Resilience is the Capacity to Recover
I spent years in environments where things changed fast and without warning. Governments shifted. Funding priorities reversed overnight. Security situations deteriorated in hours. The organizations that survived and accomplished their mission weren‘t the ones that planned perfectly. They were the ones that could absorb a shock and find their footing again.
Resilience isn‘t stability. It‘s not about preventing disruption; that‘s impossible. Resilience is the capacity to be knocked off balance and recover without losing your purpose.
Most organizations are fragile in ways they don‘t recognize until the shock arrives. They have good people and good processes, but the system is brittle. One key person leaves and knowledge walks out the door. One market shift and the strategy becomes irrelevant. One crisis and the whole machine grinds to a halt.
This brittleness takes down institutions that look indestructible from the outside. And scrappy, under-resourced teams handle chaos that would have broken a Fortune 500 company. The difference wasn‘t talent or budget. It was how the system was designed.
The Three Pillars of Resilience
Pillar 1: Resilient People
You can have the best processes in the world, but if your people are burnt out, scared, or stagnating, you don‘t have resilience. You have a house of cards waiting for a breeze.
Resilient people are people who trust their leadership, understand the direction, feel they‘re developing, have psychological safety, and have meaning in their work. This comes from good management. Leaders who invest in people, give them feedback, help them grow. It comes from organizations where failure is treated as information, not punishment.
It also comes from capacity. Resilient people aren‘t running at 110% constantly. They have bandwidth to think, to learn, to help each other. When you work people into the ground, they‘re not resilient. They‘re just surviving; survival mode is where adaptive capacity goes to die.
Also: build redundancy in knowledge. If your best person left tomorrow, would the organization function? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that‘s your first resilience investment.
Pillar 2: Agile Processes
Resilient organizations can move fast when they need to. They have processes that are robust but not rigid.
The opposite of agility is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy feels like it creates stability, but it creates brittleness instead. By the time you‘ve gotten approval from five layers, the situation has changed. This dynamic destroys response capacity in both government institutions and large corporations.
Agile processes look like: clear ownership (this person is responsible for this decision), rapid feedback loops (we know within days whether something is working, not quarters), and built-in flexibility (you can change tactics without dismantling the strategy).
In practice, this often means pushing decision-making authority down to the people closest to the problem. The organizations I saw work through volatile environments most effectively were the ones where frontline leaders had clear principles and the authority to act on them, not the ones where every decision had to climb three levels for approval.
Pillar 3: Strategic Clarity
You can‘t be resilient if you don‘t know what you‘re trying to accomplish. When crisis hits or conditions shift, people should be able to ask “does this support our strategy?“ and know the answer.
Strategic clarity means everyone understands what you‘re trying to accomplish, why it matters, and how their work connects. It means you have a clear enough strategy that you can make trade-offs under pressure without relitigating everything from first principles.
Organizations that respond to every new opportunity typically lack clarity about their core work. They‘re like a boat without a rudder; lots of motion but no direction. When the storm hits, they‘re the first to go.
The Pre-Mortem: Your Most Powerful Diagnostic
Imagine it‘s two years from now and your strategy has failed. What happened?
This question (the pre-mortem) is different from scenario planning. It‘s not “what if.“ It‘s “imagine failure and work backward.“ This reveals your hidden vulnerabilities. Not the obvious risks. The invisible ones.
I ran a pre-mortem on an initiative once and someone said “what if the funding partner changed their priorities?“ Everyone assumed that couldn‘t happen. But it did, two years later, and we had safeguards in place because we‘d thought about it.
Run pre-mortems quarterly. They take 30 minutes. They surface risks that no amount of optimistic planning will reveal.
Building Resilience: Where to Start
Assess your three pillars. Where‘s the weakest link? That‘s where to invest first.
If your people are exhausted and disconnected, no amount of process improvement will create resilience. Start with trust, development, and capacity.
If your people are strong but your processes are rigid, you‘ll have great individuals who can‘t move fast enough when it matters. Streamline decision-making and build feedback loops.
If both people and processes are sound but strategic clarity is lacking, your team will execute brilliantly on the wrong things. Get clear on direction first.
Resilience isn‘t a program you launch. It‘s how you operate. The organizations building it now are the ones that will still be standing when the next shock arrives.