Ask CEOs what keeps them up at night, and you’ll likely get a brief answer from a familiar drop-down menu of angst—climate change, inflation, cyberattacks. But some of the most challenging global problems are tricky precisely because they’re closely connected to other problems.
That’s why the World Economic Forum gets granular in its risk survey, asking business and government leaders about a more detailed range of threats—and analyzing how those threats influence one another. Notice the lines in this risk map that connect, say, inflation to unemployment, or extreme weather to supply-chain disruptions. Leaders who understand how these crises are interrelated, the thinking goes, are better prepared to survive any and all of them.
A version of this article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline, “Clusters of worry for world leaders.”