Resilience in the age of polycrisis

• Companies must learn to survive and thrive in an era of constant volatility. That requires dynamic risk management, constant alertness and much faster information processing.
• A focus on AI and cybersecurity is needed to further enhance resilience. Many boards are aware of the risks, but fewer fully understand their exposure or whether their contingency plans will hold under pressure.

Resilience is evolving into a competitive advantage. Companies best placed to navigate the next shock are those with the organisational capacity to process complexity at speed.

In ING's Opens in a new tabCEO Survey from the end of 2025, a striking 77 per cent of the executives and senior managers of the Netherlands' largest companies said they consider their organisations 'well' or 'very well' prepared for economic and geopolitical shocks. At first glance, that confidence may seem surprisingly optimistic. After all, an exceptional succession of crises has exposed several shortcomings in European companies' resilience. The 2008 financial crisis, followed in recent years by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, trade wars initiated by President Trump and now the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, have all exposed structural vulnerabilities. Dependencies on complex supply chains and foreign suppliers for energy, raw materials and essential products ranging from medicines to chips do not indicate resilience.

And yet, on closer inspection, the confidence expressed in the CEO Survey may be more grounded than it appears. According to Juliette van Enckevort, the successive crises that corporate leaders have had to confront have quietly changed how they think about risk. And they have responded. Not with sweeping strategic overhauls, but with a steady accumulation of improvements derived from hard-won lessons.

Through her role, Van Enckevort is in close contact with CEOs and executives, particularly in the logistics sector. "If I look back," Van Enckevort says, "the global financial crisis in 2008 served as a trigger, a wake-up call. That was followed by a period of relative calm, and then since COVID it's been one shock after another. Right now you could say we're in the midst of a polycrisis, where several mutually reinforcing crises unfold at the same time. That has made companies much more conscious of the constant volatility surrounding them, and it has forced them to scrutinise their own economic and financial vulnerabilities."

That exercise has produced tangible results. Van Enckevort observes a pattern of small but meaningful adaptations, for example in supply contracts. Contractual provisions that were once perhaps treated as boilerplate are now reviewed and negotiated with care. "Who bears inflation risk? Which cancellation and termination rights do we have in case of supply issues? What insurance clauses do we need to update or expand? These are the types of questions companies are asking themselves more often than before," she says. On the sales side, questions about who bears the risk of rising energy costs and within what timeframe contracts can be adjusted are now a central part of many commercial discussions.

Perhaps most tellingly, the approach to financial risk management has shifted from static to dynamic. "Companies are clearly timing their purchases of interest-rate hedges more carefully than before. Where they previously hedged their full interest-rate exposure on day one of a financing arrangement, I now see them creating flexibility in financing documentation to find the right window of opportunity," Van Enckevort explains. "They know that a post on Truth Social can move the dollar up or down within fifteen minutes. So rather than locking in at potentially the wrong moment, they give themselves time to act." It is a subtle but important shift: not the abandonment of certainty in favour of speculation, but a more sophisticated understanding of when certainty is worth paying for.

This dynamism extends to business planning more broadly. Companies still have their five-year plans and their base cases, but also realise that it will most likely not be business as usual over that period. "You can model GDP growth and inflation," Van Enckevort quotes a CEO she spoke to recently. "But the moment you factor in rising diesel prices affecting the competitiveness of rail versus trucking, a potential recession reducing overall demand, and a possible easing of the Ukraine war opening new transport corridors – all at once – the complexity becomes very hard to manage." In a world of polycrisis, where multiple disruptions interact and amplify each other, scenario planning can no longer be treated as a ritual exercise. Instead, it has become an essential skill in preparing for and responding to whatever shock companies may face next.

None of this, it should be said, amounts to the kind of rigorous rethinking of resilience that the more alarmist analyses of deglobalisation might call for. There is no mass exodus of supply chains from China, no systematic reshoring of critical manufacturing. Van Enckevort points to the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to the case for strategic independence: "There was talk about reducing Europe's dependence on Russian gas long before Russia's invasion of Ukraine - yet all the while the multibillion-euro Nord Stream 2 pipeline was being built." In the transport and logistics sector that Van Enckevort focuses on, electric buses provide another example. "Private, stand-alone European electric bus manufacturers are losing out against the larger Chinese manufacturers operating within China's industrial policy framework. As a result, European operators sometimes have little alternative but to resort to Chinese suppliers."

Does Europe therefore need a more protectionist industrial policy? Van Enckevort says it's a matter of finding the right balance: "From an economic perspective, in many cases global trade still yields more efficient and wholly acceptable solutions. Yet in more sensitive areas, near-total dependence on foreign suppliers is not a sign of healthy resilience. There, I would indeed prefer a more pan-European, state-supported, protectionist approach."

Regardless of executives' confidence, complacency would be dangerous. Van Enckevort is uneasy about one area in particular: “When it comes to improving resilience, cybersecurity and AI should probably be the top priorities,” she says. Her concern is not merely the technical risk of attacks, but the uneven level of understanding among executive teams. “Many boards know that cybersecurity is important, but I'm afraid relatively few teams fully grasp the depth of the organisation’s exposure or whether contingency plans would actually work under stress.”

Artificial intelligence amplifies both the risks and the opportunities. On the one hand, AI expands the attack surface for cyberthreats and misinformation. On the other, it offers companies a powerful way to process the torrent of operational information generated during today’s overlapping crises. Companies must absorb geopolitical developments, commodity-price movements, regulatory shifts and supply-chain disruptions simultaneously, then assess how these interact across their business models. “The challenge for management teams now is not a lack of information,” Van Enckevort says. “It is processing that information quickly and turning it into effective action. Management teams relying on human judgement alone will struggle to keep pace."

That is why the most resilient companies are likely to be those that combine technological sophistication with organisational adaptability. AI tools can help firms analyse scenarios faster, identify emerging risks earlier and respond more dynamically to market shocks. The implication for boardrooms is clear. Resilience is no longer about preparing for a single shock. It is about operating effectively in an environment where shocks are constant, overlapping and difficult to predict. Companies that continue to treat volatility as temporary are at risk of falling behind permanently. The companies best placed to navigate the next disruption – and surely there will be one – will be those that have invested not just in hedging instruments and contractual flexibility, but in the organisational capacity to process complexity at speed. In the age of polycrisis, resilience is evolving from a defensive capability into a source of competitive advantage.