Our research has shown a significant drop in the confidence employees have in their senior leadership team. In our quarterly client survey, 22% of respondents primarily attributed their general lack of business confidence to poor leadership at the top of their organisation, compared to just 3% in Q1 (see figure one). A slow response to the uncertain business environment was their particular concern. These respondents weren’t middle-ranking managers, the people that typically (and understandably) resent the extent to which their bosses expect them to get things done in difficult circumstances: An even higher proportion of CxOs—25%—felt the same way.

Poor leadership is especially troubling because the same survey also showed an increase in the percentage of people who think the poly-crisis isn’t going away any time soon. In Q1, 56% of the executives we questioned said they thought the crisis would last for at least three years, a number that has risen to 67% three months later (see figure two).

One of the responses to economic uncertainty has been to turn to consulting and other professional services firms for help. Almost all organisations make some use of consulting support, and in our latest quarterly survey, 48% said they do so heavily. Moreover, 79% think that their use of consulting services will increase as a direct result of the polycrisis.

It’s also worth noting that we get a more positive response to this question when we explicitly link it to the economic situation; when we decouple the issues and simply ask about future use of outside help overall, the proportion saying they’ll need more support falls to just over 57%, close to the pre-pandemic norm.

Unsurprisingly, clients are investing more time in planning how best to mitigate future risks. The proportion of client organisations in the US increasing the time they spend preparing for existential threats tripled between 2021 and 2022. Seventy-two percent of US and UK organisations say that they’ve invested more in risk and resilience in the last three years. Forty-five percent of clients globally say that business risk and resilience is one of their investment priorities in the next 18 months. Forthcoming research on the lessons learned since 2020 around how clients navigate crises highlights the important role of scenario planning—and this is also the area where clients feel consultants have been able to add the most value.

All this accounts for why demand for strategy work—usually the first casualty in any economic crisis—has been relatively resilient in recent years. While hoping for the best, clients recognise the need to plan for the worst, and that requires studying past lessons, gathering information about future trends, and, above all, taking a rigorously objective view: all characteristics of the best strategy consultants.

But having a plan is not enough. If we ask clients which types of professional services firms have been most helpful to them in responding to the “age of crises”, 43% point to technology firms, against 33% indicating strategy firms (see figure three). Why? It’s probably linked to the 41% of clients who say that economic uncertainty has made them more likely to use consulting help to get things done quickly and the 37% who are looking to consulting firms to deliver more in the way of concrete results.

This brings us back full circle to the growing dissatisfaction with the performance at the top of the organisation: Leadership teams don’t just need to know what to, they have to make sure it gets done. And the same is true of their consulting partners: In a crisis, the firms that will do best are those that can integrate strategy with technology, and technology with strategy.