“I am tempted to declare that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.” – Sir Michael Howard, Military Science in an Age of Peace, RUSI Journal, 1974
What the business remembers
The disruption is usually remembered as a fortnight. A senior person gone with almost no notice, an anchor customer lost, a supplier that simply stopped delivering, a system down for longer than anyone thought possible. Afterwards, the story the business tells itself is about those two weeks. The long days, the fast calls, the people who stepped up when it counted. In the first leadership meeting once the worst has passed, the owner thanks everyone for reacting the way they did, and means it.
The odd thing is how much credit the crisis takes. It becomes the moment the team discovered what it was capable of, as though the pressure itself produced the judgement. But the manager who made a consequential call on the second day, without waiting for the founder to be available, did not acquire the standing to make that call during the emergency. What looked like organisational resilience during those two weeks had mostly been built during ordinary months nobody thinks to mention. A crisis can reveal resilience. It rarely creates it.
What ordinary weeks had already decided
If the capability was not built in the fortnight, it is worth looking back at the weeks that came before, when nothing was happening. Not for a set of practices anyone would have pointed to at the time, but for what had simply become normal. Whether managers were used to deciding with incomplete information, or whether they waited until someone removed the uncertainty for them. Whether inconvenient news reached the leadership team while it was still inconvenient, or arrived softened and late. Whether two people could disagree and settle it between them, or whether every disagreement travelled back to the owner for a ruling.
None of this looks like resilience in an ordinary week. It looks like unremarkable management, the sort of thing nobody writes down. Its significance only shows under load, when it becomes clear how many people across the organisation can keep making decisions and how many simply stop and wait. A business does not become less dependent on its founder at the moment the founder becomes unavailable. That independence, if it exists at all, was built earlier, through the decisions other people were already making while the owner was still in the room, still reachable, and choosing not to intervene.
The exposure that remains comes from a business that still depends on one person’s judgement, and no crisis creates that overnight either.
The reassurance of a healthy business
A business that reports well may look healthy – the numbers are sound, the controls are in place, the board pack tells a stable story. None of it is dishonest, and none of it is useless. But a clean set of accounts describes the business as it stands on a calm day. It says very little about whether people can decide well when the expected information is missing, when a key relationship is under strain, or when the person normally relied upon cannot be reached.
The pattern shows up in the numbers too. When McKinsey looked at the companies that came through the 2008 crisis strongest, what stood out was that they were already pulling ahead in the months before it arrived, then widened the gap through the downturn and after it. What they measured was mainly financial, stronger balance sheets and earlier cost action, rather than the leadership capability this piece is about. But the timing is the point: the advantage was visible before anyone knew what, specifically, they were preparing for.
Reporting, audits and governance are not inadequate; they answer the questions they were built to answer. The tougher question is whether they leave a business feeling prepared simply because its present condition is so clearly visible, when preparedness of the kind that matters under pressure was never something a report could show. That is a broader subject than one article can hold, and the wider work of building business resilience across the organisation reaches into culture, finance and operations. The narrower question worth considering here is what happens when the things that never appeared in any report are the things that suddenly matter.
When everyone knows and no one carries it
When SME leaders were asked recently why known risks so often sit unaddressed, one answer outweighed the rest by a wide margin: no clear owner. It is worth pausing on that, because it is easy to read it as an accountability problem and move on. It is also something else. A risk that no one owns is a risk the business has not yet decided about – not the risk itself, but where true responsibility should sit when the thing becomes urgent and someone has to act.
What almost nobody chose was the option admitting that naming the risk had felt like enough. That silence may be telling, because it was, after all, the answer that required the most uncomfortable honesty. A serious discussion around a table can produce the sensation of progress without moving anyone’s responsibility an inch. The risk gets raised, examined, agreed to be important, and then it stops appearing on the agenda, which can easily be mistaken for it having been dealt with. A risk can go unaddressed while everyone in the room still knows it is there long after it stops being discussed, particularly when no person and no date were ever attached to it.
It complicates the business everyone remembers as resilient. It may well have been less resilient than the outcome suggested. It may simply have been that, on that occasion, the right person was on hand and made the right call. Not because the business had been built so that good decisions got made without them, but because they happened to be there. That is a far less comforting reading of a good outcome, but an essential one to keep in mind.
The leadership capability the crisis reveals
Some businesses survive disruption because the founder works harder, becomes more central and personally holds the moving parts together. There may be no alternative at the time, and the effort can be extraordinary. Afterwards, survival is taken as evidence that the business is resilient. That may not be resilience at all. It may demonstrate the reverse: that the business could not respond without one person carrying all of it, and that nothing beneath that person had been built to share the load.
The businesses that come through differently are quieter about it. Information moves without being chased. Decisions are made close enough to the problem, by people who actually understand it. Individuals act without pretending to a certainty they do not have, and correct course when what they believed turns out to be wrong. The disruption did not produce any of this. It exposed it. Being wrong about which shock was coming turned out to matter far less than being able to get it right quickly once it arrived, and the capacity to do that was not summoned in the moment. It was either already there, or it was not.
What survival leaves unanswered
It is tempting, afterwards, to call the business resilient because it survived. But survival on its own proves remarkably little. A business may come through because its people worked themselves to exhaustion, or because one indispensable person happened to remain available throughout, or simply because the shock turned out to be milder than it might have been. None of those is the same as resilience, and it is worth being honest about which one actually carried the day.
The businesses that repeatedly come through disruption well are rarely the ones that predicted the particular shock. They are the ones that had already built people capable of exercising judgement when certainty disappeared. Afterwards, the crisis is remembered as the moment the business found its resilience. Perhaps it was only ever the moment everyone could finally see what its leadership had, or had not, built in the years before anyone was watching.
So the question left standing is not whether your business would survive the next disruption. It is what, in the ordinary weeks nobody remembers, you are building or neglecting while the pressure is still off and no one can yet tell the difference.
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