Laboratories of resilience

The ICCO Global Summit came to Mumbai this year with an ostensibly ambitious theme, titled 'The Change Agenda'. The conversations that followed, however, suggested that even this framing might underplay the significance of the reverberations reshaping traditional public relations practice. In truth, nothing struck me more throughout the three days, featuring more than 220 participants from 32+ countries, than the notion that what the industry really requires is a resilience agenda.

Not resilience in a reactive, stoic sense, either — even if the comms sector has plenty of experience weathering setbacks with a smile. But resilience as something akin to an operating system. A capability that you either build deliberately, or risk being outpaced by a world shifting rapidly beneath you.

From the very first session, the pressure lines were clear. SEC Newgate CEO Fiorenzo Tagliabue described the moment as a "period of unprecedented transformation that is marked by high uncertainty." Weber Shandwick global president Jim O’Leary warned that the next five years will bring “more change in our profession than we have had in the previous five decades.”

Senior leaders talked openly about a world defined by "structural and systemic risks" and a state of "perpetual extinction events," one in which being a CEO is "more difficult than it has ever been" as the "topple rate" rises to historic levels. Adfactors’ Madan Bahal spoke of being "scared and struggling," while TCS CMO Abhinav Kumar described leadership conditions as a "constant crisis flow with no start or stop."