Whether you’re running a business or a household, crisis preparation in 2025 means your backups and bunkers better be ready – and tested.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the term “invest in preparedness, not in prediction” in his famous book, The Black Swan.

This book was first published in 2007, a time when crises were rare and black swans were even rarer.

Fast-forward to 2025. War is raging in Europe and the Middle East. Climate change is more visible than ever. Donald Trump and his erratic policies are back in the White House.

Black Swans? There are way too many crises in today’s world for Black Swans to be a suitable animal analogy. We should rather use ravens to describe today’s constant crises: There are many more ravens than black swans, and ravens operate in flocks rather than in isolation.

Prepare Before The Shit Hits The Fan

Flashing back to the 1990s. When I was a teen, I often made fun of my mum and her spleen for canned foods. “Mum, war is over.” She was still maintaining food stocks the way she learned it during the Cold War.

Flashing forward to the 2010s. I started investing in photovoltaics, a storage furnace, an emergency power unit, and a rainwater storage tank. Now it was other people making fun of me, accusing me of being a prepper and having Armageddon fantasies.

Preparing my home took me some 10 years. Once my house was ready, I started preparing for IT disasters: Backup satellite internet connection, redundant servers at Yonder, the B2B company I co-founded, and offline data backups. Laugh at me if you want, but data integrity is just as important as energy self-sufficiency in our connected world.

Maintain Your Preparations

Preparing for disaster is one thing; maintaining your preparations is another.

Do you run regular emergency power unit tests? I do. Once a quarter, I switch off grid power to check if the failover to the emergency power unit works fine. And believe it or not, at least once a year, something doesn’t work the way it should. If you run tests regularly, you have plenty of time to fix things before adversity strikes.

The same applies to power generators: It’s not enough to buy a power generator after you were trapped in a 36-hour blackout. If you have the generator sitting in your basement and waiting several years for the next blackout, chances are it won’t work at the moment of truth. You need to take it out regularly and run it up to make sure the cylinders are well-oiled.

At Yonder, we continuously back up all customer data. But backing up data is just half the story. How about restoring data from backups? Have you ever practiced this? We restore data from our backups every week when we reset the demo environment our sales team uses. Even if this takes time and effort, you don’t want to be caught off guard when you have to restore real customer data and you haven’t exercised the procedure before.

Conclusions

There would be many more examples, but the message should be clear by now. Crisis preparation is a long-term endeavor, but preparation is not enough. 

You will need to invest repeated time and effort to maintain your preparations, or you will be surprised that they don’t work at the worst possible moment.