How We Help Clients

Response & Resilience

From natural disasters to geopolitical uncertainty, we help organizations navigate disruptions to create competitive advantage—before, during, and after disruptions.
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Novel, fast, interconnected disruptions are the new normal for public- and private-sector institutions. Organizations that navigate them correctly create a competitive advantage that can last for a decade. Yet very few have systematically built the capabilities needed to thrive in them.

Founded in 2011, McKinsey Response and Resilience has helped more than 1,000 firms navigate such disruptions, including support to more than 250 organizations during existential crises. We build distinctive early warning systems, create proactive action and escalation operations, develop pragmatic business continuity plans and programs, and train the next generation of leaders to be resilient.

During major disruptions, we stabilize organizations through a nerve center team-of-teams approach and drive actions to help the institution pivot and thrive.

Our three focus areas encompass:

  • supply chain resilience for industrial, aerospace, and automotive manufacturers
  • climate adaptation for federal and state public-sector institutions
  • critical infrastructure defense for energy, telecommunications, banks, and public-sector institutions

Our experts include the former head of the Navy SEALs, top leaders in the Coast Guard and FEMA, and business continuity leaders for major financial institutions.

How we can help

Foresight and Resilience

Early warning system and proactive operations
Our early warning system offers proactive risk management, utilizing advanced algorithms for real-time threat detection. Timely alerts empower stakeholders to take decisive action, ensuring organizational resilience and sustained success.
Business continuity management
We are focused on partnering with clients during critical times to ensure their survival and success. We bring in experienced teams to lead clients out of crises and guide them toward a path of full health and growth.
Crisis preparedness
We provide proactive, tailored solutions, helping clients anticipate and manage risks before they escalate. Our multidisciplinary teams address crises comprehensively, enhancing communication, fortifying resilience, and developing agile response frameworks for organizations to emerge stronger.
High consequence resilience capability building
We help clients develop the necessary skills, processes, and infrastructure to effectively anticipate, prevent, respond to, and recover from events that could significantly disrupt operations, harm stakeholders, or threaten the organization’s reputation and viability.

Response and Recovery

Nerve center operations and stakeholder stabilization
We assist clients in establishing cross-functional teams modeled after the Incident Command structure for swift responses. This involves nerve center setup, stakeholder engagement, and mobilizing teams to address threats. Our Crisis Advisory Board, composed of seasoned executives, further enhances these practices.
Long-term resolution and business reset
We guide clients after crises with a dedicated Project Management Office, using opportunities for transformative initiatives like cost reduction and strategic transformations. Aligning with broader business goals, we steer organizations toward realizing their full potential after crises.
Disaster response and recovery
Our disaster response and recovery capability is designed to provide guidance and support in the first 72 hours of a disaster, which includes acknowledging the disaster, caring for affected people, and assigning dedicated leadership to manage the response.

Case studies

Early warning system
Deploying tool, governance, and capability building to foster supply chain resilience and stability
A large aerospace and defense manufacturer faced chronic supply chain challenges, including severe shortages and increasing supplier part quality issues on the production line. McKinsey and the client worked together to develop a data-backed early warning system with a cross-functional operating model to drive more proactive risk mitigation actions and ensure supply chain continuity. Through analytics and a holistic stakeholder change management strategy, the manufacturer was able to reduce supplier-caused part shortages by ~25 percent and shift ~40 percent of supplier part quality defect identification up the value stream, delivering >$200 million in EBITDA impact.
Crisis response
Our response to the war in Ukraine
Supported short-term refugee relief in Ukraine, including services for up to 30,000 refugees across more than 25 reception centers. We identified 90,000 available places in schools, capacity for 200,000 people to receive healthcare, and 70,000 housing opportunities. Our team matched them to refugee needs. We connected more than three million refugees to an online job platform, resulting in 17,000 jobs posted and 65,000 job applications submitted.
Business continuity management
Identified tier 1 priorities and improved capabilities to strengthen business continuity
Improved overall resilience of a global pharma company that had experienced a major cyberattack and found its business continuity plans inadequate for thriving in major disruption. We rapidly defined ~15 top enterprise priorities and refocused the scope and business effort, making the program sustainable. We improved the central team and businesses’ capabilities to strengthen its business continuity going forward.
Disaster response and recovery
Aided disaster response and recovery efforts following a major earthquake
Our team supported the organization in managing disaster response efforts to build and integrate data sets to clarify humanitarian needs, resource prioritization, and impact tracking during the fast-moving crisis. We built a common operating picture (COP) that allowed the NGO to better understand humanitarian needs, especially in areas that had yet to be visited by aid workers, by using open-source satellite data and deploying an AI solution, as well as integrating data from the client and outside sources (e.g., UN relief data, social media, telecommunications data). The lead organization adapted the COP to allocate cash grants for displaced and vulnerable populations. In addition, we helped the NGO build a training program on personnel safeguarding.

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Featured insights

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Paving the way to resilience: Strengthening public sector adaptation planning and execution
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Increasing resilience to climate change requires a more systematic response than ever before. Governments and public entities play a central role in defining, enabling, and executing it.
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Resilience during uncertainty: What industrial leaders must know
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McKinsey’s Global Resilience Survey reveals how leaders in advanced industries view the current landscape and highlights the challenges ahead as they manage uncertainty.
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Supply chains: To build resilience, manage proactively
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Supply chain upheavals show little sign of abating. Companies can address them by reconsidering outdated, short-term strategies and beginning the hard work of building structural resilience.
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Protecting people from a changing climate: The case for resilience
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Our new study lays bare the potential impact of climate risks for people across the globe—and underscores the need to protect the most vulnerable and build resilience.

Featured experts

Mihir Mysore
PartnerHouston
An experienced crisis practitioner working across sectors and regions; helps leaders of large organizations resolve and prevent...
Ida Kristensen
Senior PartnerNew York
Coleads the Risk & Resilience Practice; advises leading financial institutions on cybersecurity, strategies for risk management,...
Linda Liu
PartnerNew York
Advises public and private organizations on how to prepare for, respond to, and manage crisis situations

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