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In today’s business environment, disruption is no longer episodic.
It’s relentless.
Boards are navigating not just isolated crises, but a cascade of them, from pandemics and political polarization to technological upheaval and workforce fatigue. Dr. Nikki Lanier, CEO of Harper Slade Advisors and former director of Premier Bank, has coined a term for this modern condition: “swan stacking.”
“Swan stacking is a term that I coined to describe what I believe is an emerging and deeply overlooked phenomenon in the workplace and really largely society as a whole,” says Lanier. The concept builds on the idea of “black swans” — rare, unpredictable events with seismic impact, like 9/11 or the onset of COVID-19 — and “gray swans” — those risks we see coming but often dismiss, such as widening inequality or cultural division.
“But what we’re experiencing now, in my opinion, is something very new,” says Lanier. “Multiple swans landing at once, back-to-back — the layer upon layer of disruption and economic upheaval and psychological missteps and social and political upending all happening at the same time.”
Lanier first began noticing this pattern around 2020, while serving as a senior VP at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Her role, which encompassed engaging business, banking and civic leaders to demystify monetary policy — put her in regular contact with companies and communities weathering unprecedented turbulence. “Even then in those conversations, I was noticing employees were carrying emotional residue from the pandemic,” says Lanier. “But now they’re dealing with the whiplash from political volatility and violence and cultural fatigue and mounting economic uncertainty. And they’re expected to function as if none of this matters.”
That expectation, she argues, is unsustainable. “Swan stacking puts people in a state of constant cognitive and emotional overload. And yet businesses, for the most part, are still operating at pre-2020 expectations of productivity and resilience. I think that that disconnect is dangerous.”
A Strategic and Fiduciary Concern
For boards, the implications of swan stacking extend far beyond morale. Lanier views it as an enterprise-level risk that touches the core of governance responsibility. “For boards, the implications are massive,” says Lanier. “But many don’t have language for it yet. swan stacking concept affects workforce capacity, leadership stability, retention, brand trust, consumer confidence — all the things that boards care about and are responsible for overseeing.”
The result, she observes, is a silent strain visible across the corporate landscape: rising CEO turnover, reputational risks tied to employee treatment and organizational cultures “fraying” under invisible trauma. Yet few boards have named the root cause. “It’s not as simple as burnout or an employee morale issue,” cautions Lanier. “This is not something that you can throw a pizza party against. It’s really the stacking and the accumulation of these pressures that I think is going to be important for boards to pay attention to en masse — and regularly — because this is a strategic and fiduciary concern.”
That framing — human well-being as a fiduciary matter — is particularly relevant for private company boards, where governance can often feel less formalized than in public counterparts. But Lanier’s warning is clear: an emotionally depleted workforce is not a “soft” issue. “If your workforce is weathered and fractured and emotionally depleted, it is not a soft issue. That’s an enterprise risk, not a human resource issue,” says Lanier.
Shifting Board Boundaries
Lanier argues that boards can no longer afford to treat employee well-being as purely a management function. “Traditionally, boards maybe haven’t seen employee well-being as their lane. But, in this climate, it’s absolutely a board issue,” says Lanier. “We’ve entered into a reality where employee health is now a key indicator of business resilience.”
Lanier outlines three concrete steps directors can take to integrate this mindset into board practice:
- Request the right metrics. “Board members love metrics. Beyond the engagement scores, we’re looking for indicators of emotional fatigue, safety, perception and weathering. That’s the nomenclature boards are going to have to get really conversant with.”
- Encourage expert partnerships. Boards should seek input from professionals trained to assess and interpret workforce well-being. “You can work with industrial psychologists or workforce anthropologists. Maybe workforce and workplace futurists who have strong human capital and change systems experiences,” says Lanier. “I’m not suggesting that you add a seat to the board, but you certainly need, with some sort of short-term permanence, a resource to the board that can help engage on these kinds of conversations.”
- Pressure-test strategy against capacity. The board’s oversight role must extend to asking whether the company’s people can realistically sustain the expectations being set. “Regularly ask the question, ‘Can people come here and rely on a sense of stability and being seen?’ And can the people that we’re relying on realistically sustain the level of output that we are requiring of them?” says Lanier. “In my view, that’s what responsible governance should look like in the age of swan stacking.”
The Human Imperative of Governance
For directors, particularly those overseeing private and family-owned enterprises, Lanier’s message is both cautionary and empowering. Private companies often pride themselves on close-knit cultures and long-term relationships, but that doesn’t make them immune from the cascading anxieties reshaping the modern workforce.
Swan stacking, as Lanier describes it, is a call to action: to broaden the board’s definition of resilience, see emotional well-being as a driver of performance and govern with a clearer understanding of the human toll of disruption.
“We’re all living through this,” says Lanier. “Boards have a chance to be the stabilizing force.”