It is not a matter of foreseeing everything but of being ready for anything.
The European Commission’s recent guide to assembling household emergency kits — with its list of bottled water, shortwave radios, and supplies for cooking pasta puttanesca in the midst of disaster — could be read as a handbook for contemporary chaos.
But behind its apparent naivety lies a distorted mirror of business reality. It is also worth asking whether, beyond its practical usefulness, this type of message does not seek to generate a narrative of permanent alert that ends up normalizing exceptionality.
If citizens must be prepared for blackouts or conflicts, what level of resilience is expected of companies in this era of constant uncertainty? The answer lies in translating the logic of survival into corporate language, where black swans have ceased to be exceptions and have become part of the landscape.
The European motto “ready for anything” resonates loudly in the corridors of companies operating in VUCA environments — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this context, crises are no longer interruptions but the permanent backdrop to operations.
The public’s recommendation to store water finds its business equivalent in the critical need for liquidity. These are not just financial cushions but lifelines for times when markets evaporate as quickly as a puddle in the sun.
Emergency pasta represents, in business terms, the need for diversification. Just as it is not healthy to feed exclusively on energy bars, no business model can be sustained if it depends on a single product, customer, or market.
The companies that have best weathered the latest global shocks share one characteristic: diverse portfolios that balance declines in one area with growth in another. In a world where decisions like Trump’s tariffs or an unexpected pandemic can redefine supply chains in a matter of days, diversification is not an option but an essential protective measure.
The paradox of the longwave radio — that gadget that works when all else fails — has its correlate in the paradox of enterprise hyperconnectivity. Despite having more data than ever before, many organizations continue to be blindsided by crises brewing in plain sight.
However, both domestic kits and business contingency plans share a common flaw: they often remain on paper. The EU proposes 64 citizen preparedness measures, more than anyone would remember in a real emergency.
At the corporate level, many plans are designed just to comply with audits. But real preparation requires real simulations. What would the team do if a competitor launched the same product tomorrow at half the price, powered by artificial intelligence? What if a regulation banned the core business?
These exercises, when taken seriously, allow for the detection of hidden vulnerabilities and adjustment of the strategy without waiting for disaster.
The most difficult component to pack into a modern survival kit is antifragile leadership. Faced with the temptation to manage from fear or denial, managers must cultivate what some psychologists call a “catastrophic growth mindset”: the ability to see in every crisis an opportunity for transformation.
This is not naïve romanticism in the face of collapse but strategic pragmatism. During the pandemic, the companies that reacted fastest were not always the most technologically advanced but those with teams capable of making decisions under extreme pressure.
Europe’s insistence on foreseeing unthinkable scenarios reveals an uncomfortable truth: the exceptional has become the norm. The organizations that survive will not necessarily be the largest, but those that develop the agility to adapt time and time again.
In this new framework, the real business survival kit can be summed up in three elements: liquidity to withstand financial storms, diversification to absorb shocks, and a culture capable of pivoting without losing its way. Everything else — from crisis manuals to predictive algorithms — are just reinforcements.
While governments rehearse plans to deal with massive blackouts or conventional wars in Europe, companies face their own plausible apocalypse: synchronized cyber-attacks, extreme volatility in commodities, or even pandemics arising from thawing permafrost.
In the face of all this, perhaps the most valuable lesson of the European kit is not logistical, but psychological: to understand that stability is a myth, and that the only possible preparation is to build organizations that not only withstand shocks, but evolve through them.
Original article in Spanish published in Canarias7:
