Crisis Readiness Is Not a Plan on a Shelf, It’s a Trained Muscle
Turn on the news any morning, and the pattern is unmistakable: a cyber-attack here, an extreme weather event there, and a reputational crisis going viral before anyone in the building has agreed on what to say about it. The organizations still treating disruption as an unlikely future event are operating on an assumption that the last decade has comprehensively disproven.
Casey Zgutowicz, Executive Vice President at Lockton, breaks down why the gap between knowing a risk exists and being operationally ready for it is where most organizations fail. Zgutowicz works with senior leaders on the risk and human capital decisions that shape where their companies go next, and he has a phrase for the posture he encounters too often in boardrooms across the country. “We’ll deal with it when it happens,” Zgutowicz notes. “I still hear that way too often. And in my experience, those are usually the organizations that struggle the most when something actually hits.”
Knowing the Risk Exists Is Not the Same as Being Ready for It
Awareness is the easy part. Senior leadership teams can usually name the risks keeping them up at night: cyber exposure, supply chain fragility, regulatory shifts, and reputational volatility. What separates the organizations that absorb disruption from the ones that fracture under it isn’t foresight. It is whether they did the work before it arrived. When a crisis hits, the clock starts immediately. Organizations have minutes, not hours, to establish what they know, what they do not know, and what they need to know right now. “Those answers don’t magically appear under pressure,” Zgutowicz reflects. “They come from doing the work ahead of time.”
The organizations that respond well are not the ones with the thickest crisis playbook. They are the ones whose people have practiced the decisions they will face in real time. Who makes the call when the CEO is unreachable? What does the first communication say, and to whom? Which partners get activated, and in what sequence? Those aren’t questions you want to answer for the first time during a live crisis. Crisis readiness is a trained muscle. Run the drills, stress-test the plan, and find the cracks before reality does it for you.
Great Insurance Coverage Means Nothing If Nobody Knows How to Use It
The protection that exists on paper produces nothing in practice if the human coordination required to activate it was never built. This is a scenario Zgutowicz encounters more often than most organizations would like to admit: solid coverage is in place, a crisis arises, and nobody knows what triggers the policy, who to call, or which partner to engage first.
HR, legal, communications, finance, IT, and the executive team all need to know their specific role before things go sideways, not while they are trying to manage the situation simultaneously. The same goes for insurance and advisory partners. Alignment built in advance turns scattered protection into an actual response. Alignment attempted during a crisis turns a manageable situation into an organizational disaster with an audience. “Readiness today is not an ‘if,'” Zgutowicz states plainly. “It’s a ‘when.’ And the good news is that with the right preparation and the right partners, you can respond faster, communicate clearly, and protect what matters most.”
It is the approach Zgutowicz and his team at Lockton bring to every client engagement, not just placing coverage, but making sure the people, plans, and partners are aligned before they are needed. The organizations that engineer that readiness before they need it are the ones that come out of disruption stronger. Those that do not are the ones that spend the next 18 months explaining what went wrong.
For more on crisis readiness, enterprise risk, and building organizational resilience that holds when it matters most, connect with Casey Zgutowicz on LinkedIn.
