Navigating Poly-crisis: The New Reality for Crisis Management in the United States

This paper is part of a continuing publication series for the Global Crisis & Resilience Forum led by Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Program. The forum is supported by McKinsey & Company. The ideas in these papers are the independent product of the author.

For those of us in crisis management roles, when something goes wrong, it starts as a challenge and then escalates to a problem. Problems then grow to become any one of three broadly interchangeable words: emergencies, disasters, or crises. For this discussion, I combine emergencies and disasters into the bucket of crisis. Many feel that the reality of emergency management is no longer “disaster”-specific but is more broadly the all-inclusive concept of a crisis. A problem becomes a crisis when we lose our ability to cope, and a part of the system becomes overwhelmed. Crises become catastrophes when the resources and structures meant to respond to that crisis become overwhelmed and break down. Something can be catastrophic at the local level but perhaps just a crisis at the regional or national level, and much of that nuance depends on someone’s on-the-ground perspective and historical experience.