Don't get comfortable about the way your business is run, says Suzanne Rabicoff, general manager, future of work, with Invisible Technologies. Change has to happen now, and it can come from all levels of the organization.

Reactive decision-making is not the way to mitigate risk in businesses today, says Rabicoff. She cites the disastrous fallout from the recent service failures of Southwest Airlines during severe winter weather, causing it to cancel thousands of flights and garnering huge amounts of negative publicity for leaving travelers stranded. “They didn’t listen to people internally or make the investments needed to protect their relationship with consumers and their own employees,” she says. The result was “a tremendous meltdown that brought down the system and ruined the experience for millions of people.”

Why do companies fail to fix what’s obviously broken in their organizations? “I think it’s a framing issue,” Rabicoff says. “They’re not properly assessing the risk.” Contrary to how they were described in the press, the failures of Southwest didn’t amount to a “black eye.” They represented “a tremendous health scare,” she says. “That was like having a heart attack.”

Rabicoff challenges the notion that real change within an organization must always come from the top. “I think that’s an excuse,” she says. Innovation can come from anywhere in the company, and not necessarily in the form of immediate, sweeping change. In fact, executives often refuse to enact necessary change because they’re intimidated by the scope of the problem and its apparent solution.

“A lot of leaders say, ‘I don’t want to go near that, it’s too scary, it feels heavy, I can’t have this conversation internally,’” Rabicoff says. “So they immediately go into passive bystander mode, where they’re not taking action.” What they should be doing is starting with “single small steps” that can lead to a change in habit, even as they’re acknowledging the need for issuing a “Code Red” for change.