We’re seeing higher fuel prices. We’re seeing inflationary pressures and this political escalation that’s feeding directly into the business environment. And sometimes when a crisis starts outside of a company, it takes a while for companies to realise that it’s actually hit them.

It’s hit their costs, their supply chains, their confidence. And what I certainly see when working across large European companies is the difference between firms that respond strategically from the start, as opposed to those that simply wait and then panic and react. What do you see as the difference between those two groups of companies in the groups that you work with? There’s a company that I work with at the minute and in the oil and gas space and logistics space.

And they’re constantly planning forward and have forward planning what could potentially be happening, not just looking at what is happening now that is affecting us. And I think that helps having a more heightened preparedness level. And it really is needed because it gets you out of that reactive state, more into the proactive state.

So you’re better prepared to be more manoeuvrable and say, okay, well, if this goes wrong, we have a plan B already in place, not thinking now this has gone wrong and then trying to figure out what are we going to do about it. So the better companies that I’ve worked with are more about that forward planning, horizon scanning, what’s coming in the next few months, what’s potentially bubbling up in the environment that could affect us rather than that kind of short term narrow view is as soon as it hits the news, now what are we going to do? And one of the things that I also see in many boardrooms and in many executive teams is business leaders treating geopolitical shocks as something that’s interesting or something that’s more of a background noise, as opposed to something that’s going to hit their earnings, affect their logistics or impact their customer demand. So what point do you think CEOs and business leaders need to stop viewing the news just like something that’s external and interesting and start treating as something that’s actually internal to their business and their ability to make profits and to ensure business continuity? I think it should be constant now.

I think that should be a focal point is what is going on across the world, because regardless of what happens, it’s going to have an impact on your business now, because these geopolitical points, as we say with the with the Hormuz thing, it’s having such an impact not just on fuel prices and availability, but you think of the knock on effect of transportation issues, logistics, supply of goods, all of that will come to a business regardless of whatever industry that they’re in. So I think it needs to be front and centre of the mind constantly on a running basis now. And there’s things that you can do like micro simulations.

So we tend to look at crisis management exercises as everybody gets in the room once in a year, you got your C-suites, you sit down for a couple of hours and they go through an exercise. They’re fantastic. But what you could also do is 15 minutes in one of your executive meetings or as like on the cuff regular basis is this is going on, how would we deal with this if this directly impacts our company.

And it doesn’t have to be a big scenario, it doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles. It’s just like this is what’s happening. Where’s our risk posture? How would it impact us? What would we do about it? And that short micro simulation, if that becomes more of a regular party, they’re much more prepared for whatever happens.

And it is best to look at the news because poly crisis is another thing. It could be where there’s always something going on, you may have a crisis in your business, and then that just adds to it. And it’s multiple crises at the same time.

Everyone’s getting a bit exhausted with what’s going on really in the in the world at the minute, it feels like we’re just in this constant state of crisis. So it becomes very difficult, you get almost complacent, I think, well, we managed through we’ve not been majorly impacted, things go away, and they come and we can manage. That’s a difficult mindset, from my opinion to be and you need to think, okay, what’s the worst case scenario and continue to plan and be able to respond to it.

Yeah, and that’s a great point about the micro scenarios. I think I’m also a big advocate of more regular, smaller training, as opposed to a once a year exercise. I mean, there’s not many things that you can do once a year and actually be competent in that skill, whereas doing it more regularly and shorter bursts is more manageable for executives and business leaders, but also going to lead to a better pedagogical outcome.

And you talked about the doubts and I think shipping companies are already showing doubt about whether there’ll be a full return to transport through the Strait of Hormuz, even if the conflict cools and even if Trump and Netanyahu stop the conflict in Iran, whether the shipping through that Strait is actually going to ever continue to the levels that it was beforehand. And I think this matters because the first order shock is only part of the story. What we usually see is their second and third order effects.

And in this case, that would be prolonged caution, rerouting of supply chains, delays, and ongoing higher costs for a longer period. Using that as an example, JP, how should business leaders be preparing for crisis when the real damage often comes from persistent uncertainty rather than just one big dramatic event? Having multiple streams, so not having single points of failure, not relying on one source of a supplier or one kind of way to get your business, your suppliers, and always having those backups in place, even if they’re not formal arrangements per se, making sure that you understand, okay, if we lose one of our key assets or our keys, revenue streams or ability to bring in revenue that we know where else to go for, so it doesn’t cause a disruption that lasts into the months into the years. Because if we take your example there with the homes, if that’s not going to be the route that is taken for the future, and we have to come up with alternatives, that’s sometimes is a good thing as well.

