Polycrisis is the condition in which several crises run at the same time and feed each other, so that a response built for one of them worsens another. A single emergency has a start, a response and an end; a polycrisis keeps starting while the earlier crises are still running, and recovery to the old normal stops being the goal. In Miklian and Katsos's work the term describes settings such as Lebanon, where weak political institutions, economic instability and disasters overlapped for years, and the Harvard Business Review crisis playbook, the Beirut SME study and the Crisis casebook all address it (Katsos and Miklian 2021; Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher 2025).
Three converging long-term trends, climate change, globalization and growing inequality, each make the occasional crisis worse, and together they magnify one another. The Covid-19 pandemic was a health crisis, an economic crisis and a political crisis at once. Katsos and Miklian opened their November 2021 Harvard Business Review article with that observation and answered it with three strategies: elevating community relationships to true partnerships, looking beyond government authorities for guidance, and making principled, consistent political choices (Katsos and Miklian 2021).
The empirical anchor is Beirut. Most business and crisis research frames a crisis as a singular event that a firm must get through. Lebanon's overlapping crises, grounded in weak political institutions, economic instability and disasters, gave Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher a setting in which to ask how firms survive a series of intersecting crises and how their strategies differ from single-crisis management. Thirty-four in-depth interviews with SME owners produced a framework of SME strategies for perpetual crisis, and the strategies differ from singular-crisis approaches (Business Horizons, 2025).
The largest challenges firms face under crisis are sociopolitical. A 2021 survey of 78,000 people in Bogota, Medellin, Beirut, Cape Town, Caracas, San Pedro Sula and San Salvador found those challenges complex, systemic and hard to quantify, and most frightening to managers in cities where extortion and business violence are pervasive. Firms embedded in their communities, and aware that they shape the systems around them as much as those systems shape them, did better (Working Through Violence Research Team 2021).
Small firms experience shocks differently from large ones. Miklian and Hoelscher's review in the International Small Business Journal treats the business, the shock and the response as linked within a given context, distinguishes how different types of crisis hit small firms, and reads the Covid-19 pandemic as a novel exogenous shock that reshaped all of them (volume 40, issue 2, pages 178 to 204, 2022).
Miklian and Katsos's Cambridge Element on ethical leadership in conflict and crisis sets conventional business strategy against values of community and authenticity and argues that ethical and servant leadership attributes become essential once the usual approaches fail, drawing on historical lessons, firsthand accounts and ethical perspectives on crisis (Elements in Leadership, online 31 May 2024, print 20 March 2025).
The casebook on responsible management in crisis turns the research into teaching material: a dozen leaders under extraordinary pressure, cases including Starbucks in Sumatra, Unilever under Paul Polman, Chobani's hiring of refugees and a brewery in a social media storm, each with MBA-aligned frameworks and teaching notes. Force Majeure, the simulation built from the same research, lets players run a company across roughly 200 real-world markets while the game runs the crises (conquercrisis.io).
Katsos, John E. and Jason Miklian. "A New Crisis Playbook for an Uncertain World." Harvard Business Review, 17 November 2021. Page →
Maalouf, Jamal, Jason Miklian and Kristian Hoelscher. "Business Survival Strategies in a Polycrisis: SME Experiences from Beirut, Lebanon." Business Horizons, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2025.03.002. Page →
Miklian, Jason and Kristian Hoelscher. "SMEs and Exogenous Shocks: A Conceptual Literature Review and Forward Research Agenda." International Small Business Journal 40(2), 2022, 178-204. DOI: 10.1177/02662426211050796. Page →
Miklian, Jason and John E. Katsos. Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis. Cambridge Elements in Leadership, 2024. DOI: 10.1017/9781009446891. Page →
Miklian, Jason and John E. Katsos. Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer. Cambridge University Press, 2025. Page →
Katsos, John E. and Jason Miklian. "A New Crisis Playbook for an Uncertain World." Harvard Business Review, 17 November 2021. Maalouf, Jamal, Jason Miklian and Kristian Hoelscher. "Business Survival Strategies in a Polycrisis: SME Experiences from Beirut, Lebanon." Business Horizons, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2025.03.002.
Several crises running at the same time and feeding each other, so that a response built for one worsens another. A single emergency has a start, a response and an end; a polycrisis keeps starting while the earlier crises are still running. Lebanon, where 34 Beirut SME owners described running their firms through overlapping institutional, economic and disaster crises, is the reference case (Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher 2025).
The word predates this research and is used across policy and academic writing. The business application in Miklian's work is a crisis playbook for compounding shocks (Katsos and Miklian, Harvard Business Review, 2021), evidence on SME survival strategies in Beirut (Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher, Business Horizons, 2025), a Cambridge Element on ethical leadership in conflict and crisis (Miklian and Katsos, 2024), and the Crisis casebook with its Force Majeure simulation.
A single-event model assumes the crisis ends and normal operations resume. When crises overlap, resolving one destabilizes another and recovery to the old normal stops being the goal. The 2021 playbook article answers with community relationships elevated to true partnerships, guidance sought beyond government authorities, and principled, consistent political choices (Katsos and Miklian 2021), and the Beirut study finds SMEs using survival strategies distinct from single-crisis approaches (Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher 2025).
Hold to values of community and authenticity when conventional strategy fails (Miklian and Katsos 2024), elevate community relationships to true partnerships (Katsos and Miklian 2021), and keep local knowledge networks that AI risk tools cannot replace. Before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, ESG platforms rated Russian-market exposure as moderate and predictive models assigned low probability to a full-scale invasion; afterwards BP wrote down $25 billion in Rosneft assets and Shell took a $4 billion impairment (Miklian 2026).