Why won't leaders prepare for disasters?

In 2003, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled “Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming”. The authors ... Bazerman and Watkins argued that while the world is an unpredictable place, unpredictability is often not the problem. The problem is that faced with clear risks, we still fail to act. For Watkins, the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate predictable surprise. “It’s not like this is some new issue,” he says, before sending over the notes for a pandemic response exercise that he ran at Harvard University. It’s eerily prescient: a shortage of masks; a scramble for social distance; university leaders succumbing to the illness. The date on the document is October 12 2002. We’ve been thinking about pandemics for a long time.