So there’s always opportunity in a crisis as well. It doesn’t always have to be that negative part. What you might see is a more diversification of routes and different ways of working, which you have short-term pain for longer term benefits.

And again, businesses should look at that of like, where do we funnel all of our resources and all of our income streams, very concentrated or diversified a bit more. So if one thread breaks, we’re not completely cut off. Yeah, I think that’s a really, really solid point.

It was quite interesting from a work point of view, quite sad from a citizen of the world point of view. But you know, I spent about five or six days working with clients that were impacted by significant cartel violence in Mexico. And literally, Friday afternoon, I was like, took a breath.

And then, you know, Saturday morning, we see that Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran. And really, from that, it was just went straight through, you know, my list of clients and went, okay, which clients are going to be most affected. And before I’d even gone through that list and worked out my priorities, you know, I started getting calls from clients starting asking, what’s the impact? What should I start considering? And I think it’s really valuable to try and get ahead of that.

Because, you know, we’re seeing now five weeks into this crisis at the time of recording this episode. Bent crude is rising sharply, fuel costs are climbing across the world, inflation pressure is building again, much to the pain of many people. And for companies, that means margin compression, that means procurement volatility and pressures from both customers and from shareholders.

So in your experience, JP, you know, what are the first three executive decisions that leaders need to make when a macro crisis starts to show signs that it could impact their operations? Who needs to be involved is a big one. So you might have a crisis team, you might have a wider team that you might bring in specialist resources, specialist expertise on what the issue is, because you can’t plan for everything. So you might need it.

Okay, well, we’ve got our core team, then we can bring in piecemeal depending on what’s happened. So who to get involved is the big one. The next thing is what’s your posture and who you’re going to speak to what you’re going to tell them really important.

And then the third one is like, what is the priority? What are we trying to achieve from our response? And a lot of teams don’t really pick that out when they start a crisis, they kind of just go full tilt straight into it and get into right, we’ve got to solve the problem. When you start a crisis response, sometimes it’s very valuable just to sit back and think, what are we trying to get out of this response? What does a good outcome look like? And then have that pinned up in the room or as your kind of guiding mentality that you always need to reflect back to are, are we still aligned to what we said at the start? And it’s alright to pivot if things go along, but you’ve got to have that kind of north star that is so important because it guides everything else that you do in your response. I think that’s critical.

I often talk about a 15 minute framing and within the first 15 minutes, the crisis management team must have framed what the crisis is and what their objective is. And part of that is to make sure that they’re prioritising, because as you know, there will be competing priorities. There’ll be times when they have to decide between staff, profitability, compliance with regulations, external reporting.

They’re going to have to give something up in order to achieve something. That’s almost what a crisis is by definition. But having that priority is going to be critical, but also the crisis management teams need to be reporting to whoever their boss is to confirm this is what you have mandated us to do and this is what we’re focussing on.

So I think that objective setting is really critical and it feeds into this whole confidence. Confidence from the board that management has the confidence and ability to manage the crisis, but it’ll also bring confidence to the crisis management team. And I think when we’re seeing the headlines every day about this combined war risk, not just in the Middle East, but in North Africa, in Europe, we see treasury selling, we see inflation pressures that we’ve mentioned a few times.

We’re seeing strains in long-term alliances like NATO. It’s not surprising when you see board members and investors starting to ask companies about, is their management really in control of their profit and loss lines? So how can leaders communicate in a way that’s calm and credible without pretending to have certainty when certainty is very difficult in a poly crisis or a permacrisis? It’s very difficult. I think you’ve got to set that precedent when things are normal, for want of a better word, because if you try and build your reputation and build your trust in the crisis, you’re not going to, simply.

So you need to build that trust and that authoritative stance with internal stakeholders, but also external stakeholders as well. In day-to-day operations, we communicate effectively, we communicate authoritatively, and we just make sure that we are under control in the best of times. And then when the worst of times hits, people are a bit more believable that you have things under control.

So things like social media presence, I mean, it’s huge now. A crisis can unfold on social media before your company even gets notified, which is so difficult now, because in the past, you had a bit more time to try and figure things out. So you don’t really have that time very much anymore.

And people’s patience, there’s no patience anymore. So people expect to know probably more than they actually deserve to know in a crisis. They expect that you will tell them everything.

So having that outline of always being on social media and engaging with customers, however you want to do that, then they know where to go for the source of truth. So some companies might not have a large social media presence or might not use it to communicate very often. And then when a crisis comes, it’s like, okay, well, you just give me lip service, potentially that that’s what it can come across as.

