For MENA startups, crisis planning is a habit, not a budget item

Founders rarely plan for crisis. Growth absorbs them: customers, hires, product launches, fundraising. Even mature companies tend to prepare only after something goes wrong.

In the Middle East and North Africa, disruption is not theoretical. Startups operate across markets marked by geopolitical tension, economic swings, regulatory change and shifting access to capital. Teams, customers and suppliers often sit in different countries. Resilience becomes an operating capability, not a corporate exercise.

Why leaders fail under pressure

Experience alone does not carry you through a crisis. Most leadership skills develop in normal conditions, when time is available and mistakes are cheap. A crisis compresses time and raises the consequences. Leaders improvise precisely when improvisation is most dangerous.

PwC's Global Crisis Survey found that 95% of business leaders expect a crisis, but nearly a third have no staff dedicated to preparing for one. About 70% believe they would recover well, yet only around a third have resilience foundations in place. More than 40% emerged from a crisis stronger than before. The difference is preparation.

A crisis is not a problem

A crisis threatens what the organisation cannot afford to lose: people, operations, reputation or customer trust. It compresses decision time and pushes the business beyond its normal ways of working. A problem can be absorbed by existing processes. A crisis exceeds them.

For startups, crises come in forms: external shocks such as geopolitical events or market downturns; technology failures like cyberattacks; operational breakdowns in supply chains or products; and people crises, including loss of a key leader or burnout. In MENA these overlap. A geopolitical event can disrupt a supply chain, dampen demand and delay fundraising at the same time. A regulatory shift in one market forces a rethink of expansion elsewhere.

There are levels. A disruption stresses the system. An incident breaks part of it. A crisis threatens the whole. What pushes you up the ladder is not just the scale of the event but how quickly decision time disappears and how much you must improvise. Every crisis tests leadership, decision-making, trust, communication and adaptability.

Two lessons from the field

Gomaa spent 21 years in special operations, where crisis was not an interruption but the job. He draws three lessons: you fall to the level of your preparation; trust is built before a crisis, not during it; the debrief is where growth happens.

The obvious threat is the truck, such as ransomware locking your screens. The snake is quieter: an employee's credentials leak through a third-party breach and later let an attacker log in with a valid password. Nothing appears to have been hacked. In one case, leaked credentials were identified before use. The incident was treated as an IT problem, but the key decisions were leadership decisions: whether to force a company-wide reset, how to communicate, and who took responsibility.

Another case involved an acquired mobile virtual network operator. Management retained several employees because they trusted them on instinct. When a large volume of company data surfaced for sale online, the breach was assumed to be external. It turned out to be an inside job, carried out by a retained employee. Trust cannot run on instinct, especially during acquisitions or rapid hiring. It needs controls, accountability and systems.

Preparation on a startup budget

Startups do not need large budgets for crisis planning. They need habits. Write a one-page plan naming who decides, who communicates and who gets contacted for the three crises most likely to affect the business. A short plan people read beats a long document nobody opens.

Run a 30-minute tabletop exercise every quarter. Use a realistic scenario: your biggest customer's data leaks, a payment provider goes offline, regional disruption hits a key market. Ask what the team would do in the first hour. After a lost deal, missed launch or difficult quarter, debrief on what was learned, not who failed.

Startups have an advantage. Fewer layers mean faster decisions. Culture is still forming, so founders can embed clear communication, accountability and decision-making before a real test. MENA founders already face small disruptions: fundraising gaps, regulatory shifts, product setbacks, talent losses and interruptions in key markets. Each one is a rehearsal.

A crisis does not build the team. It reveals the team you built beforehand. Prepare your people, debrief honestly and treat smaller disruptions as practice. Resilience is the ability to keep sound judgement when the environment becomes less predictable.