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Key Takeaways The environment leaders are operating in has changed so dramatically that familiar crisis instincts are creating new risks instead of protection.
A different set of assumptions is now quietly separating organizations that recover from disruption from those that become cautionary tales.
Three years ago, I was writing a column called “The Age of Impact” and teaching crisis communications classes at Northwestern, shaped by the same ideas. Companies were competing to prove they cared — about employees, about justice, about the world. It felt like a new era of corporate responsibility was taking hold.
Then the ground shifted.
Anti-DEI campaigns turned inclusion initiatives into political targets. Generative AI leapt from industry conversation to mainstream consciousness almost overnight, transforming how we work. Polarization widened from a crack to a canyon.
My students started putting forward no-win scenarios: What if your CEO gets deepfaked the night before earnings? What if half your workforce wants you to speak out and the other half will quit if you do? The situations kept getting wilder — and then I noticed something alarming.
Corporate executives I counsel, chief communications officers, board members, CEOs running Fortune 500 companies, were asking almost the exact same questions.
When professionals across the entire spectrum of experience are terrified by the same problems, it’s not just a communications challenge — it’s an enterprise risk. Wells Fargo lost $80 billion in market cap after employees opened millions of fake accounts to meet sales targets — a scandal that festered internally for years before it exploded publicly. Target shed $15 billion in months after DEI backlash. These weren’t messaging failures. They were leadership failures with balance-sheet consequences.
Related: Your Business Isn’t Ready For the Next Crisis — Here’s How to Fix That Fast
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