Looking Back to Move Forward: What 2025 Reinforced About Crisis Preparedness

As the year draws to a close, it is natural for organizations to reflect on what they accomplished, what they endured, and what still feels unresolved.

For many leadership teams, this year was not defined by a single, headline-grabbing crisis, but by a steady accumulation of pressure, often from multiple directions at once.

Throughout 2025, real-world events reinforced how quickly localized incidents can escalate into enterprise-level crises. Severe wildfires across Los Angeles and surrounding regions forced mass evacuations, disrupted logistics and utilities, and tested public-private coordination under extreme conditions. At the same time, continued instability affecting commercial shipping routes through the Red Sea created persistent supply-chain disruptions, driving up costs, delaying goods, and forcing organizations to make rapid operational and contractual decisions in an already strained global environment.

Alongside these high-visibility events, many organizations faced less visible but equally destabilizing pressures: cyber incidents, workforce disruptions, regulatory scrutiny, misinformation spreading faster than facts, and geopolitical uncertainty influencing day-to-day operations. None of these challenges occurred in isolation. They overlapped, compounded, and tested leadership teams’ ability to prioritize, decide, and communicate under sustained uncertainty.

From our perspective, this year reinforced a critical reality: organizations rarely struggle in a crisis because they lack plans. They struggle because they have not validated their ability to execute those plans under real conditions, with real people, and real consequences.

This distinction between planning and preparedness has never been more important.

What We Observed Across Organizations This Year

Working alongside leadership teams across industries, several consistent patterns emerged. These were not isolated issues or sector-specific challenges; they were systemic themes that cut across geography, size, and maturity.

Decision-making friction at the executive level

In many organizations, crisis governance structures looked solid on paper but became strained under pressure. Authority was unclear. Decisions were delayed while leaders sought consensus or waited for perfect information. In time-sensitive situations, hesitation proved as damaging as a wrong call.

Plans that existed—but had never been tested

We encountered well-written crisis management, emergency response, and communications plans that had not been exercised in years, if ever. Teams were confident in the documentation but unfamiliar with how those plans translated into action, coordination, and leadership behavior during an evolving incident.

Siloed response functions

Cyber teams, operations, legal, communications, and executive leadership are often prepared independently. When incidents crossed those boundaries as they almost always do, misalignment became evident. Information flowed unevenly. Priorities conflicted. Messaging lagged operational reality.

Escalating expectations from stakeholders

Employees, regulators, customers, and the public now expect faster responses, clearer communication, and visible leadership presence. Silence or delay is often interpreted as incompetence or indifference, regardless of the complexity of the situation.

Leadership fatigue

Many senior leaders are operating in a near-constant state of alert. The cumulative effect of repeated disruptions has made it harder to sustain focus, discipline, and decision quality when it matters most.

These observations are not criticisms. They are indicators of where preparedness efforts must evolve.

What Differentiated Organizations That Performed Well

Despite these challenges, some organizations consistently demonstrated resilience. Their success did not hinge on perfect plans or unlimited resources. Instead, several shared characteristics stood out.

They treated exercises as leadership development, not compliance.

Effective organizations used tabletop exercises to stress decision-making, clarify roles, and expose assumptions. Exercises were designed to challenge leaders, not validate comfort.

They emphasized realism over complexity.

Rather than building overly intricate scenarios, these teams focused on plausible events with meaningful consequences. The objective was not to overwhelm participants, but to force prioritization, trade-offs, and timely decisions.

They aligned crisis management, emergency management, and communications.

Strong performers understood that response actions and communications must evolve together. Messaging reflected operational realities, and communicators were embedded in the response, not briefed after the fact.

They normalized imperfections.

Leaders were willing to acknowledge uncertainty, adapt as new information emerged, and adjust direction. This flexibility reduced paralysis and improved credibility internally and externally.

They institutionalized lessons “to be” learned.

After exercises or incidents, observations were not shelved. Gaps were addressed, plans refined, and capabilities strengthened. Preparedness was treated as a living system.

The common denominator was validation. These organizations could see, test, and measure their readiness and not just assume it.

Related: From Lessons to Leverage: Turning Crisis Findings into Lasting Resilience

PreparedEx in Practice: Supporting Capability, Not Just Plans

Throughout the year, PreparedEx supported organizations through assessments, plan development, executive training, and exercises. While the specific engagements varied, the underlying objective remained consistent: help leadership teams understand how they would actually perform when faced with pressure, ambiguity, and consequence.

This work extended beyond traditional tabletop exercises. It included validating escalation of thresholds, decision authority, communications alignment, and cross-functional coordination. In many cases, the most valuable outcomes were not answers but clarity: clarity on roles, assumptions, and priorities that had never surfaced before.

What consistently resonated with clients was a simple truth: preparedness is observable. You can see how quickly teams orient, how confidently leaders make decisions, and how effectively organizations communicate and adapt.

Looking Ahead: What Leaders Should Focus on Next Year

As organizations prepare for the year ahead, several priorities stand out for leadership teams serious about resilience.

1. Reassess decision authority and escalation triggers
2. Validate capabilities not just update plans
3. Strengthen executive-level crisis leadership skills
4. Integrate communications early and often
5. Address exercise fatigue by improving exercise quality
6. Measure preparedness beyond “we have a plan” and run functional and full-scale capability exercises.

These are not theoretical improvements. They are practical steps that directly influence how organizations perform when tested.

Closing Thoughts

Preparedness is not achieved in a single workshop, document, or exercise. It is built deliberately through repeated validation, honest reflection, and continuous improvement.

As this year ends, the most important question leaders can ask is not whether they have plans in place, but whether they have confidence in how those plans will perform when tested by reality.

At PreparedEx, we believe that confidence comes from experience before it is needed. The organizations that invest in that experience today will be the ones best positioned to navigate uncertainty tomorrow.