Twenty-five years ago, the UK government thought it was dealing with an agricultural disease outbreak.

Within weeks, it was fighting a global image crisis that threatened to kill the UK’s tourism sector.

The initial response to the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak was technical and operational.

But a failure to get ahead of the outbreak quickly led to the British countryside appearing closed – trips cancelled, businesses struggling and images of soldiers in protective suits tipping animal carcases into huge burning pyres.

Today we would call that a polycrisis.

But the most interesting lesson from 2001 isn’t simply that the crisis grew.

It’s that it was initially defined too narrowly.

The response followed the logic that this was a problem with infected livestock. Let the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food control animal movement and they’d contain the disease.

But crises don’t just stay in whichever box you put them in.

As Alastair Campbell later recalled in his book Winners:

“With the foot-and-mouth outbreak, we though we were dealing with an entirely domestic issue. But then we started to get the message that the endlessly repeated shots on American TV of burning pyres under the headline ‘BRITAIN ON FIRE’ were creating a tourism issue too as people and businesses cancelled flights. So focused had we been on the crisis in hand, we failed to foresee this related secondary crisis coming along.”

Government had been responding to one crisis, before suddenly finding it was dealing with several.

Why this matters much more today

In 2001, that escalation and realisation took weeks. Today it would happen much faster.

It’s not just that news travels faster. Some voices get artificially amplified by bots and algorithms. Deepfake images pile on top of the real ones. Narratives form and evolve at lightning speed, while a much more fractured group of stakeholders all start responding at once.

The initial issue is only the starting point. You need to interrogate how the story could become something bigger; what other issues it could trigger or collide with.

Don’t just ask what if this chip pan became a house fire. Ask what if all the houses on the street were on fire – possibly for different reasons, all at once.

The preparation gap

While a lot has changed in 25 years, this is the problem most crisis plans still don’t do. They focus on the trigger event and map what the organisation will do operationally.

But they don’t look for what other challenges they could trigger, what dormant issues they could revive and what reputational narratives might emerge as a result.

Philippe Borremans has been excellent at banging the drum about the need to prepare for the age of polycrisis, but for many organisations, it can feel too daunting an exercise to even begin.

It doesn’t need to be – certainly if the aim is simply to be better prepared tomorrow than you are today.

Foot and mouth is often remembered as an agricultural crisis. But the way it became something much broader is a pertinent lesson for 2026.

Don’t wait for the headlines appear to do the work. Make sure your processes are polycrisis-ready before the initial bolt of lightning strikes.