Many of our organisation's Business Continuity Plans have proven to be completely inadequate for the COVID-19 pandemic. Most households did not have an adequate financial buffer to weather a period of unemployment. Governments have been caught unprepared with minimal stocks of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) and key drugs. However, the crisis is not a 'Black Swan' event. Epidemiologists have been warning of a global pandemic for decades. Movies, such as Contagion, visualised how a global pandemic might affect the economy in graphic detail. We had 'trial runs' with both SARS and MERS pandemics.

1. What biases do you think contributed to the lack of planning for such a crisis? How can we learn from this experience to make better plans at household, company and government levels?