AI is going to destroy us. The Russians are coming. The climate is changing. The world trading system is coming apart. Read enough headlines and you could conclude that the only sensible response is to stop planning altogether.

But what are you actually doing about any of this?

Most businesses have a risk register. Someone updates it, the board reviews it and risks acquire reassuring colours. There is usually something about cyber security, something about losing key people and something about the economy. There are owners, controls and mitigation plans.

All useful. But does the discussion ever reach the question that really matters: what could make this business unable to continue?

An existential risk threatens your ability to exist. For a business, that might mean losing access to an essential resource, becoming unable to operate for longer than its cash can sustain, or discovering that customers no longer need what it sells. You can manage your familiar risks competently and still lose the business because you never questioned the assumptions beneath it.

The World Economic Forum’s 2026 risk survey places economic confrontation between countries at the top of its two year outlook. That is a survey of perceptions, not a prediction. But it should prompt a serious discussion in any business whose strategy depends on goods, money and technology continuing to move freely across borders.

I was once brought in by my global sales team to apologise to a very major bank where we had a major outage due to a fault in an undersea cable. All was now well I told them, we had corrected the fault and we had contracted with an alternative supplier for back-up so if a problem occurred we could immediately switch over. They rather grudgingly accepted our apology and I told them it would not, could not happen again. Two months later I was in front of the same customer to apologise again because what we had not checked was that both cables shared a single point of failure. It was not something that was easy to check but that was no consolation to the customer.

Consider a manufacturer that has negotiated excellent terms with three suppliers. Procurement may regard that as sensible diversification. But if all three depend on the same overseas processor for an essential material, the business still has one point of failure. A restriction on exports could turn a purchasing problem into a threat to the company’s survival.

Or consider a professional services firm enthusiastically using AI to improve productivity. It is measuring hours saved and encouraging staff to experiment. Meanwhile, its customers are asking whether they need to buy those hours at all. The firm could become more efficient at delivering a service whose commercial value is disappearing.

Neither example requires the end of civilisation. Both require leaders to look beyond the risks they already know how to discuss.

I was involved in the early days of the Internet. One lesson from that period is that a business can recognise a technology, invest in it and still misunderstand what it will do to its market. Putting your existing business online did not necessarily protect it from a competitor who had understood that the business itself could change.

With AI, we need to examine both the consequences of using it and the consequences of others using it better. A business that delegates essential judgement without retaining the ability to challenge it creates one vulnerability. A business that assumes its expertise will remain scarce and valuable creates another.

There is also a danger in treating threats as separate entries. Conflict can disrupt supplies and energy. A cyber attack can stop operations just when customers and lenders are becoming less forgiving. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre reported a record number of nationally significant incidents in its 2025 annual review. The operational consequences deserve as much board attention as the technical defences.

The serious question is often what happens when several things go wrong together.

How long could you pay your people if you could not trade? Could you recover your systems without relying on the supplier whose systems had also failed? Who could authorise emergency spending if the usual decision makers were unavailable? At what point would a temporary disruption become permanent damage?

These questions become uncomfortable quite quickly. That is a reason to ask them while you still have choices.

Start with the assumptions that must hold for your strategy to work. Perhaps you assume that a particular market will remain accessible, that insurance will remain available, that customers will continue to pay for your expertise, or that essential infrastructure will keep functioning. Ask what would happen if each assumption failed, how much warning you might have and what you could do now.

Some answers will cost money. An alternative supplier, spare capacity, cash reserves and the ability to operate without a critical system all have costs. Leaders need to understand what protection they are buying and what exposure they are choosing to retain. Efficiency achieved by removing every reserve can leave a business with very little room to survive a shock.

Then test the response. Put the leadership team through a plausible scenario. Take away its usual systems. Introduce incomplete information, competing priorities and a decision that cannot wait until the next board meeting. Find out whether the plan works when people have to use it.

Crisis management matters, but it begins after something has gone wrong. Protecting the future of the business also requires decisions about its strategy, dependencies and capacity to adapt.

You cannot prevent every catastrophe. You can examine the things on which your business depends, reduce some of its vulnerabilities and practise making difficult decisions.

If your board has not had that conversation, it ought to. Before events choose the agenda for you.