After 16 years as a risk leader at Deutsche Bank, Victor Meyer recently joined Supply Wisdom as the COO.  He also served as Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils for both Pandemic and Catastrophic Risk.  In this blog post, Victor reflects on the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and calls on his vast experience to detail what he believes will be the “next shoes to drop”. Victor also details what third-party risk programs must do to effectively predict and mitigate the cascading risks that will result from the COVID outbreak.

It’s a natural inclination during a protracted period of crisis or disruption to try to predict the “next shoe to drop”. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly invites this type of exercise as leaders seek knowns in an atmosphere of much uncertainty. But this pandemic is different than other types of crises with which most business leaders have had direct experience. The scale, cascading nature, interaction of impacts, and “novelty” factor makes the next shoe very difficult to predict. The current crisis is actually a combination of crises – epidemiological, economical, and most of all social, and the aggregated impact is stretching many supply chains and service providers’ capabilities to the breaking point. So, with COVID-19, I’m afraid it won’t be a single shoe, but rather an unpredictable avalanche of shoes we need to monitor as we manage the resilience of our supply chains and third parties throughout the lifecycle of a crisis that could last years, if not longer.