If you do it consistently and interact, then when the time comes and you have to communicate, they know, okay, I’m used to them, I’m used to what they say, I know the tone of voice is consistent, much more believable, much more authentic. Yeah, it really is. I think that’s a great advice.

And over the last couple of months, I’ve been speaking almost weekly to major firms across Europe about something much deeper than the immediate conflict in Iran and the conflict in Ukraine. And that’s this weakening of old assumptions around alliances, around security guarantees, around global stability and compliance with the rule of law. And for multinational businesses, that raises some really hard strategic questions.

So I’d love to hear JP, are you seeing some of your clients starting to adapt their crisis planning to a world where political reliability and forecasting is so much less reliable? Yes, absolutely. There’s been a couple of customers that I’ve worked with in the past, in particular, where they’ve had global footprints. And instead of having a crisis management approach, as a company, they would have that global view, but they had to, because of the political instability in some of the countries that they operated in, or the differences in culture, they had to have crisis management teams for each of their locations that were responsible to respond in that particular location, had the authority to do it on behalf of the company.

And it was so important and it worked so well because they know the cultural differences in that area. They know the legal regulations more in depth. They understand the political landscapes and they can adapt more appropriately.

Because if you try and do it at the top level, more centrally, it is very difficult to understand and have a view of all of that, what’s going on in all those different regions when you don’t have the boots on the ground. So having a crisis management team per location, if you have a global footprint like that, it’s so important and that they have that authority. So it’s almost like the gold, silver, bronze approach that you see quite a lot in the military and the emergency services.

Adapting that view in a business is just as effective. And that kind of gold level is your corporate level crisis. Your silver level is your regionals.

Your bronze is like your business continuity type, localised sponsor teams. So I would very much do that. And that will deal with global instabilities because you’ve got more of a localised response capability, much quicker, much more dynamic and then it feeds upwards.

And JP, I’ll take a moment just to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcast, please go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast. And if you like our content, please remember to subscribe and like it. That’s really important for our continued success.

Now, JP, one thing that really stands out in the headlines is how quickly the effects spreading across sectors. And it’s not just oil and shipping, although that’s what we’ve talked about so far. But we’re now talking about EV demands.

We’re talking about coal substitution. We’re talking about helium shortages affecting chipmakers and energy stress testing across major technological investments. So what does this tell us about the needs for executives to start preparing for compounding crisis rather than neat, isolated events? Yeah, it goes back to what I said about the exercise.

And it is so key. I think in the past, we’d run crisis simulations that were one scenario, exactly what you just said, a building fire, for example. It’s so complex now, the business environments where you just take the chips, for example, chip manufacturing, that pauses.

The knock-on effect across multiple organisations, multiple regions is unbelievable when you try and think about it. One chip can have such a lasting and magnificent effect. So you need to run simulations that aren’t just one scenario anymore.

It might start as one issue, but then it grows legs and it goes into a different direction, and it might ebb and flow. And that’s what we do with Crisis City. We generate exercises that take you on a path, and it might branch at some point, or it might ebb and flow as realistic as possible, because it’s not just linear.

You don’t just say, well, I’ve got to go from decision A to decision B to decision C, and then the crisis is finished. Because the mere definition of a crisis is it’s beyond your normal ability of response. If you could just manage it and it was an easy from start to finish, it wouldn’t be a crisis.

So the really need to look at executive level is to run these simulations where it’s like, well, what if we had a cyber attack that then was compounded by a supply chain failure? What if it was one of our third parties that had the supply attack, but it impacted our business and took our information? At the same time, we then had something with one of our warehouses. Are they all connected? Is it isolated? If they were connected, it’s a much bigger issue. If they were isolated, we’ve got two crises or potentially three crises that we’ve got to manage at the same time.

So is it the same team that use it? Do we split teams? So there’s all these conversations. I’ve just listed a few here that if you run an exercise, you’ve got about three or four hour exercise before you’ve actually made major key decisions. So put that into reality and try and think if you’ve never done these exercises, if you’ve never thought through these processes, that’s where companies start to falter and fail because the magnitude of a crisis isn’t quite understood until you’ve actually been in one and felt what it’s like in those rooms.

And it’s not nice. And when you talk about where they start to fail, I know a lot of leadership teams still think that crisis management is just about messaging. But your work and some of your writing points to something much broader about readiness, about business continuity, about judgement, and about how we behave when we’re under pressure.

So when a crisis occurs, where do you most often see the real failures come out? Is it weak decisions? Is it poor structures? Bad communication? Is it leaders just simply not understanding the business implications quickly enough? Probably a combination of all four. But what I would say is where an initial failing is actually getting together as a crisis team. That’s the first failures tend to happen.

