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Dear {{ first_name | reader }},
You know how it goes; you bookmark a great report and then another one but then life takes over and you forget to write about them. Well, here’s is that correction. I read these two reports weeks apart, for entirely different reasons. Neither mentions the other.
The Institute for Crisis Management's Annual Crisis Report tracks a year of US business crisis coverage — 1.2 million news items, sorted into sixteen categories, going back to 1990.
International SOS's Risk Outlook 2026, and the mid-year Pulse Check that followed it in July, surveyed 860 and then 250 senior risk leaders about how their organisations actually respond when something breaks.
One counts headlines in a single country. The other asks practitioners on six continents how they feel about their own readiness. Put side by side, they arrive at the same place from opposite directions.
AI hasn't created a new kind of crisis. It has made every existing kind move faster than the machinery built to respond to it.
WAG THE DOG NEWSLETTER | ISSUE WEEK 14, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Cybercrime overtook mismanagement as the largest single crisis category tracked by ICM in 2025, nearly doubling its share of US coverage from 13.29% to 25.44% in a single year.
57% of risk leaders surveyed by International SOS say new risks are now emerging faster than their organisation can deal with them, and only 35% feel confident they could mobilise a response team quickly if one hit.
Read ICM and International SOS together and a scope gap becomes useful rather than a limitation: ICM's data is drawn almost entirely from US regulatory and media sources, while International SOS surveyed risk leaders across 53 countries — the accelerant shows up on both sides regardless.
43% of organisations in the International SOS Pulse Check say they've either been hit by, or can't even measure the impact of, false or misleading information tied to a health, security or wellbeing risk.
Sexual harassment coverage in ICM's data jumped from 2.08% to 15.26% of tracked items in a single year — the highest level since #MeToo first broke in 2018, driven largely by renewed hashtag activity rather than a single new scandal.