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Frontier AI models can now find exploitable vulnerabilities faster than any human research team, and attackers have that capability today. In Episode 335 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath introduces the AI Storm, a scenario of concurrent zero-days with exploitation beginning within hours of disclosure. He explains why the threat environment your continuity, incident response, and crisis management plans were built for no longer exists. Bryan walks through five unwritten assumptions every plan rests on and shows how each one breaks under AI Storm conditions. He shares anonymized findings from tabletop exercises Bryghtpath ran with clients this year, …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Bryan Strawser shares a personal story. Over the past year, alongside leading Bryghtpath, he completed paramedic school and seven months of clinical shifts on a 911 ambulance in the Twin Cities metro. What he learned riding to 180 patients changed how he thinks about resilience. Bryan walks through five lessons from the ambulance that apply directly to corporate crisis teams. Plans are foundations that only contact refines, real emergencies are quiet, and teams must move on partial information. Leaders belong in the command zone, positioned to see everything …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser digs into new research on how CEOs really view their marketing leaders. The numbers show trust at a five-year high while 60% of CEOs call the function overhead. Bryan argues resilience leaders live the same contradiction, with an even harder problem: being graded on disasters that didn’t happen. Bryan walks through four moves that convert executive trust into actual funding. Stop reporting risk and start pricing decisions, turn tabletop exercises into an evidence engine, let your sponsor carry findings upward as their own, and sell enterprise outcomes …

Most resilience policies are either a mission statement with a logo or a forty-page plan wearing a policy’s name tag. Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath recently reviewed a global company’s business continuity policy that failed four of ISO 22301’s six requirements. Nowhere did it require anyone to exercise anything. In this episode, Bryan explains what a resilience policy actually is: the three-to-five-page charter that gives your entire program its authority. He walks through the seven elements that belong in it, from scope and executive commitment to program requirements, framework alignment, and reporting. He also covers the four most common ways policies go …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Bryan Strawser explores the role of corporate strategy in building an effective resilience program. Most business continuity programs can recite their RTOs and plan counts but cannot articulate the company strategy. Bryan explains why that gap leaves organizations protecting yesterday’s business. Drawing on Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s Playing to Win framework, Bryan walks through the five choices that define any corporate strategy, centered on two questions: where to play and how to win. He shares practical signals for reading your company’s strategy, including capital allocation, earnings calls, …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath examines the single largest variable in whether a resilience program succeeds. It is not the framework, the tooling, or the number of plans. It is whether a senior leader owns it. Bryan walks through four things strong leaders do that weak sponsors never will. They align the program to the business, clear the political obstacles only they can move, fund it honestly, and stay engaged long after the kickoff. Each one is a real point of failure, and each is a leadership problem rather than a technical one. The …

On this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath examines why some resilience programs survive a change in leadership and others quietly fall apart. The deciding factor is rarely the quality of the plans. It comes down to business alignment and whether the program’s champion understands that alignment is the point. Bryan makes a contrarian case: a strong champion can actually be the more fragile of the two. A program propped up by one leader’s relationships looks like success, right up until that leader is promoted, retires, or gets reorganized away. When they go, the entire case for …

Most resilience programs don’t fail because the plans are wrong. They fail because capable leaders make the work more complicated than it needs to be, and never tie it back to the business. In this episode, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath explains the complexity tax and why “adding rigor” usually makes things worse. Bryan walks through the five ways good leaders overcomplicate resilience. A structure no one can explain, terminology that hides meaning, plans untethered from the business, borrowed confidence about plans you don’t understand, and solving confusion by adding more process. Each one comes from caring and knowing a lot, not …

Most resilience programs don’t fail because the plans are wrong. They fail because capable leaders make the work more complicated than it needs to be, and never tie it back to the business. In this episode, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath explains the complexity tax and why “adding rigor” usually makes things worse. Bryan walks through the five ways good leaders overcomplicate resilience. A structure no one can explain, terminology that hides meaning, plans untethered from the business, borrowed confidence about plans you don’t understand, and solving confusion by adding more process. Each one comes from caring and knowing a lot, not …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser breaks down the dangerous fallacy of the “IT-only” crisis. When your cloud provider goes down at 9:14 AM on a Tuesday, the resulting chaos—from broken point-of-sale systems to dark warehouses—isn’t a technical glitch; it’s a total business failure. If your CEO’s only move is calling the CIO to ask “When is it fixed?”, your organization is already in a state of collapse. Bryan outlines the three critical shifts executive teams must make in the next 90 days to move beyond silence and technical metrics. He …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser explains why a clean compliance audit and a resilient organization are not the same thing. Compliance proves what you did in the past. Resilience is what you execute under pressure in the future. Bryan walks through why a 300-page binder is no substitute for rehearsed leadership, with lessons from last year’s AWS outage. He explains why resilience programs go obsolete when they sit adjacent to executive strategy instead of moving with the business. And he reframes what boards should actually measure, shifting from plan revisions …

Your business continuity program was built for one crisis at a time. That world is gone. In Episode 325 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryan Strawser of Bryghtpath unpacks the polycrisis and why concurrent, compounding crises break the programs most organizations rely on. Bryan walks through the ten threats driving the polycrisis era and the four places where legacy programs fail under concurrent stress. He introduces the four capabilities every resilience leader needs to build next: Sense, Decide, Respond, and Recover and Learn. He closes with a four-phase roadmap to move from a single-scenario program to a real operating model. …

Bryan Strawser challenges a common but damaging leadership instinct: the urge for executives to take over and micromanage during a crisis. He explains that this kind of performative leadership creates bottlenecks, slows decision-making, and undermines the expertise of the crisis team when speed and clarity matter most. Strawser emphasizes that effective crisis leadership requires nuance—balancing time in the weeds with a strategic, enterprise-wide perspective. Leaders must resist ego-driven behavior, trust their trained teams, and focus on aligning the organization, communicating effectively, and protecting long-term business outcomes. The episode underscores a critical truth: if leaders cannot trust their teams to manage …

In Episode #323: The Fog of War, Bryan Strawser explores the reality leaders face in the first moments of a crisis—when information is incomplete, conflicting, or entirely absent. Drawing on his experience during the Boston Marathon manhunt, he emphasizes that waiting for perfect information is a losing strategy; leaders must act decisively based on what they know while clearly acknowledging what they do not. The episode introduces a practical decision-making framework grounded in “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and the critical risk of “unknown unknowns.” Strawser reinforces that silence is not neutral—it is a decision that creates space for others to …

Six weeks into 2026 is the right moment to pause and assess whether your resilience program is aligned with how your organization is actually operating today. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryan Strawser challenges leaders to revalidate their risk landscape, critical process priorities, and crisis readiness before the year accelerates. Early-year course correction is far easier than mid-year crisis recovery. Bryan outlines the key questions every resilience leader should be asking now, from whether your Business Impact Analysis still reflects reality to whether your exercise calendar targets enterprise-level risk. He also explores how cyber threats, geopolitical instability, …