The New Reality of Disruption

Disruptions don't stay in their lane anymore. A stranded ship in the Suez Canal, an earthquake in Tohoku, a cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, three unrelated events, one pattern. In a networked system, the real question isn't whether disruption reaches you. It's how far it's already traveled.

Most planning models get this wrong. They assume either that every site fails on its own, or that one failure takes down everything. Reality sits in between, and that's the part traditional models miss.

Professor Vishwakant Malladi built a model that traces disruptions through what facilities actually share, suppliers, transport routes, IT systems, climate zones. Tested across 49 US sites, it beat traditional approaches on cost, resilience, and speed of decision-making.

Most networks are stress-tested against isolated failures. That's the wrong test. Risk concentrates where things overlap. Map the overlap, and you're not just managing risk, you're finding the edge.