And it’s just that process of, well, who activates a crisis? Who gets the team together? And what does that initial 15 minutes to an hour call look like? So simple things like call trees, responsibilities for who activates that and who to call. Do you have everybody’s phone numbers in your phone? Are you relying on it? Is it just on teams? Well, what if you don’t have access to your environment? And then what like an agenda? So what is it the talking points? And we mentioned before about setting the scene, setting your standard operating work, assessing all of that at the start, because if you don’t, you’re going to fail straight away. But there’s also then, like you said, communication.

These are senior decision makers, and they’re there for a reason. But sometimes because they’re not in its day to day, they might not understand the business implications on the ground. So being able to have that touch point between the business and the leaders who have to make those difficult decisions, that needs to be clear and tested.

So how do you get that information? Who do you go to? Being realistic about how quickly you can get that information as well is something that people fail. They think that information will just happen in seconds. You could be looking at hours.

So then in the meantime, what are you doing? And how are you making those decisions without that information? And then I would say going further than that is just having control because in a crisis, it’s so easy to get into like a blinkered view. And right, we need to solve this crisis. And you get tunnel vision, and you just want to solve absolutely everything at the same time.

So being able to prioritise what’s actually mission critical for us to solve, what can wait, what can we pass to another team to go and do? How often are we going to feedback as a team? And if they don’t do that, you then end up saying, well, we’ve got this massive issue. And I liken it to when I’ve got previous experience, kind of want to tidy a room or renovate a room and you get everything in the middle of the room. And then you think, I’ve just got so much to look at now, I don’t know where to start.

It’s kind of like that, where you have bring all of the problems to the table. And then you get so overwhelmed that there’s so much to do, you end up getting decision paralysis, and you just then end up sitting in this room with a mess. So being able to prioritise, and that only comes with training and experience and exposure through these exercises.

So they’re the ones that I see where the failures happen in those different areas. Definitely couldn’t agree more. A client I was supporting recently actually ended up in a similar slot.

And when outlining all the things that we needed to do to resolve this crisis, it led to management paralysis. Instead of actually like, okay, we’ve all got our roles and responsibilities, just like, oh my gosh, this is too much, led to paralysis, which was a real shame. But we had to work through that and come up with solutions.

But I also think one of the biggest dangers, especially in a volatile market is false confidence. And many companies are telling themselves that because they’ve got a plan, they’re prepared, or because there’s a risk register, they know what their risks are, or because they run an annual exercise, they think they’ve got everything under control. But crisis preparedness is a little bit like insurance in so much as if it’s doing its job and everything’s okay, then you never see the benefits of it.

Tell me about the conversations and how you speak with companies. I suppose, especially companies that are quite risk immature, that are early in their journey about identifying what they need to do and why they should be investing in crisis preparedness. I think it would go to the examples.

You’ve got so many real world examples of what’s going on. That’s where I would start. So, okay, you may not have a risk register.

You may feel like you don’t need one, but look what’s happened in the world. How would you act if that happened or impacted you as a business? And that flicks a switch in a lot of companies’ minds and think, okay, I see where you’re coming from. And then you just handhold them through it a little bit more.

So, okay. Identify your risks. What’s the key things that will keep you up at night? And what’s like, how do you mitigate those risks? And then again, go back to the exercises, make your mistakes, exposes them, it gets that appetite growing a bit more, and then you can start to plan a bit further because it is that kind of overconfidence that you mentioned.

A lot of companies, and I know we’re going back away now, but it’s still freshing a lot of people’s mind with COVID. A lot of companies said, well, we managed to COVID and we were fine. Or we managed to figure it out and nobody knew what they were doing and everybody figured it out and managed to carry on in the majority of cases.

So therefore we don’t need to plan. We’ll just do the same. They always say, we’ll figure it out.

We’ll figure it out. And I just say to them all the time is I wouldn’t want to be sat in that room during a crisis, trying to figure it out at the time. So then goes back to having these training sessions and the exercises that ramp up that pressure enough for them to feel it as close to a real crisis as it is.

Because until it’s a horrible feeling when you’re in the middle of a crisis and decisions can affect people’s livelihoods or the business actually being able to run. So having an exercise that simulates that as far as possible opens people’s eyes. And I’ve had it with customers before where they just were not interested in the slightest about doing anything crisis management.

We would just go send everybody home. We’ll manage it. It’s not an issue.

Put them through a really in-depth exercise that really ramped up the pressure. We had phone calls coming in, everybody’s mobiles were going off, carnage. And then they realised afterwards in the debrief that we did, okay, we need to do this more often because we didn’t have a clue what we were doing.

