Over the years a natural tendency I’ve come to realise is my ability to understand the systems that operate within a business. Over time that instinct has become closely tied to one question: how does an organisation actually build organisational resilience? Not the kind that appears in strategy decks, but the kind that shows up in how people work, how departments interact, and how pressure moves through the system when things start getting difficult.
In simple terms, organisational resilience is a company’s ability to absorb disruption, adapt to change and continue operating effectively under pressure. It’s not just about surviving shocks – it’s about designing systems that can withstand volatility without relying on constant firefighting.
You can usually feel it within minutes of walking into an organisation. Sometimes everything feels aligned. Conversations flow, people know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and there’s a quiet sense that the machine is working as intended. Other times it feels like walking into a control room where half the alarms are flashing and someone has simply turned the volume down so nobody has to deal with them. Everyone is calmly discussing strategy while the organisational equivalent of the “check engine” light has been on since 2017.
But one thing I’ve almost never seen businesses do in any formal way is evaluate where they are structurally weak.
Not operational problems.
Not performance metrics.
Structural weakness – the places where things technically work, but only because someone is sprinting flat-out to stop the wheels falling off.
If you’ve ever worked in a team that lives permanently in firefighting mode, you’ve already seen what structural weakness looks like. Work still gets done, but it happens through late nights, stress, heroic effort and the quiet hope that tomorrow won’t introduce anything new into the mix.
I spent nearly 18 months operating in that environment before realising there had to be a better way. Because businesses today aren’t dealing with occasional disruption anymore – they’re dealing with constant uncertainty and change. The challenge facing leaders now isn’t simply managing disruption, it’s building organisational resilience in systems that were never designed for permanent volatility.
What Tokyo Understands About Risk
The best way I’ve found to explain this is by looking at Tokyo.
Tokyo sits directly in the Pacific Ring of Fire – a region known for high volcanic and seismic activity, with several major fault lines running beneath the city. As a result, Tokyo experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes every year. Most are small, but dozens each year are strong enough to be clearly felt across the city. That’s two or three tremors every single day.
All of this happens in the largest metropolitan area on Earth, home to roughly 37 million people, filled with skyscrapers stretching thirty, forty and even sixty-four floors into the sky. In most cities this combination would be considered a catastrophic design oversight.
In Tokyo it’s just Tuesday.
The buildings are engineered to withstand seismic intensities of 6 to 7. To translate that into plain English, it’s the kind of shaking where standing upright becomes almost impossible. Imagine trying to remain calm and professional during a meeting while the entire building behaves like a washing machine filled with bricks.
That’s the moment where most cities would start updating their will and estate plans.
If that level of seismic activity struck a city that hadn’t been designed for it, the consequences would be catastrophic. Entire districts could flatten on what would otherwise have been a fairly uneventful Tuesday afternoon.
Tokyo survives this environment for two simple reasons: its buildings are engineered for the reality they operate in, and the city constantly monitors and learns from every earthquake that occurs.
Three practices sit at the centre of this system:
- Structural design verification – Before construction begins, building plans undergo extensive verification to ensure they can withstand the seismic forces expected in the region.
- Real-time monitoring – Modern high-rise buildings contain sensors throughout their structure that measure movement, vibration and stress, feeding real-time data into monitoring systems that detect structural strain immediately.
- Post-event inspection – After significant earthquakes, engineers conduct detailed inspections to understand how buildings performed and how future building codes should evolve.
In other words, Tokyo doesn’t hope earthquakes won’t happen. It assumes they will, and designs the system accordingly.
Where Businesses Get This Wrong
This is where the parallel to business becomes unavoidable. Most organisations were designed for a world where disruption happened occasionally. A new competitor might appear every few years. A technological shift might arrive once a decade. Market changes moved slowly enough that leadership teams could schedule a strategy offsite, drink terrible coffee, produce a PowerPoint deck and declare the future officially handled.
Usually followed by a photo of everyone standing in front of a flip chart looking suspiciously optimistic.
That world has quietly disappeared. Today businesses operate in an environment where change behaves far more like seismic activity. Technological breakthroughs, political shifts, economic shocks and competitive disruption arrive with increasing speed and frequency. Traditional change management approaches often struggle in volatile environments.
When that happens, the strain has to go somewhere. In most companies it ends up being absorbed in the only place available – people. Teams begin firefighting. Leaders operate under permanent pressure. Departments become reactive rather than strategic. Work still gets done, but largely through caffeine, stubborn determination and the corporate equivalent of duct tape holding everything together.
If you listen closely you can almost hear the system whispering, “Please stop adding projects.”
Which works remarkably well. Right up until the moment it doesn’t.
Organisations Are Living Systems
This is where it helps to think of organisations less like rigid structures and more like living organisms.
Healthy organisms constantly regulate themselves. They monitor signals, adapt to stress and repair damage before it becomes fatal. Businesses, at least in theory, should operate in much the same way. But many organisations behave less like living systems and more like rigid structures. Problems are rarely addressed early. Instead, issues quietly accumulate beneath the surface until something eventually breaks.
Research into psychological safety shows that teams perform far better when the environment supports open communication and learning. In healthy systems, people feel able to raise concerns early, challenge assumptions and share information that helps the organisation adapt before pressure becomes dangerous.
Without that kind of environment, organisations tend to respond very differently. Problems remain unspoken until they become unavoidable, at which point the response is usually reactive: new initiatives, restructuring exercises, strategy workshops or the purchase of some shiny new technology that promises to transform everything.
But adding technology without redesigning the system is a bit like installing earthquake sensors in a building that was never designed to survive an earthquake in the first place.
Real business resilience strategy requires something deeper. It requires organisations to build capability in three areas:
- Anticipating change – Understanding the forces likely to disrupt the system.
- Designing for change – Creating structures, processes and leadership models that support resilient business systems.
- Implementing for change – Monitoring the organisation continuously so small cracks are identified before they become structural failures.
These are not one-off initiatives. They are ongoing capabilities.
Just like Tokyo’s buildings, resilient organisations are not designed to avoid disruption. They are designed to withstand it, learn from it and improve because of it. Because the last thing any organisation wants is to discover its structural weaknesses during the business equivalent of a category-seven earthquake.
Structural weaknesses don’t matter on calm days, they only matter when the ground starts to move. And by then, the structure has already been tested.
The uncomfortable question for leaders is simple:
Do you actually know where the stress points in your organisation are today – and whether your systems truly support organisational resilience?
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