Silicon Valley has a crisis management problem. My concern is not a shortage of preparation. It is preparation built around the wrong model of a crisis.
Structured response frameworks, escalation protocols and dedicated crisis teams can be valuable when an organisation is dealing with operational disruption. An outage has a technical cause to investigate, services to restore and people who need information.
A conflict with a regulator or a government presents a different problem. So does a struggle over legitimacy, influence or narrative. The actors have their own interests, constraints and reasons to continue. Restoring normal operations does not necessarily resolve the conflict.
That distinction changes the questions worth asking. Who is involved? What do they want? What gives them influence? Which relationships explain their behaviour? Treating those questions as peripheral can leave an organisation well coordinated internally but poorly informed about the situation outside it.
In my original post, I called this a Silicon Uncanny Valley: crisis structures that look convincing but are built for the wrong kind of crisis. The appearance of preparedness should not prevent us from examining whether the organisation understands the problem it is facing.
Adapted from Neel’s LinkedIn post of 6 March 2026.
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