It’s No Big Deal
From wars to market drops, high-impact events have become the new norm in global business. Can leaders shrug off disruptions?
Trillion-dollar market swings. Oil around $100 per barrel. Huge data breaches. Major wars. Cities cloaked in wildfire smoke. Not even five years ago in the US, any of these would have been front-page events warranting a supportive note from the CEO to employees and stakeholders. But in 2026, experts say the world, and business, have started to look at all this… with a shrug.
In the aughts, academic Nassim Taleb popularized the term “black swan event” to refer to rare and unpredictable happenings. Now, leaders must confront black swan events and any number of other disruptions every few months—then try to carry on as if everything is, well, normal. “There’s definitely been a shift,” says Marnix Boorsma, a senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s CFO and Global Energy practices. During the pandemic, he says, virtually every major event triggered what he calls the “great corporate email reflex.”
To be sure, black swan events have always existed. (The term gets its name from the 1600s discovery of black swans in Australia, which exploded the European belief that all swans were white.) These unpredictable, impactful events were typically treated as shocking outliers that required emergency response. But they’ve become so frequent in recent years that leaders are now treating everything from wars to stock crashes as “gray swan” events: i.e., they’re not entirely predictable, but they’re still consequential—and they can be absorbed without drastic changes in strategy or operations.
For example, during the 1980s, major weather disasters happened every 82 days on average, compared with every 19 days over the last 10 years, according to government stats. Similarly, roughly nine major data breaches are reported daily in the US—a category that didn’t even exist in the early aughts. In the last few years, more and more executives have stopped commenting. “So many difficult and terrible occurrences have become so normalized,” says Karen Huang, senior director for search assessment at Korn Ferry. “Leaders can’t possibly comment on all of them.”
Companies have also begun to realize that strong reactions—whether in the form of messaging or logistical changes—can be risky. The tariff announcements in 2025 were among the last major events to generate a widespread reaction from the business world. Firms spent millions relocating foreign operations, or making plans to, only for courts to strike down the price increases or countries to renegotiate them. Now, many leaders choose to stay mum in the face of dramatic events. “Meaningful statements and commentary are often not getting made by people in positions of authority and power,” says Jeff Constable, office managing partner for Korn Ferry in New York. In this new gray swan environment, he says, firm leaders and employees must learn measured ways of handling ongoing disruptive events as part of a broader long-term strategy. For the leader, “it’s part of an ongoing conversation over a long period of time, versus trying to be overly heroic in a single, unique moment,” says Constable.
To be sure, experts do advise communicating directly with employees during high-pressure events, especially in situations that present a direct risk to their well-being, such as a war in their region or the loss of a major contract that might result in corporate shifts. Overall, the best tone to take is one of steadiness and calm orientation—a tone which, in and of itself, can help stakeholders cope. In a world of reactivity, Boorsma says, “steadiness stands out more than speeches do.”
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