But being able to turn that screw in the exercise was what flipped that switch for them. So for people on the start of the journey are just, that has to happen. You need to expose yourself.

You need to expose your team. And more importantly for that is make them understand that they can make mistakes. They’re not being targeted as individuals, because if you make mistakes in your exercises, all comes out in the debrief.

Far better to then finger pointing in an actual crisis where people’s names are then attached and say, well, why didn’t you do anything? So to get people out of that mindset of, well, I can’t make a mistake. We need it to be easier. We don’t want to look foolish.

You got to leave your ego at the door, especially in the crisis, because there’s no ego at all in a real crisis. And so JP, if you’re advising a CEO this week with the headlines that we see this week, looking at the front pages, what would you tell a CEO that they really need to do in the next one to two weeks, not the next year, but the next one to two weeks? I mean, should they be focussing on their supply chain exposure, the energy and cost assumptions, the communications planning, decision rights, stakeholder messaging, scenario planning, further escalation? I mean, there’s so many things that are taking the attention of our executive teams. What would you be telling them to focus on now? Where to start is probably a good one.

I would tell them to focus really on the supply chain, because I think that is just the biggest one. Find out where your weaknesses are in your supply chain. Map your supply chain, first of all, and find out where the weaknesses are.

And do some training as far as media training. And if you haven’t, go and do something like that. Because especially for that executive or the CEO level, they’re the ones that are going to be put in front of the microphone or in front of the cameras.

If you’re not trained on that, that’s an awful place to be in to try and explain. So go through that training if you haven’t. If you’re in that kind of position, I would say everybody needs to go through and do that kind of training.

They’re the two things I would say. You could get completely overwhelmed with this constant news articles of, well, this is going wrong, this is happening. So be aware of it and be mindful of it.

But look at your supply chain, make sure that you’re media trained and you’re ready for whatever happens. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. We saw the CEO of one of Canada’s largest airlines lose his job just recently.

He gave a statement, which on paper was appropriate after the deaths of two of their employees. But being a Canadian airline, their official languages are English and French, and he only communicated in English, and that cost him his job. And you just think, what was the comms team doing? What were their external communications advisors and their PR firms advising them? They didn’t realise that, hold on, an airline that’s got its headquarters in Quebec, a French-speaking part of Canada, only giving a statement about the death of two employees in English.

I mean, it’s an easy oversight, but you’d think that that should have been picked up. So I think you’re right. Media training, comms training, good relationships with PR firms and crisis management firms really is critical.

And when you look around the world, JP, there’s a lot going on. What are the international risks that concern you the most? I think, obviously, just the global conflict, if you look at what’s going on, and I think a lot of scare tactics, I say scare tactics, but a lot of threats are from this global war breaking out and the missiles. What concerns me more is the cyber threat, because it’s easier to have an attack that impacts multiple regions from a cyber perspective than it is with the global conflict and the missiles.

If you take down a national grid, you take down energy infrastructure, the far reaching implications of that. So that’s where my concern more is, is how resilient is our infrastructure to be able to withstand that kind of impact and being prepared, not just from your business perspective, but personal perspective as well. Do you have things at home that you can communicate with your family? That is a concern that I think more people need to perhaps be aware of.

It’s very difficult to do that without looking like you’re just being scaremongering and say, oh, you’re just jumping on the bandwagon, and it’s just conspiracy theories. It’s very difficult to help people to plan for that when people, like I said before, they’re fatigued, we’re constantly exposed to negativity and things that are going on all the time, you become you just don’t want to you don’t want to see it. And there’s people that I spoke with recently where I don’t watch the news anymore, because it just depresses me and it scares me.

So I just avoid it. And I can see why. But then you’ve also got to be prepared for your own personal safety, but from a business perspective as well.

That energy grid is a key one for me. I looked at the solar storm as a as a crisis exercise once where solar flare goes off, and it’s a Carrington event, where it’s like one in every hundreds, hundreds of years. But if that happens, and it just takes down the energy grid, just from a solar flare, the impact of that you mean, you’re talking about healthcare issues, water sanitation, right? Because there’s no law and order because the electricity grid doesn’t work anymore.

And that can snowball really quickly. And it only takes a cyber attack to do the same thing. So I think we need to be more aware of that.

Yeah, thanks very much for raising that, JP. I appreciate that. And thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast.

Pleasure. Thank you for having me. Well, that was a great conversation with Jon-Paul Gabriel.

He’s the founder of Crisis City. And I really appreciate his insights on crisis management and how corporate actors can be better preparing for the next and even the current crisis that’s going on. I’m Dominic Bowen.

Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days. Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast.

For more episodes and articles, visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host Dominic Bowen. See you next time.