What the 2026 disruption across the Gulf and Middle East means for business continuity and operational resilience, and what leadership teams should do next.
The 2026 events, from airspace closures to shipping and fuel disruption, showed that organisations rarely fail because they had no plan. They struggle when the plan assumes one route, one supplier, one site or one decision-maker. Operational resilience is the ability to keep your important business services within tolerance when any of those assumptions breaks.
Identify your important business services (IBSs) and the people, sites, suppliers, technology and routes each one depends on. You cannot protect a dependency you have not mapped.
For critical flows such as freight, fuel, travel and data, agree an alternative before you need it: a second supplier, a second corridor, a second provider.
Reduce reliance on single overseas suppliers for critical inputs, and hold buffer stock where lead times are long and the cost of a gap is high.
Know who your critical suppliers are, who their suppliers are, and where they operate. Visibility shortens the time between an event and your decision.
Treat conflict, sanctions, airspace and energy risk as inputs to your risk assessment, business impact analysis and recovery time objectives, not as footnotes.
Agree who can invoke the plan, which indicators trigger it, and how information reaches them in hours, not days. Use monitoring and dashboards that support decisions.
Test the second route, the remote-working model and the crisis team before an incident does it for you. An untested alternative is only a hope.
