How regulatory shifts, resilience insights, and crisis patterns will inform the next era of risk leadership
By: Tejas Katwala, Co-Founder
2025 was a year that reminded us how interconnected and fragile our world has become. It brought moments that tested governments, financial systems, technology infrastructure, and the confidence of executives who suddenly faced risks they had not seen before. It also offered important clarity. We learned that risk is no longer a silo to be managed but a fabric that runs through every part of how organizations operate, make decisions, and prepare for the future.
This review is not simply a recap of events. It is a reflection on what practitioners, executives, regulators, and risk leaders experienced this year and the lessons these experiences reveal about the year ahead. If 2025 showed us anything, it is that traditional risk models struggle in an environment defined by speed, interdependence, and complexity. The organizations that adapt will be the ones that build resilience into their architecture, not just their documentation.
Below are the ten lessons from 2025 that will shape the discipline of risk and resilience in 2026.
Lesson 1: Systemic Risks Are Now the Norm, Not the Outlier
This year showed that interconnected risks do not cascade gently. They move quickly and across domains. A software update disrupted hospital operations. Supply chain delays created shortages of critical medical products. Cyber events propagated through vendors and their vendors. These were not isolated failures. They were system-level events that amplified one another.
Forward Action in 2026: Move from program-by-program assessments to systemic models that reveal dependencies across people, processes, technology, data, suppliers, and locations. Resilience depends on seeing the entire system, not managing isolated parts of it.
Lesson 2: Regulatory Requirements Expanded and Fragmented at the Same Time
Regulatory bodies moved rapidly this year. DORA went into effect in the European Union. The UK proposed new resilience and consumer protection expectations. Basel III tightened operational risk and capital expectations. Payment providers in the UK face new segregation and safeguarding rules in 2026.
The challenge for organizations is not only the volume of regulation but the divergence. Global firms must comply with frameworks that do not align neatly.
Forward Action in 2026: Build modular, adaptable compliance structures that use shared data rather than duplicated effort. Staying aligned requires systems that can map requirements once and apply them everywhere.
Lesson 3: Artificial Intelligence Became a Strategic Accelerator and a Strategic Exposure
AI strengthened risk programs by revealing anomalies, predicting patterns, and accelerating analysis in ways that were not possible only a few years ago. At the same time, it introduced model risk, transparency concerns, and new forms of fraud that regulators and organizations are still learning to govern.
Forward Action in 2026: Adopt AI responsibly, with oversight, ethics, explainability, and human review built into design. The leaders will use AI to enhance decision clarity while maintaining rigorous governance.
Lesson 4: Third-Party and Supply Chain Weaknesses Became Impossible to Ignore
From saline shortages to critical component delays to software vulnerabilities buried inside dependency chains, 2025 reinforced how fragile global supply networks are. Cyber attacks on technology supply chains surged. Sustainability reporting requirements expanded. Boardrooms began asking harder questions.
Forward Action in 2026: Increase upstream visibility. Embed supplier impact into scenario testing, financial modeling, operational plans, and resilience cycles. Third-party risk can no longer sit on the periphery. It is central to every critical business service.
Lesson 5: Public Infrastructure Failures Showed the Cost of Underinvestment
The Heathrow substation fire illustrated how one point of failure can bring a national transportation system to a standstill. Thousands of flights were grounded. Operations across Europe rippled for days. Events like this highlighted how national-level infrastructure depends on aging systems, limited backups, and complex interdependencies.
Forward Action in 2026: Include external shocks as part of core planning and testing. Organizations must assume that public infrastructure failures will affect them and design continuity strategies accordingly.
Lesson 6: Enforcement Became More Decentralized and Less Predictable
In the United States, federal activity softened while state attorneys general increased enforcement. In other regions, regulators signaled relief for smaller institutions while raising expectations for governance and duty of care. Risk leaders had to navigate not only rules but the changing behaviors of those enforcing them.
Forward Action in 2026: Track and interpret enforcement trends across jurisdictions. Compliance is increasingly shaped by enforcement posture, legal precedent, and political context, not only formal rules.
Lesson 7: Compliance Costs Continued to Rise and Complexity Continued to Accelerate
Despite talk of deregulation, compliance workloads expanded and costs increased. Organizations faced new reporting expectations, sustainability requirements, operational resilience mandates, and cybersecurity obligations. Many turned to structured frameworks such as COSO and ISO 31000 to centralize risk and compliance governance.
Forward Action in 2026: Eliminate redundancy across systems and teams. Most cost increases stem from duplicated work, fragmented workflows, and disconnected evidence. True efficiency comes from improving how data and processes integrate and flow.
Lesson 8: Culture and Leadership Became Central to Resilience
Executives were candid this year about how unprepared they felt for simultaneous geopolitical, climate, cyber, and economic pressures. Many leaders reported difficulty keeping pace with the volatility of their operating environment.
Forward Action in 2026: Build resilience into leadership behavior. This includes open communication, accountable decision making, and regular testing of assumptions through exercises and simulations. Culture is not a soft dimension. It is a structural determinant of resilience.
Lesson 9: Financial and Policy Uncertainty Forced Leaders to Rethink Their Operating Models
Inflation volatility, shifting fiscal policy, ESG expectations, and capital demands influenced how organizations planned for the future. Risk and finance teams began working more closely as economic uncertainty became an operational risk.
Forward Action in 2026: Converge operational resilience and financial resilience. Organizations need integrated models that evaluate cash flow stress, supplier constraints, workforce availability, technology outages, and policy change as part of a single analysis.
Lesson 10: ISO 31000 and Other Risk Frameworks Transitioned from Guidance to Architecture
ISO 31000 gained momentum this year as organizations sought a unified structure for risk. More importantly, many began operationalizing it, moving beyond static risk registers into processes where risk thinking shapes decision making.
Forward Action in 2026: Embed these frameworks into everyday operations so that risk becomes part of the organization’s decision logic, not a retrospective reporting exercise.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If 2025 revealed anything, it was that legacy operating models cannot support the interconnected nature of modern risk. Shocks now move through systems that were never built for this level of complexity. Resilience can no longer be defined as recovering from disruption. It must be defined as adapting to it with clarity and confidence.
The organizations that succeed in 2026 will unify their data, break down silos, understand how their services truly operate, and embrace intelligent automation that helps teams focus on human judgment rather than administrative burden. They will treat resilience as a living system that evolves as their environment evolves.
Most importantly, they will lead with empathy and clarity. Risk and resilience are ultimately about people, and the past year reminded us that behind every outage, disruption, or regulatory change are individuals trying to navigate uncertainty. Warmth and human understanding strengthen resilience at every level.
Preparing for What Comes Next
CLDigital 360 brings together real-time dependency mapping, AI-powered insight, regulatory monitoring, scenario planning, and governance in a unified, future-ready architecture. It is designed to help organizations transform the lessons of this year into meaningful action for the year ahead.
If you would like to explore how to prepare your organization for 2026, our team would be glad to show what is possible. Connect with our team to learn more.
